Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This research combines a randomized experiment with a correspondence audit to measure the impact that awareness of Fair Housing law has on landlord practices. This project is both timely and important because an increasingly large supply of rental housing is provided via online platforms, such as Craigslist, rather than through licensed realtors educated about Fair Housing law. The hypothesis being tested is that many online landlords have only a limited, if any, knowledge of housing legislation and may thus be unaware of how the law applies to them.

The experiment creates a treatment group of randomly assigned Craigslist rental housing posts to send informational emails about Fair Housing law. In the following days, a correspondence audit varying applicant info by protected class (i.e. race, gender, etc.) is conducted in order to compare response rates by landlords of treated properties – those receiving fair housing info – with those of untreated properties – those receiving no fair housing information. This research is designed to shed light on the role that knowledge of fair housing law has on discrimination, as well as how effective an email distribution of fair housing law is when disseminating policy.