What Should I Do About My Bigoted Landlady?

Although you mention the city housing authority, you make it clear that you don’t know your landlady to have discriminated in filling her vacancies. Perhaps she hasn’t been tempted to violate fair-housing laws because you don’t have many nonwhite friends. (Assuming that’s how her biases cut.) Still, your real concern seems to be her character, not her conduct. You’re worried not that you’re encouraging her attitudes but that you’re somehow complicit in them.

Well, what could you do about her racism and sexism? You can’t force her into therapy or a re-education camp. You can object on the occasions when she expresses an immoral sentiment, but, given your noncordial relations, the main effect will probably be to produce increasing ill feeling between you, rather than to shift her perspective on the world.

There are lots of bigots in the world, alas. Changing their hearts and minds, when it happens, takes time and effort and the right background conditions. You clearly don’t think that would work here. So direct your attention elsewhere. I applaud your commitment to racial and sexual equality. But you have no reason to feel bad about sharing real estate opportunities with your friends. (You might have reason to feel better, of course, if those friends were more racially diverse.)

A final note. The ethics of our current housing markets — shaped as they are by zoning ordinances and systems of rent control that often reflect the interests of existing tenants better than those of younger and poorer entrants to the housing market — is too large a topic to explore here. But those of us who live, as you and I do, in large urban areas with very high rents should be thinking about what could be done to improve housing options for those with lower incomes. (The sociologist Matthew Desmond, for one, makes a thoughtful case for housing vouchers.) A city is, among other things, a moral community, and it works best as a community if it provides an affordable place for all who work in it. How to achieve that may be a complex policy question — but the aim is surely one we can all share.

I’m a renter in the Bay Area, one of the most expensive places to live in the U.S. We have lucked into an exception-to-the-norm situation, getting to live in a small house with the landlord on-site in a small unit adjacent to our dwelling. Due to housing codes, and decisions the owner (our landlord) has made, we share an address and mailbox, and when we go through the mail, we just put the landlord’s mail in a separate box near his door. He’s a nice guy and a very decent landlord (we are paying significantly under market, allowing us to continue to live in this area). He also receives a Christian magazine, with cover stories including those that suggest L.G.B.T.Q. rights are undermining religious freedom, and others about the dangers of educating children about gender diversity. He has never expressed these views to us verbally. He is aware that we are Jewish, and when he’s made occasional comments in the past (“that guy jewed me down”), I have reminded him that I am Jewish. We are all white folks and have a gay couple as neighbors, whom he is friendly with.