Fennell, Lee Anne, Searching for Fair Housing (April 10, 2016). Boston University Law Review, Forthcoming. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2762026

“There is a blind spot in the scholarly and legal treatment of housing discrimination: the racial biases of home seekers. Search strategies routinely incorporate information about neighborhood racial composition, either as a proxy or as a direct preference. Although search heuristics can powerfully entrench and perpetuate (or, alternatively, disrupt) segregation, it is widely assumed that the way that families search for homes is none of the law’s business. This paper questions that assumption and, more broadly, examines how home seeking fits into a societal conception of fair housing that assigns positive value to integration.”