Which Information Matters? Measuring Landlord Assessment of Tenant Screening Reports
Name
Which Information Matters Measuring Landlord Assessment of Tenant Screening Reports.pdf
Size
2.46 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d50868ada7c264db434cf7fbd65bc880
Author(s)
So, Wonyoung
Date Issued
August 30, 2022
Journal
Housing Policy Debate
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Citation
So, W. (2022). Which Information Matters? Measuring Landlord Assessment of Tenant Screening Reports. Housing Policy Debate, 33(6), 1484–1510.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
This research studies how tenant screening services’ presentation ofinformation influences landlord decisions. Tenant screening services util-ize criminal records, eviction records, and credit score databases to pro-duce reports that landlords use to inform their decisions about who torent to. However, little is known about how landlords assess the infor-mation presented by tenant screening reports. Through a behavioralexperiment with landlords using simulated tenant screening reports,this study shows that landlords use blanket screening policies, that theyconflate the existence of tenant records with outcomes (e.g., eviction fil-ings with executed evictions), and that they display, on average, tenden-cies toward automation bias that are influenced by the risk assessmentsand scores presented by tenant screening reports. I argue that maintain-ing blanket screening policies and automation bias, combined with thedownstream effects of creating and using racially biased eviction andcriminal records, means that people of color will inevitably experiencedisproportionate exclusion from rental housing due to perceived “risk”on the part of landlords.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2022.2113815
