Welcome to The Jeremy Taylor Show and About The House

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that a Web site may be found liable for violating fair housing laws by matching roommates according to gender, sexual orientation and parenthood. The judges said a site called Roommates.com may be brought to trial for possibly violating anti-discrimination laws because it requires users to provide information about gender, sexual orientation and whether they have children, and then uses the information to screen people for matches. “A real estate broker may not inquire as to the race of a prospective buyer, and an employer may not inquire as to the religion of a prospective employer,” Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote for the majority. “If such questions are unlawful when posed face-to-face by telephone, they don’t magically become lawful when asked electronically online.” (www.laist.com)
Laist (4/4/08); Ross A. Lincoln

Housing Troubles Immobilize U.S. Labor

When housing is not an obstacle, more than five million Americans, nearly 4% of the U.S. workforce, move annually from one place to another. Now this mobility is increasingly restricted. Unable to sell their homes easily and move on, tens of thousands of people are making the labor force less flexible just as a weakening economy puts pressure on workers to move to wherever companies are still hiring. No government agency counts those who move for jobs, either across state lines or just from one town to another. The Census Bureau, however, calculates how many people move across state lines for all reasons, and that number fell by 27% last year, after climbing by almost that percentage for each of the previous three years. With homes changing hands easily in a booming market, interstate migration reached 2.2 million people in 2006, excluding moves that followed Hurricane Katrina. As the U.S. economy and home prices began to unravel in 2007, however, interstate migration plunged to 1.6 million people. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, said he would not be surprised to see record low domestic migration this year. (www.iht.com)
International Herald Tribune (4/3/08); Louis Uchitelle

A Road Not Taken by Lenders

According to a report on mortgage fraud released by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a unit of the Treasury Department, only 31% of suspected fraud was detected before loan disbursements in the 12 months ended March 31, 2007. On stated income loans, only 19% of the cases of suspected fraud were detected before the loans were financed, versus 33.5% on more fully documented loans. Yet 43% of the case samples in the study involved misrepresentation of income, assets or debts. The degree to which mortgage lenders and Wall Street looked the other way on borrowers’ incomes, a sin of commission given the ease with which they could have been checked, raises an intriguing question. Can investors stuck with losses on these loans sue to recover their investments based on this due-diligence failure? After all, mortgage originators made representations and warranties to investors that the quality of these loans was good when it clearly was not. And they made these representations knowing that they had not bothered to conduct quick and easy borrower-income checks. (www.nytimes.com)
New York Times (4/6/08); Gretchen Morgenson