Innovations in Digitalization and the Future of Fair Housing

Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University or of any of the persons or organizations providing support to the Joint Center for Housing Studies. [...] Innovations in collecting and analyzing the vast and growing amount of information about housing markets and structures, constraints on consumer choices, and the consequences of public and private practices can support litigation and other efforts to detect and remedy deep patterns of bias. [...] In the Fair Housing Act, Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Congress crafted a legal framework to respond to widespread problems of segregation, poverty stubbornly concentrated on the basis of race and ethnicity, and fundamentally unequal access to opportunity that marked the national metropolitan landscape of the era. [...] Digitalization and the Domains of Fair Housing Law To understand the potential of digitalization to advance fair housing, it is helpful to begin with the basic structure of fair housing law. [...] As Chief Justice Roberts famously crystalized this so- called “color-blind” Constitutionalist view, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”35 A co-author and I recently argued that under Justice Kennedy’s view and the endorsement by the Supreme Court of narrow circumstances in which the benefits of diversity support the use of race as o.