Sorry, your wife is Indian, landlord won’t rent to you
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That’s the culture in the region, imo it’s not “wrong”. People self-select and who am I to discriminate against their culture? They do it for their reasons.
I personally find it reprehensible, but that’s my cultural values. I’m proud of where I’m from (US), where we have spent generations working to mitigate any form of discrimination based on race, gender or creed. It’s not perfect, but we strive in the right direction.
> generations working to mitigate any form of discrimination
I would definitely agree that all humans have the capacity to be racist (other-ist) and that racism is not confined to the USA (obviously).
But it’s ridiculous to claim that somehow “it’s worse than the USA” and that the USA has mitigated it all, because that’s easily disproved by speaking to any minority person.
The OP literally said "It’s not perfect, but we strive in the right direction" in the next sentence
If Henry the Eighth said "I am not perfect, but I have treated my wives far better than anyone else in the world", then the admission that he is not perfect should not be sufficient to dismiss factual challenges to the second part of the claim.
Does the US have to be better than the rest of the world? All counties, everywhere?
This isn't really even allowing for equality with say Canada.
There's a famous quote (perhaps apocryphally) attributed to Reagan: "You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American."
As a brown man, I feel this viscerally; I am not only deeply proud to be American, but I feel accepted as an American by my non-immigrant peers.
I think the nuanced way of putting it isn't so much that "America is not racist", it's that every country in the world deals with racism as a problem, but America is perhaps among the least racist.
Daryl Davis¹, through conversation, convinced a number of Klansmen to leave and denounce the KKK. See “Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America”².
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Courtesy:_Daryl_Dav...
An exception like "oh well you're one of the good ones"?
> I have never met a full-fledged racist (in U.S. here). Peronally, I think they are a very small insular group, if they exist at all.
Talk to old people if you want some disappointment then.
Yes. This includes most "old people". A lot of the talk an jabs or using racial epithets is superficial when you get right down to it. At least, in my experience.
They're very nice at the surface level. You wouldn't expect it, but oh boy was it there an it was deep.
I really, really do not believe that the racial epithets are superficial. It's not a uniquely old person problem by any definition, but it's extremely common.
When my grandmother was dying in a hospital, she had some dementia. I don't think she ever uttered a racial epithet to anyone in her whole life, but one day a hospital worker was trying to clean her room up and making a bit of a commotion, she sat up and told him to go away, that she did not like black people. We apolized to the man who seemed to understand the situation. My point is that people are complicated, sometimes they say things on reflex they would not say in a healthier more positive frame of mind.
People are concerned about existing as they were born as well. I think those people are less concerned about whether or not your grandma can be honest about her feelings towards black people.
> I don’t think she uttered a racial epithet to anyone in her whole life
I’ll start by saying this is an assumption and likely untrue.
As previously stated, lots of people who are racist are never overtly racist.
This is why I've never liked the notion of sneering at those who say "some of my best friends are race/ethnicity", as if that is proof of that person's irremediable evilness. Isn't it a good thing for people to, however superficially or insincerely, consider "exceptions"? To put another way, if people instead said "I consider race/ethnicity to be 100% bad", would this be better? Of course not.
Anyway, this experience is the reason I roll my eyes when someone calls ____ a nazi. There are legit nazis in the world, and they’re a truly unpleasant bunch.
And... unless you're in a marginalized minority group, you really aren't in a position to know how racist people are.
Oh yeah, I just remembered, we also recently had a president for four years who was overly racist. Remember his attacks on Judge Curiel? Remember Mexicans "are rapists"?
So yes you’re right anyone can empathize. But I don’t think that’s what OP is saying. You really cannot fully understand unless you live it. Just like you cannot understand true poverty in African countries, when you’ve spent your whole life living in a (relatively) rich one.
But I (a black African man) can never truly know or experience what the average Uyghur goes though day to day, because I just haven’t lived it.
So no, when we say that, we are not “excluding” anyone - in fact the more allies a minority has, the more likely they will achieve equality. But lived experience is different.
However lived experience can also introduces biases — for instance, would you trust a court of law to deliver justice if the victim was also judge and jury? That lived experience which provides sensitivity and also can make one too close to the matter at hand to see things clearly.
I think people with and without lived experiences can pull together and make positive contributions.
I say this because there are so many examples of solutions proposed by people with lived experience that are utterly counterproductive, because they shut out the voices of those without lived experience but who might have balancing views drawn from the broader human experience.
My experience is that people are more likely to share racist views with other people of their ethnic group but would likely never be overtly hostile to a person of a different race.
Also, I think if you are in a marginalized group it's extremely hard to disambiguate racism from general assholery.
If you don't get hired for a job you'll never know if it was because the interviewer was racist or because he just didn't like you
Does this mean that it is not empirically measurable then? That would explain a lot because actual data is what I find missing from the claims of how prevalent racism is.
As for empirical data, there's tons. Maybe start with this Brookings report since it's on the topic of the OP (housing) https://www.brookings.edu/research/biased-appraisals-and-the...
"The question is: What explains this? We don’t know with any precision. In our paper, we reviewed literature on racial bias and pointed to its potential as an explanation, writing: “Our findings are generally consistent with the widespread presence of anti-Black bias.” We left it for future work to explore some of the relevant mechanisms that link bias to valuations and quantify their importance."
So the thought is that it MIGHT be bias (a bit presumptuous then to title the study "Biased appraisals..."). And we are waiting on future studies to actually provide the causal link.
But even if every bit of the 23% delta is caused by racial bias, we need to consider the trend. As far as I can tell every important sociological data point on this matter (employment, wealth, marriage, laws, etc.) has been improving decade after decade. I don't know what numbers this same study, or one equivalent to it, would reveal from say 5 or 7 decades ago, but I assume it would have been substantially worse.
All of which is to say that proposing a narrative that racism is rampant and getting worse does not seem to be supported by the data. To the contrary, it would seem that it is less than it's ever been and continues to decline.
EDIT: To be clear, I am not suggesting you or anyone here is proposing a narrative that racism is rampant and getting worse. But I think it's safe to say that proposal is prevalent in pop culture.
I'm not familiar with a narrative that racism is getting worse. My impression (and I thought this was in line with US liberal thinking) is that we are now beginning to admit that racism didn't go away with the end of slavery, it didn't go away with the end of segregation; it's still here. I'd say things are getting better, because many white people acknowledge racism instead of pretending it doesn't exist.
A great example was how shutting down travel at the start of Covid-19 was seen as racist. Yet, there should have been no issue as it was the only thing we can do in our global environment to slow the situation. Yet, the people in charge came up with that as racist.
"When Mexico sends its people, ... they're rapists." - Donald Trump
That time he said April Ryan (reporter) should "go set up the meeting" with the congressional black caucus for him.
Shithole countries.
The Muslim ban. Which for a while people around him tried to get him to pretend wasn't a Muslim ban, but really wanted to keep using those words, so he did.
I don't have any complaints about shutting down travel over COVID-19. It should have happened sooner, and I don't know anyone who ever disagreed with that. On the other hand, he did go out of his way to unneccessarily try and rename COVID the "China virus," which sure looked like racial scapegoating to me.
But, I would say that his mysogyny is much worse. And, his love for dictators. ("love" being his term)
But it is already bad enough that Afroamericans had been kept from acquiring wealth by various means, judicial and extrajudicial for much of the last century. They are closing the wealth gap, but extremely slowly.
Ignoring that history is part of a basically racist system.
Used to play airsoft with a guy who had a totenkopf tattoo. He wasn't pleasant at all. Not sure anyone wanted him there but so long as he didn't break any of the rules they weren't sure if they could refuse him service.
Though as a counter my friends dad has a bunch of neonazi tattoos under his hair (he doesn't shave it any more) and was a very solid bloke who had a troubled path getting there.
Even the actual neo-nazis can reform.
The dog whistle version of this, which you heard public figures using on TV, was "he doesn't look presidential."
The real point is that the conversation you described happens ten times over in most peer developed countries. If you think it's bad that a few people say this about Obama (who ultimately was elected President twice), imagine what it's like running for office as a person of color in France, Germany, the Nordics, Japan, South Korea, or Italy — it's nigh impossible. Whereas in America, the kind of racism you're describing has been relegated to retirees and people who generally lack power, in Europe, this kind of thinking persists in board rooms, popular culture, and even the British Royal Family (just ask Meghan Markle) — institutions with real cultural influence and power.
Ultimately, while racism continues to be a problem in America, it's much further along in solving that problem than pretty much any other developed country, save for maybe Canada, the UK, and ANZ.
As someone that moved to a very very racist part of the US in their teens (near a sundown town), this is by far the most scary statement you could write. I believe you would be far more concerned if you understood the enormity of it when you look at it in the converse.
This person you mention that creates an exception 'for one of the good ones' will also create an exception for their buddy when they lynch someone and they just forget to tell the police about it.
I recommend 'Neoslavery' by Knowing Better as a little chunk of more recent American history a lot of people would like to erase. Racism runs very deep in some places.
I don't deny such attitudes. But I would be suprised if such attitudes extended to a complete abnegation of local authority to prosecute a lynching. Even in a sundown town.
If George Floyd's murder had not been filmed Derek Chauvin would still be on the police force and not in prison. This is why you should watch the video attached in my previous reply. Especially in the south the local authorities were actively involved in gathering slaves (remember prison slavery is legal to this day in the US).
Second, George Floyd was not "lynched". It's even debateable if there were even racial motivations to the case. He ultimately died of a fentanyl overdose, and there is video evidence he was out of control at the time. Not to excuse Chauvin, but I'm not going to try to read his mind or judge his character on the basis that "he looks like a white supremicist" sitting in court.
Saying cases exist but we simply don't know about it, is dodging the question. You can't prove a negative. That's just being disingenuous. Where is the proof that lynchings are occuring but they are just being swept under the rug?
Neither of these things are true.
"An autopsy found methamphetamine and fentanyl in Floyd’s system at the time of his death. Investigators also found pills contained methamphetamine and fentanyl inside Floyd’s SUV and the backseat of a squad car officers tried to push him into.
"Schleicher pointed jurors toward the testimony of a forensic toxicologist who found fentanyl levels were “well below the ratio” of people who die from an overdose and a “very low” level of methamphetamine in blood taken from Floyd at the hospital."
https://apnews.com/article/trials-us-news-death-of-george-fl...
No, two autopsys and a jury determined that he died from a knee on his neck.
https://apnews.com/article/trials-us-news-death-of-george-fl...
> Nearly every one of them will create an exception once they have a reasonable conversation with someone from another race.
Shifting somewhat off race, one of my biggest hopes with some of the covid / work-remote urban-to-rural diapora is that- by finally having some reverse brain drain- less urban places might finally see & hear from some more diverse people. Some cultural mixing & injection of other people can (I hope) add some empathy & sense in places that have had fewer & fewer huddling together & weathering the slow-but-ever-ongoing worldwide march of economic-stratification.
In America, as long as you're a hard worker, believe in America's institutions, and are civically engaged, it doesn't matter where you're from, you will eventually be accepted as "American", and if anyone were to suggest otherwise, they'd likely get ostracized by most (if not all) institutions that hold power/influence.
I have been to America and it feels lots of different countries living in the same place, not necessarily a good thing. Again it's a subject full of nuances, but I have seen different people being completely integrated after just a single generation. What I think is relevant is how much a culture is exposed and capable of absorb different people from different cultures.
This has been true for pretty much every group of immigrants to America. I recommend reading this thread which makes the argument better than I ever could: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1469031915768279045
> The American immigrant story -- arrive with little, work hard and move up over three or four generations, win a place in the middle class and a place in the national tapestry even in the face of discrimination -- is still firmly in place, folks.
And it's easy to take this for granted, as Americans, but this kind of economic convergence within 3-4 generations is not universal. Muslim immigrants to France suffer from multi-generational poverty.
I know for a fact that if I tried hard enough, I could become the CEO of Google (like Sundar) or the CEO of Microsoft (like Satya), or even "fail" into a Director/VP position at any Fortune 500 corporation. I know I can probably become the Mayor of a major city, or a Governor of a major State, or even a member of Congress. I know that my Indian-American wife who is accomplished in her own right can potentially become the CEO of Vimeo (look her up!). I know I can probably become a star stand-up comedian (like Hasan, Hari, or Aziz). I know I can probably become a star actor in a Hollywood Blockbuster (like Mindy or Kal).
I type this comment while on vacation in Stockholm, where the streets are currently littered with campaign posters for the upcoming election in September 2022, and I do not believe that I or my children can ever see ourselves on those posters and be accepted as Swedish — no matter how hard we tried. I'm not confident that I'd ever be considered to meaningfully lead H&M or Ikea or Volvo, at least not over a white blonde Swedish person with generations of Nordic lineage. As I said above, I'm sure I'd be comfortable living in Sweden — it's a remarkably easy place to live — but my success is capped by the color of my skin in a way that it simply isn't in America (or Canada, UK, and maybe ANZ).
That’s part of why you see such frustration on the right when people oppose things listed in the constitution (gun rights, censorship of any kind, etc). In their world view, it’s an assault on America. It’s why they call the left un-American. It’s also why the left in the US always refers to “our democracy”, in their world view the US is a “multi-cultural democracy” (not a constitutional republic - which it technically is).
Both parties tapping into the same mojo
It's quite contradictory with what happens in practice. You can absolutely go live in France and be considered a Frenchman. However Americans will always identify you by your family's origin, even if you're born in the US.
Actually that difference in how countries see nationality was well illustrated when France won the soccer World Cup, and American commenters didn't see an issue with denying the French players they belonging to their country, and insisting they were from Africa and couldn't have changed that because of their ancestry. The French saw that as profoundly racist. See https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/7/19/17590302/t...
> "After the 2016 election, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla wrote a New York Times essay, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” making an argument similar to Araud’s (a piece that also follows a long tradition of liberal hand-wringing about identity in the US). In the piece, Lilla even cited his time taking a sabbatical in France as formative of his opinions on this subject.
> American liberalism’s emphasis on identity and difference, Lilla argues, is destroying the foundations of democracy in the country — helping the far right in precisely the way that Araud says
To be absolutely clear, I don't deny that modern American liberals employ rhetoric directly at odds with Reagan's quote, it's in fact exactly the point I'm trying to make. You can pretty much draw a straight line from that brand of progressivism to the predisposition to draw the (in my opinion false) conclusion that America is more racist than other peer countries. From my experience as a 1st-generation immigrant, that has been not only false, but I see my success as mostly being capped by the color of my skin in every other country except for the US, UK, Canada, and ANZ. I know that to hold true for basically 100% of my peers as well.
You don't just have to take my word for it, it's been true for pretty much every single immigrant group in American history. I recommend reading this thread which makes the argument better than I ever could: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1469031915768279045
> The American immigrant story -- arrive with little, work hard and move up over three or four generations, win a place in the middle class and a place in the national tapestry even in the face of discrimination -- is still firmly in place, folks.
American progressives (especially those like Trevor Noah) take this for granted in the world, and tend to undervalue just how unique it is; this kind of economic convergence within 3-4 generations is extremely atypical in the developed world. It's well and good that a handful of Africans go on to become successful football players in France, but normal non-athletic Muslim immigrants to France actually tend to suffer from multi-generational poverty.
Also, while the Vox piece you linked paints the French as tolerant and proud of their footballers, scandalized by Trevor Noah, the reality is a bit more complicated: https://twitter.com/footballfactly/status/102113333053048422.... Across Europe, footballers of color are only conditionally accepted.
South African Racism vs. American Racism
Gist of his answer is south African Racism is "blacks can't live here", US Racism is "well you could live here, but your loan was denied, sorry"
For example, Redlining just being turned into 'your address affects your credit score'.
https://www.equifax.com/personal/education/credit/score/how-...
You said: "well you could live here, but your loan was denied, sorry"
My response was that there are laws that prohibit institutions from denying loans based on the factors you have cited.
As a Canadian living in Malaysia (just shy of being in the top 10 most racist countries[1]) this is definitely true (although not against me as a Caucasian). There have been several times where I am in a Grab and the casual conversation with the driver all of the sudden turns racist whether it's against Chinese, Bangladeshi, Indian etc. People over here are much less concerned about tact and racism is no exception.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-raci...
Could there be other explanations for that than racism?
- Americans are racist
- Europeans wrote their thesis on racism
- Asians wrote the original sources on racism that the Europeans cite in their thesis
[1] https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/european-r...
They don't talk about it much in places that are really racist because they don't give a damn.
However, being looked down upon or discriminated against is one thing. Having to fear for your life and safety because they will hurt you just because of what you look like biologically is a different issue.
Take the infamous Japan for example, if you live there long enough as any non-white minority you should expect to be treated badly based on your appearance alone.
Take a white area in any US state or night time at a sun-down small town. Bad things will happen to you and the cops will be in on it. Or take driving as a minority in certain parts of the US, there is a chance you might run into a cop who might decide to frame you for some crime and at best you will spend a few weeks in jail before being set free. That can happen outside the US in say Russia for example, the US isn't special but the type of racism where you don't get jobs or get called names in public is different than being afraid day in day out or have large portions of a political party advocate for race wars, genoicide,etc...
I mean can you think of any other country where a minorities are incarcerated at a similar rate per capita as the US?
I use to think like you as well but the US is a bit special as with many things in this regard. But racism like many other evils are default settings on humans.
The USA is certainly the most racist first world country I’ve been to. (I’ve visited Canada, England, Denmark, USA)
The incarceration statistics for African Americans vs. white people alone tell you all you need to know.
Unfortunately intellectually lazy people gravitate to a binary racist vs not-racist analysis. Nuanced comparisons and suggestions mean looking under the rug where all the problems have been swept under.
Minorities in the US do have more opportunities but also effects of historical and systemic racism as well as white flight and other things specific to the US and other hetrogenous countries means minorities also live in 3rd world like conditions in some places.
A minority might get beat up and mistreated a lot in russia but slavery my means of false incarceration would be rare.
And believe it or not from Japan to Russia to Scandanavia there are a lot of nice,kind and hospitable people.
What comes as a shock to american minorities is how their race isn't even relevant unless the other person is also an asshole racist. Treating people differently because of race is too much work if you didn't grow up thinking that way unless it is a serious thing like marriage or a job (as opposed to serving a person at a restaurant).
Here in Germany for example, black skin Africans report wildly different amounts of discrimination: the lucky ones are those who, due to some inexplicable subtility, tend to get misidentified as African Americans. Suddenly they are on the other side of that strange line separating immigrants from expats, without even trying.
do caucasian americans identify as europeans outside of america?
or mexicans as spanisch?
A mistake on the side of the potential xenophobe that usually turns out quite positive for the misidentified. "Welfare seeker" vs "impersonation of the Marshall Plan", the difference could not be bigger. The face of the "good GI", in popular memory, has black skin because that used to be so much of a standout feature back in the day.
european racism is also more xenophobia than about race, which is exemplified by the difference between africans and african-americans. it's less the skin color that matters but where you are from. an african-american is from a 1st world country with a western culture similar to europe, whereas a native african is from a 3rd world country. "from the bush", from a poverty stricken and war-torn region.
So, it’s no a skin issue by no mean.
I like to think we're striving in the right direction too. Just at a different stage.
Also, as an aside mini-rant, I'm not keen on the concept of race, because it's a very fuzzy and nondescript concept compared to ethnicity or color. Race isn't a meaningful term and is mistakenly used to describe nationalities, religions, ethnicities, or other communities inappropriately.
My friend had gotten married was looking to buy a house, and his wife having a lot of trouble driving out to a location only to hear it was off the market. So he decided the he would take some of the burden from his wife, and visit places after work himself.
Fortubately, he didn't coordinate this well enough so he ended up going to some off the same places as her.
Guess what? In the morning, his Hispanic wife would be told the house was aleady sold or the seller was no longer offering it.
That same day in the afternoon, he the White husband would get a tour and be told he could buy anytime.
Racism is alive and well, if it weren't the color of my friends face he wouldn't have a house today. Funny enough his white neighbors spontaneously moved after he arrived with his Hispanic wife, and now the entire neighborhood is more multicultural.
This isn’t really unusual when you are buying in a hot market. When I was getting my place it happened several times and the realtor would usually offer to give me an appointment at another place or just take my number so they’d call me if the current deal fell through.
I think the realtors don’t leave specifically for that reason: it serves as lead generation for their other properties.
The idea that all forms of discrimination are bad. Hear me out.
All discrimination is bad including cultural discrimination. However if a culture discriminates against sex or race how do I reconcile this paradox? By respecting a culture must I respect a culture a discrimination? The parent post is a confused person trying to make sense of the paradox.
My suggestion is to get above all of it. You don't need to crystallize discrimination into a hard black and white rule where if you discriminate your evil and if you don't your good. Much of America has this attitude and they can't rise above it.
There are legitimate logical and mathematical correlations between race and certain traits, between sex and certain traits and between culture and certain traits. To judge a person for these traits based off of sex, culture and race can be very rational due to these very real correlations.
But instead America has embraced woke culture which takes these anti discrimination views to the extreme such that you get male athletes with sex changes competing with women in female sports. It's sort of insane. But I get it.
This wokenesses attitude arises from a past where Americans took discrimination to illogical levels and committed atrocities because of it. Now our country lives in the extremes. You are either racist/sexist or you are woke. Pick one, because there isn't really a word for a moderate viewpoint on this topic.
The hypocrisy is all around us. Don't discriminate against gender but we must segregate restrooms into male and female versions. Are you saying males are lecherous pervs and we must give females a safe space to piss, shit and do makeup? It's actually completely sexist to segregate restrooms when men and women practically share every other space.
He did, but tactfully: he is a foreigner who is learning Japanese and came to the university in Japan and is hired by traditional company X and blabla. Still somewhere like 25-50% straight up rejections, but at least those were 1-minute waste instead of 30-60 min waste of time. And I was looking in the "high market in Tokyo", which I guess is probably the least discriminatory in the whole Japan. I also cannot imagine what non-western foreigner suffer (who are normally discriminated against a lot more).
One time I wanted to go into a restaurant and there weren't any signs anywhere that said 'Japanese only' or anything like that, but I rocked up to the door and made an inquiry in Japanese to the lady on the door and some guy from in behind came through and was like 'sorry, no foreigners' and she turned to him and said 'no, it's ok he speaks Japanese' and I went in and had a meal without any problems.
It definitely offends my western sensibilities to be exclusionary in that way, but I think the thing native English speakers take for granted is that it's a lot easier to have an open and inclusive society like we try to when we can make a pretty safe assumption that the people we're including will be able to communicate with us to an adequate standard. I'm fluent in Japanese. It was a really hard language that took a lot to master. I have an excellent sense of the range of English abilities of Japanese people. The language barrier is a huge factor in the discomfort felt. Then there's the cultural norms. Japanese people tend to talk about other Japanese people as if everyone has baked into them the same set of rules / behaviors / assumptions. When that goes out the window, I think a decent proportion of them don't quite know how to mentally simulate how they think such a person will behave other than it'll possibly (and maybe probably) be in violation of at least some of the norms that they kind of rely on.
It always makes me pretty sad when people level comments about native English speaking countries being racist etc and then you look at how much poorer you'd fare in comparison in the general case if you were to live in their country.
That being said, there are strong legal requirements to having any tenants. Japan is very renter-friendly, and you can even be months late on paying rent without any chance of eviction. So lenders lean towards avoiding any risk at all. It can be harder to find a place as a foreigner due to risk-adversity, but while most comments here want to paint it as racism, my guess is few of the posters actually speak Japanese - I suspect it would be difficult finding a place in any country when not speaking of their language, though have no actual experience to base that on. But as a brown (other comments have suggested we suffer more discrimination, which is true in the eyes of cops and general people assuming we are all poor restaurant owners) that speaks Japanese, real estate had never been difficult, though there is additional cost for a guarantor which would otherwise be a family member.
But the thread is about Singapore where presumably there is no languages issue so not sure where Japan came from. I suppose it's tradition though for expats here to vent though ;)
if you can read/write and converse natively i think you can get an apartment; your real estate agent can vouch for you and alleviate their concerns etc
We may even call it something like "a background check".
Just spitballing ideas!
My dad had one squatter, who was a respectable 60 years old lady: she just stopped paying and the legal and justice system is so shit that it took more than a year to get her out of my dad's flat - meanwhile she trashed the flat, changed the gates to lock us out and started burning stuff.
You don't get to decide who lives in my property, I do and you can be damn sure I'll think very hard what's my chance the tenant will pay or not based on any data I have available. If they're students or asylum seekers they're more likely to trash the place and go unpunished.
It would be less relevant if I could reclaim my flat immediately (fine, I'll eat a loss of a month of rent) after breach of contract, but that's not the world we live in.
Oh, and a deposit for damage paid too, which has no bearing on the above rent and late eviction.
That might start to be fair with your logic.
I might add, this is the same logic with pre or post pay things. Prepaid phone vs postpay on credit...
THe way I would envision is that landlord is not allowed to manage any of that. Let's say you have a property, you can go to the government and say: "Hey, I have this property that I want to rent.". With the option of also giving a specific tenant if you want. The government then takes over completely. They get a free for managing the property and you get the rest. Government handles everything from eviction to damages to new tenant search.
It has to be fair for both parties.
And rent paid in advance is only so, if not in arrears.
But understand, my comment was responding to a post claiming that there should be no way to have a choice in whom you rent to.
I've seen units with a years rent in damages. Ripped carpet, holes in walls, smashed appliances and lights, etc.
But people want there to be no way to chose renters, based upon credit and past history?!
edit: your edited post clarifies things a bit. My primary concern is about forcing costs on the landlords, if there are no reliably checks. So I am open to ideas that take this into account.
edit2: more clarity here, that 'year's worth of rent in damages' was gross, not profit. It happens too frequently too. EG if rent is $100, a year of rent is $1200, but it isn't as if the landlord pockets that. Not even remotely close. Some landlords only make 30% on their units, when property tax, upkeep, water and other included things are involved.
So massive damage can take years to recoup!
How would you have perspective tenants prove they can pay reliably? A pay stub alone cannot tell if the person is reliable. They could have any number of other factors contributing to not being able to pay.
For future reference, if you ever miss a payment you can always call the company and get it resolved before the credit bureaus know.
Yes did thorough DD.
But we should be careful to not let our own biases be baked into systems and processes.
When I left my last rental after buying a house, my elderly white landlord asked me to help him put the property on Craigslist. When I did so and mentioned the Cupertino school district, he asked me to remove that part because “it would attract too many Indian families with kids” to avoid the curry smell. He had no issue with other Asian ethnicities, the previous tenant was Chinese.
I did not remove it, but I don’t know anything about the next renter.
I’ve since heard the same comment from people at work who rent out property. The curry smell is always the issue.
It's also hard to compare the US to other places. Japan and many other places are very homogenous societies, the US is the polar opposite and wears that with pride. At a high level you can say "Americans aren't racist" and that would mostly be true, but in the details everyone is different.
Many years ago, when I worked at a hotel catering to long term stays, a portion of the clientele used to be Indian families working for TCS/Infosys/Cognizant/Gentech/etc. Their rooms were automatically put out of order for 2 to 3 weeks after their anticipated departure date, because there was a sufficiently high probability it would need significant time to air out and probably carpet shampooing and other remedies.
At $150+ per night of lost revenue, no one would be willing to pay damages, and smells leave no conclusive evidence that will let you win any damages in court.
Solution was to amortize these costs over all hotel guests, just like any other externalities caused by other hotel guests.
Obviously, if you do not have volume, then you can greatly reduce your expenses by avoiding certain risks, which manifest as deciding not to rent to someone who you think has a high probability of costing you more money to rehabilitate the dwelling for subsequent rentals.
Why? Hotels that permit pets frequently have astronomical my-pet-peed fees. The point of the fee is less to be charged and more to signal that someone shouldn’t take the room if that’s a probability.
The next option is court, but of course, proving a specific person caused a specific damage in a hotel is also near impossible without spending too much in legal costs. Pets are always a headache for hotels because the probability of the pet causing high dollar amount damage is so high. Scratches and whatnot on furniture, ripping carpet, peeing and pooping. Replacing furniture and carpet and whatnot easily gets into thousands of dollars. I know the hotel I worked at made a loss on pets even though pet fees were collected.
>The point of the fee is less to be charged and more to signal that someone shouldn’t take the room if that’s a probability.
Yes, just like smoking fees. You basically have to re-floor and repaint the walls and probably replace all the furniture and fixtures to undo long term effects of cigarette smoke to a dwelling. Hence why any decent hotel will do mandatary semi weekly or at least weekly checks of all hotel rooms (regardless if the guest has a do or disturb sign).
Anytime you allow someone on your premises, you introduce all sorts of risks, and getting rid of them is not as simple as calling the police, especially when tenancy rights get involved such as with hotels. So if you want to stay in business, you have to be proactive on monitoring against these risks.
Hence the use of credit card security deposits as discrimination against those who have no credit cards. It is the most effective way to reduce your probability of having to incur huge costs from problematic hotel guests.
Getting a smell out of a place is not possible with cleaning and ventilation. It eats into everything, you need to paint again and possibly get rid of furniture.
I always thought of it probably not being enforceable anyway.
I had a rental for a while and there was extras for pets, but I do not think you could really do it for anything else. There was a 'pet fee' of like $1-200 per pet to cover carpet cleaning and such. Then an additional 'pet deposit' of half a month rent, on top of the main deposit of a month of rent. The fee was kept no matter what, and then the deposit was there to cover any additional damage like scratches and such.
You might be able to claim lingering smells, no matter what they were caused by, as damages to keep their deposit. Still a lot that could go wrong with it. As you might already have a new tenant lined up, and once they move in good luck proving in court the smells were from the previous tenant. Or you have to leave it vacant for some time to get it cleaned, costing income.
Edit: Just speculating based on my experience in the US. Mostly VA and NC. Obviously could be very different elsewhere in the world.
Maybe it’s liquid fats (like ghee), cooking processes that aerosolise them (pressure cooking) and the heavy use of spices that’s the problem more than curry per se?
Why not? Granted curry isn't one of the smells I've dealt with but I've renovated a few houses and there are a large variety of odors that will sink into walls and floors.
Bacon or sausage, fish, spices, cigarette smoke. I know an Indian family that built a second kitchen on the backyard patio for frying and other types of cooking that resulted in smells they did not want in their own home.
I feel like if I ever rent there, I should invite you guys over, the use the opportunity to cook curry.
Even if we just eat steaks, and I put the curry in the fridge for later, your husband will likely get the blame.
It would be an interesting test/data point. Does the landlord approach me, and say no more Indian guests?
Plus, at least you guys get a free meal out of it.
Indeed, here too the reason claimed is Indian curries
And the thing is, she does! There is a genetic expression the yields the difference between wet:dry::European:Asian populations and it also affects our other excretion glands!
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/body-odor-asia... (just after the graphs, near the end)
One becomes desensitized to the local fragrance ps over time. When everyone/everything stinks, no locals really smell it.
Ask a horsie person if the barns stink. At best they’ll agree it has a smell.
Interestingly, I encountered a new-to-me “white peoples smell of dogs” rumour. The discussion lends credence to the idea that genetically distinctive populations have different body odours.
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-black-people-think-that...
Edit: mostly diet differences, I think, which also tracks closely with the gene discussed in the first link.
The common reason given is that Indian cooking involves lots of spices that stain and remain in the kitchen, necessitating either a kitchen overhaul prior to renting to a new tenant, or renting to another Indian family. I understand and am sympathetic towards this reason, having frustratingly burnt-in a few permanent turmeric stains into my work surfaces. But just a little. To be a landlord in Singapore is to be of a financial status that most Singaporeans are not a part of.
And again, I also know it is simply a smoke screen, because these same landlords are also the ones complaining about "all of the Indians in the neighbourhood"! And making variations of the blinding smile joke, bobbing their heads mockingly, wrinkling their noses in disgust at the imagined smell of food or perfumes or incense, complaining about the noise they make, and advising you earnestly to never invest in property in known Indian enclaves.
Thank goodness not everyone is like this, and thank goodness for the enforced racial quotas of government housing.
It seems that he is an outlier being a mixed race couple - dunno how that works in that case ????.
Also Singapore in the early days suffered from race riots between it's Chinese/Malay/Tamil (Indian) citizens and the founders did not want racial ghettos to form or a repeat of racial strife.
I think it is a good system in a multi-cultural society - here in South Africa we see what problems and issues arise out of this type of segregation.
"When co-founder of property listings website 99.co Darius Cheung and his pregnant wife Roshni Mahtani"
Now this is old article - circa 2017
Also,
> 99.co is now tackling this by introducing an “all-races-welcome” indicator on its website. What this means is that agents and landlords can positively indicate that their properties can be rented by anyone regardless of ethnicity.
Kind of sad they would even need to do this. Maybe William Gibsons Wired article about 90s Singapore was exactly right.
>things like affirmative action and prefered minority hiring would be seen as totally racist here
No they aren't
Whole Central Europe from Poland to Hungary through Ukraine and the Balkan and racist against Roma people. Pretty much everyone hates them. Most governments and the EU have special programs to help Roma people to get jobs because they are discriminated everywhere.
Singapore has a significant local Indian minority and many mainland Indian expats, but while public housing is forcibly desegregated with racial quotas, in the private market this means there are many condo developments like Tanjong Rhu that are majority-Indian (plus expats who are unaware or don't care).
https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/f...
It does smell... freaking delicious.
The problem with these clauses is that people can exploit you.
Yes the world is a horrifying racist place with only america and europe discussing and fighting it openly.
Shame based cultures seem to be more prone to sweaping such problems under the rug instead of solving them.
Just better maps, free of charge, a new ecosystem springing up around what replaced the old eco system..
And, mind you, I'm probably among the lucky ones... if you're from other Asian countries you can probably expect even worse.
For some reason, north Indian food is over represented by a significant margin. On top of it, people expect restaurant style food to be cooked at home except nobody does that. Most young people do not use strong ghee or spices. With proper ventilation, it is not a problem at all.
Why is this any different?
And to be clear, IDGAF about Indian food. IDGAF about people who microwave fish in the office. My dispute is with cognitive dissonance.
JFC, that's awful and I'm sorry that happened to you.
Extremely offensive if this ad would show up in usa or other new world countries.
There was a video trending on Reddit where a Korean streamer going around SG in normal summer dress was accosted by some rando woman telling her to cover up, else the "indians will rape you".
Quite frankly, reading the propaganda coming out of Western outlets over the course of my whole life (and for 400+ years of occidental "anti-pagan" hate and lies), I'm so tired as to be not even elicit a reaction.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/ngee-ann-poly-to-fire...
Despite all the patting themselves on the back, when they implemented this they only added an "all-races-welcome" tag to listings that allowed all races. Landlords who discriminated against others based on race were still very much welcome on the platform.
I understand from friends that things have changed due to laws.
This is like saying "murder shouldn't be illegal because everyone is just going to bury the body". It being illegal is how the investigation starts.
You cannot force someone to explain things in court like this in any kind of decent way, the laws are there to catch the openly racists IMHO. You probably even need probably cause/crime indication, which "I think, with no proof whatsoever, that he is racist" is not.
They can drag the landlord through a federal court case. I guess the landlord could plead the fifth at deposition, if there was something criminal involved, but that will probably only help the plaintiff. Remedies include damages and attorneys fees, which can be large.
As a landlord, you probably aren’t going to be able to just brush off an FHA claim. Even if you ultimately prevail, it’s lilely to be a big, expensive hassle.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/resource...
>Is a landlord allowed to discriminate in the selection of tenants?
>That depends on how you define “discriminate.” The landlord isn’t required to take all applicants. He or she can use legal criteria to select tenants, such as their past history of tenancy, the amount of income they have with which to pay the rent, their credit history, and their past criminal record. The landlord may also use personal criteria in selecting tenants, such as whether they have purple hair or nose rings. In some places, a landlord may even refuse to rent to certain people because of their occupation. But the law has made many other forms of discrimination unlawful.
And how do you prove that? A lie isn't the same as a body.
I have no doubt that racism like this is a significant problem in Singapore, but this kind of product-placement content doesn't do any justice to the issue.
Not knowing anything about any of this except I know the type of discrimination happens.
If a company is aware and possibly works against it happening, why wouldn't I say to myself, "You know what? These guys aren't @sssholes, let me go ahead and search their listings".