CORVALLIS, Ore.
What’s in a name? Maybe plenty if you want to rent an apartment. An Oregon State University survey found that an ethnic-sounding name can be a factor in whether an applicant gets an apartment.
A rental housing applicants thought to be Black faces more housing discrimination than one thought to be White or Arab, according to the results published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. The study, co-authored by Dr. William E. Loges, an OSU assistant professor in new media communications and sociology, sought and found differences in replies to online housing inquiries from people with names associated with Whites, Arabs and Blacks.
“My jaw just hit the floor when I saw these results. I had no idea how badly the African-American inquiry would be treated,” Loges says. In 2003, Loges and study co-author Adrian G. Carpusor sent 1,115 identically worded e-mails to Los Angeles-area landlords asking about advertised vacancies.
They were divided equally among names signed Patrick McDougall, Tyrell Jackson and Said Al-Rahman. The fictional names were based on U.S. Census Bureau rankings of popular first and last names and other factors.
McDougall received positive or encouraging responses from 89 percent of landlords, while Al-Rahman was encouraged by 66 percent. But only 56 percent of the responses for Jackson were positive.
Because the data was collected near the start of the Iraq War, researchers said they thought Al-Rahman would receive the fewest positive responses.
