The Unseen Walls: A Critical and Comparative Experimental Analysis of Rental Housing Market Discrimination
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.70112/arss-2025.14.2.4327Keywords:
Rental Housing Markets Discrimination, Political Economy, Social Identities & Intersectionality, Algorithmic Bias, Digital Redlining, Landlords’ Motivations, Marginalized Groups, Comparative Analysis, Housing Policy FailureAbstract
Access to adequate housing is a fundamental human need, yet discrimination in rental housing markets remains pervasive, reinforcing inequality and community segregation. This article critically reviews housing market discrimination through taste-based, statistical, and structural models, analyzing landlords’ discriminatory motivations as a supply-side phenomenon within a political economy framework. It examines the systemic roles of intermediaries, the compounded disadvantages faced by marginalized groups through intersectional framework, and the risks of technology-driven algorithmic biases such as digital redlining in selecting tenants. Using case studies from the United States, Europe, and India, the article offers a critical comparative analysis that reveals both universal outcomes of exclusion and culturally specific and structurally determined logics driving discrimination. Findings show that identity-based differences between tenants and landlords, aggravated by intersectionality of identities, remain the primary drivers of discrimination in rental housing market, while emerging software-based screening tools introduce new forms of ingroup bias. Existing housing policies are largely ineffective at curbing entry-level discrimination, as landlords’ security and property rights take precedence. Highlighting the politics of inaction underlying policy failure, the article calls for a forward-looking research agenda that synthesizes these complex dynamics to advance systemic remediation of housing market discrimination.
JEL Classification: C93 (Field Experiments), J15 (Economics of Minorities, Race, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants), R21 (Housing Demand), R31 (Housing Supply and Markets), Z13 (Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Social and Economic Stratification)
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