If Airbnb sees a suspicious rejection of a person of color, Airbnb themselves could try rebooking it under a fake white profile. If it gets accepted, ban the host (or flag for further review, etc.)
It could be mostly automated and has no negative impact on good hosts.
Edit: Something else important here. We do not know that the reason he was denied was because he was black. You have reviews of yourself that you cannot see. Who's to say this isn't some race baiting article and this guy is a creep.
That cuts both ways. They're free to reject whoever they want and AirBnB should be free to reject them from listing their properties.
By the way, the above is a great idea which would also not cause anyone to violate the rules of the platform by creating fake profiles, etc. Plus, it has zero effect on people who are not racists.
This would be an issue, if people were forced to rent out their homes on AirBnB.
Rental property? Nope, there are laws that apply to hotels and normal rentals to avoid these situations. My dad doesn't get to deny access to his beach rental because a tenant is black.
This mirrors U.S. housing law. You don't have to rent your place out, but if you do you can't discriminate based on race.
You can't advertise that you discriminate but you generally can discriminate if (1) it's fewer than 4 units and the owner lives on premises, (2) it's a single family home owned by a person and rented w/o a broker, or (3) various other exceptions like religious organizations.
I suspect legally most airbnb landlords are in the clear.
I'm not a lawyer, but I do manage an apartment building. We don't discriminate; we just rent to the applications with the highest income and credit ratings.
I also suspect it would be in AirBnB's interest to weed this out, but since as a company they have no ethics, nothing will happen until there's a super embarrassing incident and it becomes news. eg Beyonce gets screwed by AirBnB and tweets it.
As for the law, while you note some exceptions to the federal housing laws, states may supplement. For example it is illegal to discriminate in California even if you're renting a small home.
Watch it on this - despite the exceptions in the FHA, exceptions never apply to racial discrimination. IANAL, but the discrimination outlined in the article is unlawful, regardless of any exceptions. Plus, state law often supplements the FHA to close off many of the exceptions.
But if AirBNB want to have a racism free site where only non-racists homeowners are allowed to post listing then it is perfectly with in the right to do so and I support AirBNB in banning any racist persons they find trying to use their site.
No one has a right to a AirBNB listing, and just as the homeowers can refuse service to anyone, so can airbnb
The government already passed the law mandating this, way back in 1968: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Housing_Act
Yes, it applies to Airbnb: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/898/ada-and-fha-complian...
Even if you are OK with people filtering occupants based on race, it's really poor UX to allow someone to book, and then have the host cancel with a bogus reason.
If there are hosts on AirBnB that aren't willing to rent to brown people, then there's no point showing those listings to me (a brown person).
Knew this would be in here somewhere.
You could also just offer black people the same level of trust you do anyone else when they share a negative experience they've had with a product or service...
If the person is going to complain and pull the race card on a public forum in an attempt to disparage a largely successful company then they deserve to be scrutinized.
If he provided details saying he had similar reviews to his white friend that applied, and didn't message her TWO times without a response (making it seem like he REALLY wants the place for several days) then i'd be more like ok ya she's being racist kind of unreasonably so.
As opposed to reasonable racism? I think we're done here.
It strikes me that both "racism" and "anti-racism" live on an axis that is orthogonal to "reasonableness". Both views seem to commit the believer to strongly-held assumptions that cannot be falsified.
$36k fine because a landlord "preferred to rent to adults".
The Fair Housing Act says otherwise (with respect to race and a few other categories), owner occupied rentals and small time single-family landlords excepted. No one is forcing you to rent out your property for profit, so if you don't want to let certain people in your house, don't rent it out on Airbnb.
At a minimum you would need to make sure you fake both profiles to ensure everything but skin color is the same.
Which would be utterly obvious and ineffective. Instead, they could look for discriminatory rejection patterns.
Maybe I'm lacking imagination, but how do you account for the renter and Airbnb having vastly different sets of information to work from? Also your sample size would have to be huge to rule out coincidental outcomes, which I dare say would rarely be found for the average property.
For example my property gets about 100 customers per year. I'm guessing in the last 4 years I've had 3 black customers, all accepted by the way, but if I rejected all 3 can an algorithm reasonably rule out coincidence having such a low sample size? It just seems like it would be the kind of algo doomed to fuck it up.
Consistently rejecting the one black customer you get every year would probably raise your score enough to prompt an investigation, and the outcome of that (like a fake white test booking) would give more confidence that it's not just coincidence.