Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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1. INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

Not enough is known about the prevalence of housing discrimination against persons with disabilities. Only slightly more than half of Americans know that it is illegal for landlords to refuse to make reasonable accommodation for persons with disabilities or to permit reasonable modification to a housing unit.¹ And although HUD data indicate that the volume of Fair Housing Act disability-related complaints is now comparable to complaints based on race, no rigorous estimates of housing discrimination against persons with disabilities are available.² A few organizations have conducted tests for discrimination against persons with disabilities, but these testing efforts were not designed to provide statistically valid measures of the incidence and forms of discrimination market-wide.³

Study Purpose and Scope

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) contracted with the Urban Institute to advance the state-of-the-art in testing to measure discrimination against persons with disabilities, for both research and enforcement purposes. Because the population of persons with disabilities is diverse and the challenges for effectively measuring discrimination are substantial, this research effort was conducted in two phases. The first phase was exploratory; the Urban Institute developed and implemented a wide variety of testing approaches, targeted to different groups of persons with disabilities and different forms of housing market discrimination (other than discrimination through a failure to design and construct accessible housing, which is not encompassed in the scope of this study).⁴ This phase did not produce statistically representative measures of discrimination for any group, but it did yield important lessons about what works and what does not, and how conventional testing methods can be adapted to effectively capture the kinds of discrimination that persons with disabilities experience when they search for rental housing.

Based upon lessons from the exploratory phase, the second—pilot—phase was designed to produce rigorous, statistically representative estimates of the incidence of discrimination against selected groups of persons with disabilities in a single metropolitan rental market — Chicago, Illinois. Specifically, this phase focused on the treatment of deaf people who use the TTY system⁵ to inquire about advertised rental housing, and on the treatment of persons in wheelchairs who visit rental properties in person to inquire about available units.⁶

Notes from this section

1 M. Abravanel and M. Cunningham (2002). How Much Do We Know: Public Awareness of the Nation's Fair Housing Laws. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

2 See National Council on Disability (November 6, 2001). Reconstructing Fair Housing.

3 Organizations that have conducted disability-related testing include Fair Housing Contact Service, Akron, Ohio; HOPE Fair Housing Center, Wheaton, Illinois; Metro Milwaukee Fair Housing Council, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Housing Opportunities Made Equal, Richmond, Virginia; Austin Tenant's Council, Austin, Texas; Toledo Fair Housing Center, Toledo, Ohio; North Dakota Fair Housing Council, Bismarck, North Dakota; Protection and Advocacy, Inc, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Family Housing Advisory Services, Omaha, Nebraska; Access Living, Chicago, Illinois; Metro Fair Housing Services, Atlanta, Georgia; Project Sentinel, Palo Alto, California; Inland Fair Housing, Ontario, California; Housing Rights Center, Los Angeles, California; Fair Housing of Marin, San Rafael, California; Southern Arizona Fair Housing Center, Tucson, Arizona; Arkansas Fair Housing Council, Arkadelphia, Arkansas; Fair Housing Council of Southwest Michigan, Kalamazoo, Michigan; South Suburban Fair Housing Council, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

4 Exploratory testing was conducted during the spring and summer of 2003 in two metropolitan areas — Albuquerque, New Mexico and Chicago, Illinois.

5 Note that other people with hearing and communication disabilities may also rely on the TTY system, and that findings from this analysis would apply to them as well.

6 The pilot phase testing was designed to measure the extent to which persons with disabilities experience adverse treatment when they search for housing in the Chicago area. The question of when differential treatment warrants prosecution and the related question of whether sufficient evidence is available to prevail in court can only be resolved on a case-by-case basis, which might also consider other indicators of treatment than those reported here. The tests used for this study were conducted for research purposes, not enforcement purposes.

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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