Airbnb's experiment in combatting rental bias means swapping names for initials
npr.org
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I found this out when he thanked me for coming to his home even though he was black. Basically thanking me for not being racist. So we got into a whole discussion about it. Super warm dude and one of the best hosts I've ever had.
It boggles my mind how much race still matters in America.
It is not a legitimate use of the force of the state. Jim Crow laws were similarly ideocratic, in imposing pro-segregationist ideological values onto private citizens. We foolishly went from one form of sanctimonious/domineering ideocracy, to another.
If someone wants to advertise to the public that they only rent to [race of people], in their private capacity - as the private owner of their property - they should be able to.
>>There is no irrevocable "right to profit".
Profiting simply means benefiting from an exchange. It is a completely private endeavor and the government should not be depriving people of the right to do it in order to force them to act out a particular set of ideological values.
The governance principles you're promoting are those of a secular theocracy, i.e. an ideocracy.
What you advocate is in principle no different than communism, fascism or theocracy. The innovation was in making the individual sovereign.
The laws you are defending are blatant oppression. A person who is acting peacefully, even if they are acting out values we subjectively perceive as not morally virtuous, should not be punished by the state, and its apparatus of violence (police, courts and prisons, used to compel compliance).
Without these policies, it is liable to be sued under the Civil Rights Act and Fair Housing Act for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Civil Rights lawsuits are a very large area of legal activity.
Using the monopoly excuse to categorize broad swathes of private interactions as being within the domain of public institutions (so-called 'public accommodations') is disingenuous, and just a way to get the imposition of a particular set of ideological values on people, by force, through the backdoor.
>>couldn't buy a house
If people don't want to sell their house to black people, they shouldn't be forced to. Our subjective belief in our moral superiority over someone doesn't grant us a right to use force against them.
>>It's not like 1950s southerners all just happened to be racist because, free of any cultural influence, they all individually rationally decided that was the best way to be.
When the pro-segregationist ideocracy was repealed in Northern States, and the prohibition on mixed establishments was repealed, it gradually led to private establishments de-segregating, to increase business.
Many southern politicians were afraid of the abolition of legally mandated segregation for exactly the same reason.
In any case, force is not a justifiable method to change people's attitudes on who they privately associate with.
Atlanta's business and cultural elite famously bowed to pressure from Coca Cola in 1964 to honor MLK in a mixed race commemoration, after the latter warned the city's mayor that they would relocate their headquarters if they did not, and all without any legal mandates backed by the state's apparatus of violence.
The momentum of desegregation was massive.
Claiming that if things were just left to their own devices, racial harmony and desegregation would eventually result is wishful thinking, and is supported neither by history nor the countless examples of ongoing racism throughout the world where relatively free markets exist and anti-segregation laws do not. Hatred and the ability to subjugate others is often a bigger motivating factor to people than money.
There was a very large and clear trend toward desegregation in the South that had been in place since long before the passing of the Civil Rights Act. You note the existence of private segregation as evidence of the lack of a trend, when it is no such thing. A trend doesn't imply that the parameter subject to the trend is, at all points within that trend, at its final state.
>>These covenants (like all covenants that run with the land) bound even non-signers to them; they were intended to be in place forever.
Legal means of overturning these covenants could have been created without the Civil Rights Act, and its injection of the state's apparatus of violence onto private interactions, and instituting such legal means could have been done far more easily than instituting the CRA, as land has always been a more legitimate object of state control than other forms of private property - especially in this case, where the state's intervention would have simply absolved non-signers from having to honor a disembodied contractual clause.
>>Claiming that if things were just left to their own devices, racial harmony and desegregation would eventually result is wishful thinking, and is supported neither by history nor the countless examples of ongoing racism throughout the world where relatively free markets exist and anti-segregation laws do not.
You're not informed on the history. There are profound historical examples of desegregation occuring in the wake of the abolition of mandated segregation. The best example is the Northern States, which had an extremely racist culture at one time too, contrary to what some may believe on account of their earlier rejection of slavery and their war to end it.
Every single strongly segregationist society has only ever persisted in such a state with the aid of ideocratic anti-market laws that instituted mandatory segregation, and there's a reason for that: a free society is not in its majority, inherently segregationist. Such a state of interaction is unnatural and inefficient, and in the presence of a right to voluntary interaction in both the civil and economic sphere, is gradually reduced to nothing but the fringes.
It's not just about segregation per se, it's about the bigger problem of oppression. Segregation is just a tool to implement it.
And people's ability to distinguish one another for the purposes of oppression is not even limited to skin color. If you travel around the world, you'll even observe people who look totally alike hating and trying to oppress each other. (Go visit the Balkans sometime.) Persecution of minorities -- racial, ethnic, religious -- has been a thing for at least as long as recorded history. This problem simply does not fix itself through free-market solutions.
You take it as a matter of faith that a free society does not work, and the evidence shows that it does.
Except it doesn't, and countless wars, terrorism, and other violence and oppression whose root cause was to exterminate "the other," including Jews, Christians, Gypsies, homosexuals, Rohingya, Tibetans, Uighur, Sh'ia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, and others have demonstrated otherwise.
I'm through with this discussion.
You're pointing to cases where hatred led to organized violence against minorities. I'm saying that upholding the principle of non-violence, and thereby establishing a free society, is an active defense against the kind of coordinated violence you reference.
A free society doesn't eliminate hatred. It stamps out aggression, so that hatred cannot be channeled to destructive purposes.
And yet, you're claiming that protection of the law entails force (as it must in order to be effective against those unwilling to follow the law's dictates) and therefore is to be eschewed. So which is it? You can't have it both ways.
It is not okay for the government to imprison someone because they didn't want to rent their house to black or white people, or refused to pay the fine for this choice. It is okay for the government to imprison someone because they threatened their neighbour with violence to coerce them into not renting their house to black or white people.
One could easily argue that allowing access to personal belongings (Their Home) means that they have a right to choose who enters their home on an individual basis, but this does not adhere to housing rental laws in the US.
This is specifically why laws were created based on equal housing opportunity, but now the rules are being carelessly bent by lawmakers (because new business generates new local tourism and revenue streams) with potentially disastrous consequences.
As a minority myself, I'd much rather rent from someone who doesn't discriminate, or simply rent a hotel room, or even cancel a trip rather than to show up unexpectedly to a potentially hostile or unwelcoming environment. Changing names to initials is a small-minded attempt at solving a much more serious issue.
People who discriminate but still attempt to use AirBNB as a service should not be continually supported by the service, otherwise the company should hold accountability for their listings.
I think this is an important point that many may not consider. Discrimination is more than just denial of service. It can be actively hostile, incredibly stressful, and even physically dangerous.
They don't care about solving it, just not being easy to pin a judgement on when it comes to a head.
Issue: "Black people get less confirmations than white people, we have the data."
AirBnB Solution: "No pictures, initials only."
Data after a few months: "Black people have comparably equal acceptance rates to white people."
AirBnB: "We've solved racism!"
Unfortunately your reasoning doesn’t really help the point you’re trying to make. If anything it may hurt your point.
There are other explanations for that, such as the media driving racial division and race constantly be in the center of spotlight. There are a number of people of color who feel the media, corporate America is doing more harm than good. It’s understandable, in a country of 300+M people if you are specifically fed instances of racial issues, it wouldn’t be surprising someone made this generalization even though most people are not racist to the extent they wouldn’t be comfortable in his home.
I’m not saying your conclusion is wrong, but your reasoning is. It would help if you cited what experiences your host had that made him feel that white people wouldn’t be comfortable in his home.
He said:
1) That the problem is real.
2) That, anecdotally, he met one person that behaved in a way that could only be explained by the problem being real.
This is not a proof, just anecdotal evidence, but quite good one. This kind of behaviour from a person is much more trustworthy to me than people just saying they are being discriminated.
I gave an example where there could be another explanation.
> This is not a proof, just anecdotal evidence, but quite good one
it isn't anecdotal evidence because it doesn't describe a situation where his host experienced discrimination; it describes a situation where he felt he might be discriminated against. What if these feelings are unjustified? I'm not saying they aren't, but again, there isn't evidence supporting this.
Isn't this the same sort of weak argument you're calling out? What people? How many is "a number"? Can you quote any of them on the racial issues they've seen the media feeding to us?
I think about that person frequently. How ingrained is the racist reality in your mind that the first thing you do is to tell people before you do it? Sucks.
Also a very interesting (long) read from a Black British journalist, who even had an episode of being clueless about racism in the US: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/01/gary-younge-...
It's still pretty unfair for those young males that are very careful drivers.
Do they?
Two equivalent ways of approaching the problem: Risk is the same for everyone and decreases with age OR risk stays the same for every member of the population throughout their lives.
What's interesting with fatal car crashes is that they can happen only once in a driver's life (you can't die twice). So when looking at an age cohort, the young male who dies at 18 can't die again at 36 and is therefore going to be excluded from his age cohort.
Now the question is how could we predict the individual risk level (parent income? Education? Zip Code? Race?). Doing it accurately would probably be illegal, so we accept that the young careful drivers will just foot the bill for everyone.
I would be curious to see the numbers on this.
Wow, no.
If the data shows that 'people of certain groups are more likely to cause damage' it's 'game over' ... they could never release the data.
In fact, they probably don't want to even see the data, internally, it's explosive.
There would be a big fuss over it, and maybe even some court cases.
"if anything bad happens to your home then we got you."
AirBnB can't afford to cover you getting raped or killed by someone staying in your home.
People on this thread have misrepresented the issue by focusing on rentals as though they are commercial spaces, but a significant portion of rentals are merely places in people's home which is a giant difference.
Moreover, what sane person would trust a giant corporation to support them in the event of some kind of severe or traumatizing thing, let alone just property damage?
I almost wonder if the 'rent a room in my home' should be a completely different line of business from apartment rentals.
The more you hide information from someone, the more their red flags start going up. Many people are already wary of using AirBNB as a property owner, but now? “You will rent to who we say you rent to and you have little to no say in it even though it’s your own.” No thanks.
You don't have a right to third parties providing you money making schemes for your home that meet your standards alone. They are free to interpose their own conditions, fees, etc.
In many places AirBnB renters are openly flouting the law in listing their property in the first place. My sympathies for them not having sufficient platforms on which to do so without companies "gall" in trying to ensure non-discrimination is virtually zero.
Maybe my experience was rare or I misunderstood the situation. But this seemed way more conducive to racism than full names.
https://www.airbnb.com/resources/hosting-homes/a/airbnb-answ...
It creates a gatekeeper that enables discriminative behaviors.
Enabling discriminative behaviors does not mean using discriminative behaviors. It’s called freedom. Judge people by their actions not by what you think they are allowed to see by a gatekeeper.
The newspiece mentions a problem of racial discrimination based on checking profile pictures and how a name sounds. Do you feel it's appropriate to equate someone's ratial background with "riffraff"?
Side note: it seems HN memory-holed the article altogether: not flagged, showdead has no effect. It's just....gone.
When you're SELLING a five star product, and you choose only to SELL it to [people who you look upon favorably] then you're discriminating.
Someone looks at one star homes (for example) on AirBnB, and five star. Chooses a five star. They haven't discriminated against any protected class in choosing the five star home. The homeowner absolutely can by refusing.
I only needed to attempt booking through AirBnB once before I gave up and used VRBO.
Next solution?
If there are particular attributes that you want to hire for, those should be in the job/person spec and candidates should be assessed against them.
I wouldn't go as far as what you're suggesting though, because verbal communication skills, etc, are a relevant skill for the job.
Let’s try the experiment. Two startups short on cash. One hires your way and one does not. Which one do you think is more likely to survive?
That's not the point though. The point is to remove bias.
It's easy to solve for one variable; beyond that, one has to balance things so that primary goals (hiring capable and personable talent) are still achieved.
"We want the best talent."
"No we don't. We want the to remove bias."
"Isn't talent more important?"
"Removing bias is finding the best talent."
That was like reading a conversation with an AI chatbot. We all agree we want the best talent then, yes?
So asking whether removing bias is "more important" than improving decision making is a non-sequitar: removing bias is a tool towards that goal. In a sense it's "less important" because other tools might do the job better, and in a sense it's more important because simply desiring to improve decision-making does nothing without tools to implement that desire.
That said, I wouldn’t blank out schools and employers. Discrimination by school and employer may or may not be wrong for the business. But those aren’t protected categories.
The problem is that those institutions aren’t perfect in their hiring/accepting either, and some initial mistake by the college is propagated and amplified by subsequent decisions deferring to it.
No idea how to solve this. Maybe the data could be coded into some numeric or ordinal value. I bet the actual terms like “Harvard” and “MIT” are more impressive than a completely equivalent abstraction such as “Ivy League” or “top tier”.
I'm sure that kind of redacting names &c would help, but it wouldn't be perfect.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automatio...
I'm not sure that's a valid take.
It's my understanding that Amazon calibrated their machine learning model to answer the question of "help me find more people like the one we already have", and they just so happened to have within their ranks way more people with a specific academic and professional background, which was happened to refer to be men who did activities dominated by men.
It’s famous for the ridiculous differences he policy change made. Women's success rates doubled overnight.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-...
Blind auditions seem like a good idea regardless, don't get me wrong. But the headlines talking about 50% increases are probably wrong.
It was fashionable in France for some time, and it was even attempted. It backfired however. Researchers realized that hires were less diverse when using anonymized resume.
> replace experience on resumes with "random corp 1", random corp 2, random school 1 etc.
That would remove one of the best predictors of future performance. Especially in CS, not all internships or schools are created equal.
Now, with all the "affirmative action" going on, these should be interpreted with a grain of salt. Asians, for example, need much better scores to get into Ivies than some other minorities. And YouTube was caught trashing all white and Asian applicant’s resumes a while ago [0].
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...
These articles always pull the same tricks. They invent a new racial category, "white or Asian", to avoid stating that only 61% were white - i.e. slightly underrepresented compared to the 63.7% white 2010 US demographics [1]. Although by 2014 the white % had probably dropped enough that they are neither over- nor under-represented at Google (the 2020 census reports non-Latino whites as only 57.8% of the US - a 5.9% drop in only 10 years [2]).
But you wouldn't know this from "91% white or Asian". Maybe they can make the problem go away entirely by saying Google is "32% Black or Asian"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Demographics_of_t...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Demographics_of_t...
Especially with admission scandals at top schools, there seems to be an unspoken systemic bias against asians perpetuated by some activists.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
"The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview.
Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door.
"We should hit pause and be very cautious about introducing this as a way of improving diversity, as it can have the opposite effect," Professor Hiscox said."
Anecdotally it isn't too much of a problem now since most Airbnb listings I encounter these days are commercially managed and less prone to individual bias.
If I was black I would probably prefer to be upfront denied than rent a place from somebody that is very racist and face possible problems from an unhinged owner.
I don't see a better solution here but maybe somebody else does.
You have 100% choice over who you want to let into your home.
The law could apply to registered Bed and Breakfast businesses, and perhaps those where people are renting a professionally managed full home or flat - but not for people inviting others into their homes, and renting just a room.
If a woman does not want to rent a room to the 6 foot 4 burly biker with tattoos it's 100% her prerogative.
In fact, if a woman doesn't want to rent a room to men at all, that's perfectly fine as well.
These are rooms in people's living spaces, which to me is distinct from regular business transactions.
The initial premise of AirBnB was something absolutely more intimate than a 'business' and they consistently have touted it as such.
I think that there's a distinction between what AirBnB has promoted - and a regular Bed and Breakfast, and even distinct from Uber/Cab, which is something much more transactional.
"are individual bedrooms within an apartment a “dwelling” protected by the Fair Housing Act? The court gave its answer on February 3rd, and the answer was no: the Act does not protect roommate searches."
" The home is the center of our private lives. Roommates note our comings and goings, observe whom we bring back at night, hear what songs we sing in the shower, see us in various stages of undress and learn intimate details most of us prefer to keep private…. [two paragraphs omitted] “Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places. In our tradition the State is not omnipresent in the home.” Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 562 (2003).
Holding that the FHA applies inside a home or apartment
would allow the government to restrict our ability to choose
roommates compatible with our lifestyles. This would be a
serious invasion of privacy, autonomy and security.
For example, women will often look for female roommates
because of modesty or security concerns. As roommates often
share bathrooms and common areas, a girl may not want to
walk around in her towel in front of a boy. She might also
worry about unwanted sexual advances or becoming romantically involved with someone she must count on to pay the rent.
An orthodox Jew may want a roommate with similar
beliefs and dietary restrictions, so he won’t have to worry
about finding honey-baked ham in the refrigerator next to the
potato latkes… Taking away the ability to choose roommates with similar dietary restrictions and religious convictions will substantially burden the observant Jew’s ability to live his life and practice his religion faithfully. The same is true of individuals of other faiths that call for dietary restrictions or rituals inside the home."This is a good point though, but I'm not sure a court would consider looking for a roommate and renting out a room on Airbnb as the same thing. This would also only apply if you are going to cohabit the space you're renting out, like you said. Which I think is likely the minority of places on Airbnb at this point.
If you live in a building with up to 4 units, you are exempt from the fair housing act.
I'm a airbnb host, if a renter has less than a certain amount of reviews I try search social media and other records for the users name. If I'm only given initials I would deny these requests if they didn't have enough reviews.
It doesn't matter what legislation is in place, I'm speaking rhetorically about what is appropriate or not.
Again: Having a guest in a room in your home is different than a strict commercial transaction.
We have 'Female Only' gyms - which are commercial. We have 'Safe Spaces' on campus, which is public property.
Private individuals can chose who they want in their bedrooms.
It gets less fuzzy beyond that.
AirBnB is a vast global corporation that people use primarily as an alternative to hotels. Regardless of whatever the initial ideas may have been, it's not a cosy intimate exchange platform for people who want to stay in each other's homes.
Well, that's the tricky part, isn't it. Because to a first approximation: yes, obviously.
But when you're allowing a third party to broker deals between you and a stranger where they exchange money for time spent in your home, it starts to look a lot more like you're a market-rate lodging provider and there's all kinds of civil rights law that should start to attach. Because the Civil Rights Act is specifically targeted against individuals making private decisions regarding their property (in a market setting).
But what if we found data showing that there were other groups which also had a higher risk of sexual assault or other negative dangers. Why would it only be appropriate to discriminate on gender when the reason for doing so would justify discrimination for other factors.
I'd also imagine that statistically an older Asian woman would be a safer renter than a young white man with face tattoos. This data, particularly on race, would never be released or likely even analyzed internally, but I'd be surprised if there were not some visual indicators that correlate to host safety.
Why would this group bias be prevented but bias on gender allowed? I suspect the obvious answer is true, they will only prevent bias when it's in fashion.
I wouldn't rent my home out to anyone no matter the skin color, religion, or genders, and frankly it is a bit gross for hotels, hostels and BNBs to exist. If you can't avoid travel camping keeps you at arms length from mingling with other humans filth. Weather might prohibit your options, but I'm a firm believer that "Hell is other people."
I cant take any of these corporations seriously when they only do the progressive thing in a single jurisdiction in response to a single jurisdictions progressive laws
> This update is consistent with the voluntary settlement agreement we reached in 2019 with individuals in Oregon
Then that should be the title of the article, instead of the pr puff piece
Many jurisdictions, including the federal government have similar laws. The challenge of the law itself never reached a judicial conclusion, so if AirBnB was willing to settle there, it was either because they thought it was a pretty solid law, or they made a cost benefit analysis to settle. If the latter, then the same is true other places. But instead they are making a harder business decision to resist changing anything, just to spin it as being an ally to marginalized customers.
This is a puff piece for a technology that AirBnB could roll out anywhere randomly across any population for the A/B test. Its harder for them to geofence this, harder for them to spin this, as opposed to just doing the normal software rollout strategy.
So that’s why. Think about it from the affected plaintiff or customers perspective.
Yes, sure, potentially roll it out after this “experiment”. But this is yet another example of why representation matters. This wouldn’t have even gotten greenlit this way if there were more decision makers familiar with this segment of the population by living it.
I’d believe they cared about this as an experiment to drive greater equal treatment in their platform if they complied with this agreement (and shut up about that) AND rolled out that same code someplace else, treated that as an experiment, and talked about that.
(I do see “hey, we have to do this anyway, so we might as well look at the data and see what outcomes it drives” as an inherently positive company action. I think the messaging around it as “we’re totally doing this as an experiment” while omitting the settlement agreement feels shady to me [to the point of it being an unforced error, albeit a minor one relative to the scale of the company])
Is the so-called "experiment" focused exclusively on a jurisdiction that enforces those rules?
A/B testing tends to be randomized per session or per user or per marketplace, not per jurisdiction and specially only on those where AirBNB already lost lawsuits and thus has to face a precedent.
Also, is Oregon the hotbed of racism and discrimination in the US rental market?
According to Oregon government:
Among people living in Oregon in 2016, 76% identified as white, 13% Latina(o), 5% Asian and Pacific Islander, 2% African American, 1% American Indian and Alaska Native, and 3% two or more races.
And then that is further bolstered by the original point of Oregon to begin with. The territory and state was founded on extremely exclusionary and unambiguously racist principles, specifically against black people setting foot in its borders, and that can always be used to undermine how convincing its progressive rebranding is. Simple because its so meme-worthy how hard they are trying, without ever being confronted with a circumstance to put it into action.
It also stands to reason that there are people, families, dynasties, that harbor the continuous exclusionist ideals of Oregon, from its inception.
The point being, if the company was honestly concerned about racial discrimination, wouldn't it run this sort of experiment in problematic, high-impact regions?
I mean, would it make any sense to fight discrimination against Eskimos in Florida?
This is my subjective opinion - I know a lot of ex-USSR countries are considered pretty racist. On the other hand, in that area, EVERYONE was an indentured servant at some point, so that helps equalize things as well.
I would also argue that a lot of groups enjoy playing off of race on BOTH sides (anti and pro).
I think making it illegal and socially unacceptable is the only way to get rid of it.
It's uncomfortable but sometimes the biases are rational. IE there are subgroups that are more or less likely to cause damage. It can be quite unfair to many members of the subgroup.
One option other than making it illegal is to socialize the risk. Airbnb could offer some universal damage insurance. This would at least remove the potential rational economic incentive for the property owner to select against certain groups.