WASHINGTON — A neatly dressed couple enters a suburban rental complex, looking to lease a two-bedroom apartment. They are immediately greeted and ushered off to view an available unit. Hours later, a similar couple is told nothing would be available for months.
What's going on here?
For one thing, the first couple was white and the second African American. And neither actually wanted to rent an apartment. Rather, they were testers enlisted by the Justice Department to ferret out cases of housing discrimination.
Between them, they caught the owners of the Magnolia Apartments in Los Angeles red-handed. Within a year of the 1992 filing of a federal complaint, the landlords agreed to a $100,000 settlement.
This, extraordinarily, was the first time the government had successfully used housing testers--the most powerful weapon at its disposal, but also a very controversial one--to combat bias in the nation's housing industry.
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"Everybody says we should have strong antidiscrimination laws," said Paul Hancock, chief of the housing and civil enforcement section in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. "Testing is a way of showing how that occurs, because so many people don't believe it is really happening."
Even without using testers, the Justice Department achieved a record settlement last week in a housing discrimination case in Mobile, Ala. Mitchell Brothers Inc., a large apartment rental firm accused of turning blacks away from upscale buildings, agreed to pay $1.8 million.
Until 1991, when Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) introduced legislation to require the use of testing to enforce fair housing laws, the government had been content merely to support suits brought by private parties and to negotiate with suspected offenders.
Hatch's legislation had the desired effect, even though it did not become law. The Justice Department began aggressively enforcing laws against housing bias, and has continued to do so.
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"We don't lose very many cases," Hancock said, noting that testers return several times to the targeted landlords to establish a pattern of bias. "I don't bring a housing discrimination case to just go after the one case," he added. "I want to send a message about fair housing policy."
Officials say the testing program currently is operating in about 12 U.S. cities, which they decline to identify to avoid tipping off realty agents and landlords suspected of illegal discrimination.
