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Sorry, your wife is Indian, landlord won’t rent to you

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Re: Sorry, your wife is Indian, landlord won’t rent to you

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how laws can prevent discrimination, to be honest. LLs can refuse to rent to anyone for arbitrary reasons without being required to divulge the true reason.

It being illegal means you can drag the landlord to court and ask them to explain their thinking to the court. You can say, look, here's the income and rental histories and credit scores for your tenants in separate apartments, here's documentation saying we are above that, so what's the reason for the rejection. And, lying under oath is its own crime. This is like saying "murder shouldn't be illegal because everyone…

> And, lying under oath is its own crime

And how do you prove that? A lie isn't the same as a body.

Re: Sorry, your wife is Indian, landlord won’t rent to you

#43
post #35
post #10

Was surprised to see “Singapore”, expected “Bay Area.” When I left my last rental after buying a house, my elderly white landlord asked me to help him put the property on Craigslist. When I did so and mentioned the Cupertino school district, he asked me to remove that part because “it would attract too many Indian families with kids” to avoid the curry smell. He had no issue with other Asian ethnicities, the previous…

Does curry smell even linger? I don't even consider it a bad smell but its not like it's going to permeate the walls like smoking. Funny he was fine with the Chinese in that case, who are more likely to cook chitlins at some point which can smell strong and bad for a week.

> Does curry smell even linger?

Maybe it’s liquid fats (like ghee), cooking processes that aerosolise them (pressure cooking) and the heavy use of spices that’s the problem more than curry per se?

Re: Sorry, your wife is Indian, landlord won’t rent to you

#44
post #35
post #10

Was surprised to see “Singapore”, expected “Bay Area.” When I left my last rental after buying a house, my elderly white landlord asked me to help him put the property on Craigslist. When I did so and mentioned the Cupertino school district, he asked me to remove that part because “it would attract too many Indian families with kids” to avoid the curry smell. He had no issue with other Asian ethnicities, the previous…

Does curry smell even linger? I don't even consider it a bad smell but its not like it's going to permeate the walls like smoking. Funny he was fine with the Chinese in that case, who are more likely to cook chitlins at some point which can smell strong and bad for a week.

its not like it's going to permeate the walls like smoking

Why not? Granted curry isn't one of the smells I've dealt with but I've renovated a few houses and there are a large variety of odors that will sink into walls and floors.

Re: Sorry, your wife is Indian, landlord won’t rent to you

#45
post #38

Landlording is something that is likely to make a person more racist. A couple of bad experiences and you start preferring people similar to those that did not give trouble in the past.

Too bad there isn't a service that could look into the historical background of prospective tenants to gain references, criminal, credit, job and salary information. Completely objective and mostly without inherent prejudices. We may even call it something like "a background check". Just spitballing ideas!

How well do background checks work on foreigners?

Re: Sorry, your wife is Indian, landlord won’t rent to you

#46

Every time I hear “America is racist” I remind people the world is far more racist - see story above. This is common practice everywhere. Europe, Asia, etc. they discriminate for different reasons and in different ways, but they all do it and it’s almost always overt. That’s the culture in the region, imo it’s not “wrong”. People self-select and who am I to discriminate against their culture? They do it for their rea…

> remind people the world is far more racist

> generations working to mitigate any form of discrimination

I would definitely agree that all humans have the capacity to be racist (other-ist) and that racism is not confined to the USA (obviously).

But it’s ridiculous to claim that somehow “it’s worse than the USA” and that the USA has mitigated it all, because that’s easily disproved by speaking to any minority person.

Re: Sorry, your wife is Indian, landlord won’t rent to you

#47

This is one of the few instances that I've seen open discrimination agains white western people in Japan. In my journey for renting a place, after a couple of visits and getting a "no because he's a gaikokujin (foreigner)" I asked the agent to disclose it firstly. He did, but tactfully: he is a foreigner who is learning Japanese and came to the university in Japan and is hired by traditional company X and blabla. Sti…

Might it be because of the additional legal requirements for a landlord in case of foreign tenants? Or it's really because they don't like non-Japanese?

Re: Sorry, your wife is Indian, landlord won’t rent to you

#48
Afaik Singaporean housing is based on a govt racial quota system - if you sell/lease your property it must match to the demarcated race for that area - there are numbers.

It seems that he is an outlier being a mixed race couple - dunno how that works in that case ????.

Also Singapore in the early days suffered from race riots between it's Chinese/Malay/Tamil (Indian) citizens and the founders did not want racial ghettos to form or a repeat of racial strife.

I think it is a good system in a multi-cultural society - here in South Africa we see what problems and issues arise out of this type of segregation.

Re: Sorry, your wife is Indian, landlord won’t rent to you

#49
post #19
post #10

Was surprised to see “Singapore”, expected “Bay Area.” When I left my last rental after buying a house, my elderly white landlord asked me to help him put the property on Craigslist. When I did so and mentioned the Cupertino school district, he asked me to remove that part because “it would attract too many Indian families with kids” to avoid the curry smell. He had no issue with other Asian ethnicities, the previous…

Why? Globally speaking, the US is one of the least racist countries.

You have to post your source on that. The surveys I find put the US in the most racist countries category. Not the most worst of the worst, but definitely in the worst end.

Re: Sorry, your wife is Indian, landlord won’t rent to you

#50
Brings to mind those poor african textile traders that were force evicted during the whole "covid was brought in by foreigners" hysteria in china. Which is tolerated and encouraged by the censors.

Yes the world is a horrifying racist place with only america and europe discussing and fighting it openly.

Shame based cultures seem to be more prone to sweaping such problems under the rug instead of solving them.

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