This makes sense only in a distorted reality where people deliberately ignore the obvious and insist that facts don’t matter. You know, like Superman Comics’ Bizarro World, where the stupid populace eats the plates and throws away the food.
A complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) last week by the group HOPE Fair Housing Center argues that landlords who refuse to rent to applicants with a history of not paying rent and getting evicted are illegally discriminating based on the basis of race and sex. It’s the old disparate impact canard: “A housing provider that enforces a policy that denies the opportunity to rent to anyone who has an eviction filing or judgment is disproportionately denying housing to Black households and Black women in particular,” wrote HOPE Deputy Director Josefina Navar. Now, everyone knows why landlords don’t want to rent to people who have failed to pay rent in the past and gotten themselves evicted or forced the property’s owner to threaten eviction: landlords want to be paid what they’re owed, on time, without legal hassles and expense. That’s all.
Absent evidence that a landlord will rent a property to a white deadbeat renter but not a black one, acting on this completely reasonable desire has no racial implications at all. Never mind, though: disparate impact, which some woke-before-woke-was-a-thing government bureaucrat or judge (I don’t feel like checking right now) came up with rewards a minority group for having a disproportionate number of wrongdoers or screw-ups. We are stuck with the idea that policies that had a “disparate impact” or “discriminatory effect” on protected classes will be considered illegal even if there is no discriminatory intent present. HUD has issued guidance to landlords that refusing to rent to tenants with criminal records might violate the Fair Housing Act, for example, though criminals and ex-cons aren’t “protected classes.”
Yet.
So it is, then, that activist groups like HOPE are pushing the culture into the weird belief that it is discriminatory to take appropriate measures in response to wrongdoing or screwing up, so wrongdoers and screw-ups can escape without consequences and accountability.
Is this a great country or what?
Further expanding its near complete abandonment of principles and ethics to be a member of the progressive Cool Kids Club, the once politically neutral and trustworthy ACLU is supporting HOPE’s Bizarro World argument. The Fair Housing Act bars housing providers from discriminating “because of” race and sex, so this “It isn’t what it is” effort requires acceptance of the false belief that avoiding renting to deadbeats makes one a bigot. Like so many of these arguments, this one smears an entire race.
“Numerous studies, news reports, and advocate and tenant stories document just how typical a no-evictions policy is within the rental property owner community nationally,” reads the complaint. “Often referred to as the ‘Scarlet “E”,’ a history of eviction has effectively become a life sentence diminishing housing opportunities.” Let your imagination run wild about all the other kinds of conduct one might be called racist for wanting to avoid.
Funny, the way I was taught is that it is wrong to punish an individual for conduct engaged in by other members of his or her group. This valid ethical concept has apparently mutated into “it is wrong to punish an individual for that person’s own conduct because too many members of their group also engage in it.”
Ethics Alarms 
And then they wonder why some communities have a shortage of rental housing.
“Landlords want to be paid what they’re owed, on time, without legal hassles and expense. That’s all.”
That’s unfortunately the problem. It’s reasonable that government might not want people getting thrown out of their housing for being a day late, because the resulting homelessness and people fighting t get back in could be burdensome. However, the government has been way too generous to tenants (there are more of them who vote) to the point where there can be months of back rent owing or individuals squatting for lengthy periods of time, and getting them out is next to impossible. I personally battled a notorious serial squatter, and finally forced him out, after he tried to enter default without notice to me and tried to sue me personally. He could do all this because he bullshitted the Court into allowing him to proceed in forma pauperis, which means all fees were waived for him, so he could file any damn thing any time he wanted.
You also have politicians who personally protect tenants because they are their voting base. You can complaint all you want that the tenant isn’t paying, and the local authorities will ignore you. But, if a tenant, especially a tenant the same color as the mayor, complains, then suddenly code inspection shows up, fire inspection shows up, all kinds of inspectors show up, and they start citing you. They cite you for everything, including trash on your sidewalk that the tenants threw there in the first place. If you don’t pay, or can’t pay, or can’t pay quick enough, then they slap a lien on your property, and if you get in deeper still, they foreclose on the lien and take your property. The local politicians have plenty of their friends lined up to buy it, or they may just turn it into someplace locals can live to avoid “generational poverty.” Eventually they’ll own the whole city.
This isn’t Bizarro World, it’s Marxism.
Take it, John:
“No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world”
As agriculture developed, one important question became ‘Who owned what’?. Gatherers could gather whatever, wherever, pretty much. But, did a nascent farmer own the crops she had cultivated? Or, was she just sharing for all the world? Imagine.
“This valid ethical concept has apparently mutated into “it is wrong to punish an individual for that person’s own conduct because too many members of their group also engage in it.””
And that’s on your rationalization list also.
It is easy to rationalize this if you are a compassionate white supremacist. If you truly believe that blacks are mentally and emotionally inferior, incapable of reasonable and rational thought, then such a conclusion is common sense to you.
Compassionate white supremacist, i.e., run of the mill progressive.
Yep. The soft racism of low expectations.
It’s fascinating how the democrats of yesteryear and the democrats of today reach the same conclusion from differing premises. Only they can feel better about the same conclusions in modern times.
So what about refusing to sell handguns to person with criminal records?