It’s bad enough when your parents hound you for being single and ask why you were out so late last night, but the Christian Science Monitor points to the double standard that single women renters face in India at the hands of their prospective (and over-protective) landlords:
It took Chiya Singh three months and seven real estate agents working in tandem to find an apartment to rent in New Delhi.
The problem wasn’t her credit history or salary. It was her status as a single Indian woman. The questions blocking Ms. Singh from a room of her own were a bit personal, she says. Prospective landlords wanted to know why, at age 29, she wasn’t married and why, as a single person, she didn’t want to live with her parents.
“It was an exhausting process,” Singh says, of trying to find her own place after she divorced. “I became a broken record. They asked ‘Why do you want to live alone?’ I said, ‘Um, because I think I’m old enough.’ “
That response usually netted Singh a cold expression and a vague “We’ll let you know” from the landlord. [Link]
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p>Because, I mean…why would a single woman want to live by herself?
In India, “If you want freedom, it can only be for one thing – sex,” Singh says. “You want to tell them [landlords], ‘That’s the last thing on my mind. I think I’m old enough to take care of myself.’ But for the landlord, it becomes an issue of respectability.” [Link]
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p>Right. Here is the even more messed up part. It is okay to rent to single white girls because…well, they are already slutty (or at least that is what the landlord quoted below seems to imply when she says “they are used to living on their own”).
“It’s an Indian mentality,” says Sonia Kakkar, a landlord in South Delhi. “We just feel more protective. You just feel that you are responsible.”
Ms. Kakkar currently rents the second floor of her building to two French women and prefers foreigners because she does not feel as protective of them.
“They are used to living on their own,” she says. “If they have a problem with the flat, they come to us. Otherwise, there is no interaction…” [Link]
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p>Well, to all the parents reading SM let me tell you just exactly what it is that your live-alone daughters in America are doing:
Jennifer Chowdhury just invented the hottest new game in town. Screw the Wii. Ladies, get one of these. Then invite me over (so I can blog about it for the good of the readers I mean)
All you need to know.
With all the sambar in my stomach, I AM happy :).
Rahul, I think I might have developed a giant crush on you. Let’s go on a 60 mile walk.
Get in line, portmanteau…
just the biodata? shouldn’t the meet-up substitute for the viewing-with-chai-samosa bit?
i always have the power-point presentation at hand.
Ah, I missed this. To add, a Sun (solaris server) in the study…
(Can’t believe I just said that!)
i would love to whip out a horoscope in the middle of a 1 night stand.
i always have the power-point presentation at hand.
🙂 — one thing, don’t tell my parents about the potential one-night stands; if they ask about my potential plans, tell them I am studying, even though I graduated from grad school some 7 years ago. It’ll still work.
I am the one walking 60 miles. Rahul should take a walk with me!
portmanteau, with me, it won’t be just 60 miles. I am the Forrest Gump of walks.
life is like a box of condomns. u never know what ur gonna get…
244 Rahul: “So the net result is that you are expected to be some giraffe like hybrid of A’s good manners, B’s academic ability, C’s discipline, D’s professional success, and so on…”
That’s how one builds a master race. The Nazis were decimated, but we, the first-generation IBD’s, shall prevail.
no problem. just don’t tell my parents about that thing i did back in 1997. after all isn’t that what our parents tell us – that marriage is all about give and take?
Or you get what you pay for
Or you get it in a size you ask for 🙂
and it’s heavily weighted, dependent on gender.
now….u gotta tell me what u did in 1997.
After Two hundred and sixty odd messages of spicy talk about sleeping around, crushes, dating, women’s rights, nosy auties and general morality, there is not one who talks about the real underlying issue. I tried to stay out of this one, but as a libertarian addict, this is my drug. Unlike most of you, I don’t have spicy stuff to offer – just a boring, dull, lifeless response. The Truth.
The issue is one that of property rights, and how they have evolved separately from that of America’s. Seeing Ms.Singh’s plight from the lens of American laws is confusing and misses the point.
Firstly, in the rental market, there’s the organized sector and the individual sector. America has both, but I bet most of us have largely dealt only with the organized sector(apartments, condos, co-ops) where there’s rental company with employees, rules and regulations that need to follow laws against discrimination. The individual sector, where the landlord has built an addendum to his house tries to rent it out via classifieds, has the same issues of discrimination that beset Ms. Singh. But I don’t want to go there. FYI – India does not have an organized sector (it’s barely begining).
In America, property rights are enforced very strictly. If you rent out a property to someone, it is properly documented after verifying their credit, financial and criminal history. There is no way the renter can claim your property as his/her own. There is no way the person can refuse to evict (after the contract period is over). Any damages caused to the property are settled quickly in court or via insurance.The police respond very swiftly when the landlord is threatened in any manner. In fact, the landlord does not even need to be around. Sitting in California, you could invest in apartments in the Carolinas. At the most you would have to make one visit during the purchase. There are strong laws against subletting.
In India, the story is very different. It is very difficult to evict someone, even when they don’t pay rent. Nothing is documented and most arrangements are word of mouth. Disputes take decades to decide in court. Goondaism is rampant. The police rarely respond to such disputes because they have bigger fish to fry. The landlord needs to visit the property often to make sure that the renter has not sublet the place to his cousin’s family. And then we have the concept of “rent control”, where the renter can snitch against the landlord to the Government, who then place the property as reserved for “low income housing”. Then it becomes a headache for the landlord to “disprove” that vague charge, taking years to resolve.
In short, in America, it’s easy to evict. Since the ultimate power resides with the landlord, the Government has mandated that there be no discrimination in housing. In India, it’s difficult to evict. Since the renter has considerable power, the Government cannot mandate the landlord to not discriminate.
Easy Eviction = Easy entry. Landlord asks for last two paystubs, checks criminal history and credit record. Maybe what pets you intend to keep.
Difficult Eviction = Difficult entry. A hundred questions are asked. Are you single? What caste are you? Your religion is WHAT? Show me steady income for the last three years. Get a letter from your employer. Where is your family? What food will you cook? Who else will stay with you? Who will be your guests? And on and on and on.
Now to the other issue of why Mrs. Kakkar rents out to single foreign women with questionable morality.
AMFD
…as soon as they start implementing property rights.
M. Nam
but, moornam…even iff it is solely an issue of property rights, where the people ask a lot of questions when u go in, it seems more of just plain sexism if they dont mind renting to a single guy if he lives alone, and dont like renting to a single girl living alone, because $he must be a sl*t. asking a lot of questions is one thing, this is something else entirely.
M. Nam – did you miss the subtext, well really the whole goddamned text of the article that this is a problem for young single Indian women? Not young single Indians.
be carefull bandying around phrases like that….
Puliogre/Rahul,
The point I am trying to make is: If you don’t have stronly defined and implemented property rights, the personal biases of the landlord will become the deterministic factor in the transaction. The biases may vary from person to person: Caste, Religion, Race, Marital Status, Male/Female, Sexual orientation etc etc.
The same principle applies to companies’ hiring/firing. The easier it is to fire a person, the more amenable it is for the company to hire without any personal biases. The more difficult it is to fire, the more they tend to hire within caste, religion, language etc. But that’s a diversion from this subject, so I’ll stop there.
M. Nam
I hear you, MoorNam. Everything you say is true, but the underlying issue in Abhi’s post – at least the way I understood it – had to do with the Indian male’s unique perception of women. IBD’s, please don’t consider this as anti-Indian. I am an IBD, too, and my generation’s penchant for slotting women into sister/mother/aunt role before we can comfortably relate to them defies explanation. It is neither good, nor bad. It is what it is. I don’t know how emancipated I am after 35 years in the US, but I would never serve a young niece a drink in my home. I have nothing against drinking but I would prefer she helped herself.
Anybody know some foreign women in Gurgaon interested in renting a house?
Thanks Rahul @ # 267.
It’s people like you that keep the thread right on track so I can feel free to continue to jack it up, building my case for unimaginable perversities and sliding morals…
Cannot believe I am leaping to MoorNam’s defence but … he brings out an important point.
Is it possible that at least in some instances landlord’s probing in the interests of protecting their property has been confused with plain ole misogyny? ( Again : not in all cases , there are always the busy body types)
Runa, I brought out the same issue in #17. Incidentally, that was also David Cone’s number when he pitched for the Mets, in the early 90’s.
Are we seriously giving any credence to the “Christian Science Monitor”? Seriously?
If eviction etc is the main concern, landlords should jump on to rent out to single women, because apart from some imagined syrens they might turn out to be, they will be the ones who might pay rent on time and move out upon appropriate notice.
Unless all those single girls also befriend the local goons for her private bring your own sauce BBQ! That must be happening all the time on bollywood movies, yup.
Then isn’t that more important? i.e. the fact that individuals do not have comparable resources to overcome information asymmetry, and therefore they use other proxies? This would mean that ceteris paribis information asymmetry will have more effect on landlord behavior than property rights (this is not to say the property rights do not have effects).
Let me paraphrase John Howard, We (the landlord) decides who comes in and the circumstances they come in.
ohh…i get it. basically ur saying that the systems relating to property management are messed up, so the decision is based on personal biases of the landlord. that makes sense. i.e. if the systems worked, and most of the rentals are in nice apt blocks being monitored by regulations, the biases matter less…
I meant paribus
HAhahahaha nice one Hema, Palakkadian Pride!!!! (for lack of a better term)
i dont know if the landlords/tenants having asymetric information is what is causing this kind of discrimination. i dont really uinderstand this statement.
M. Nam: I am not sure how better protection for landlords will prevent them from exercising their biases, as long as the demand far exceeds the supply. As for your analogous point about hiring, I just don’t get it. Isn’t the entire history of employment discrimination in the U.S against Jews, women, minorities etc., which has had to be rectified by workplace equality laws, proof enough? There are questions that you can ask to divine intent, or contractual structures you can put in place, which have absolutely nothing to do with sexuality/religion/morality as long as these do not affect the transaction in question.
Coach: I’ve been accused of many things in my life, but never has anyone stooped so low as to blame me for keeping things on track.
Can we start reacting to people’s comments and not their online ciphers. Good general analysis Moornam. I know hundred families fighting over their families’ apartment in Bombay as the free market hasn’t produced more decent housing and rent control keeps some of the best centrally located apartments in WWII prices. Also many fammlies are unwilling to rent apartments/rooms as they fear they will have a squatter sitauttion which is often impossible to rectify thru the courts and only thru dadagiri. But also I have no doubt Indian women face more scrutiny/discrimination even in places like Bangalore/Delhi/Bombay.
Moornam you hit the nail your prognoses about the whole issue is absolutely right. In company managed properties this is rarely a problem, when you rent a place where the landlord himself lives ( as in most of India) these problems are bound to occur anywhere.
To add to what Rahul said, even economically speaking there are “equillibria” that are discriminatory even in the presence of strident property rights and enforcement. What rahul points out is basically an example of what I pointed out above (#276) except here the “information” the landlord acts on is a stereotype masquerading as a short-cut.
And seriously you mean that? CSM is one of the best papers out there when it comes to a balanced international coverage. If you are saying this after reading CSM for a few days then I would be really surprised. This might help you, from the papers About web page –
Is the paper a religious periodical? No, it’s a real newspaper published by a church ¿ The First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston, Mass., USA. Everything in the Monitor is international and US news and features, except for one religious article that has appeared each day in The Home Forum section since 1908, at the request of the paper’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy. In an age of corporate conglomerates dominating news media, the Monitor combination of church ownership, a public-service mission, and commitment to covering the world (not to mention the fact that it was founded by a woman shortly after the turn of the century, when US women didn’t yet have the vote!) gives the paper a uniquely independent voice in journalism.
While it does not cover as much in terms of breadth and number of topics (have not seen much of Art, Music, Lifestyle, Finance, etc – usually it’s socio-politics), what it covers is usually of high quality and has a very high percentage of international news.
So basically Moornam is wrong in the context of this particular discussion.
Eviction is linked to rentability. You want to evict someone so that you could rent it out to someone who is more stable or pays more.
A single woman in the Indian scenario is quite unlike her western counterpart in matters of safety. You folks may have stayed in many apartments in your life, and the possibility is strong that in one of the apartments you stayed in, there was a rape or a murder. You just don’t know about it. The landlord probably saw a brief hiccup in rental checks, but within a couple of months everything was back on track.
However, if the single woman gets raped or murdered in the house, the landlord will face a daunting task to re-rent the place. In India, almost every renter asks around the neighbourhood before making a move. Once they find out that something untoward happened in the place, they will run. The landlord won’t be able to rent the place. FOR A VERY LONG TIME. He will have to do pujas and havans, change the direction of doors, break down a wall or two to convince the people that it was not the vaastu of his house that caused the rape/murder.
M. Nam
Sigh,
I am not sure how you reach that conclusion based on your theory of information assymetary. Who has priviliged information in this case and who is benefitting from it?
Difficult Eviction = Difficult entry. A hundred questions are asked. Are you single? What caste are you? Your religion is WHAT? Show me steady income for the last three years. Get a letter from your employer. Where is your family? What food will you cook? Who else will stay with you? Who will be your guests? And on and on and on.
I know of a poor landlord who rented his house, his retirement savings, for 11 months in Bombay coz he was away in Mysore. The tenant lived for 25 years, did not pay rent for 24 of those years. They tried to have the locks changed, tried police, law, courts, even politicians. The only solution was to sell that home and since it was a disputed property the house was sold at a 50% discount to market rate plus the tenant got 50% of the sales proceeds to leave the property.
Actually I stand corrected on that too, they just don’t have RSS feeds on everything which is why I was not seeing the rest of the stuff
However, if the single woman gets raped or murdered in the house, the landlord will face a daunting task to re-rent the place.
I don’t disagree with your central idea that re-renting for the landlord will be an uphill battle. However, there is an underlying assumption that only renting to single women poses the threat of nefarious/criminal activities on the property. Single men can be murder victims too…and married women can be rape victims too. The fact that the landlord may not be able to keep such information from the renting public is distinct from the fact that there is some inherent disadvantage to renting to single women.
I second Ardy on the CSM. I had the same bias about it based on its title when I first heard about it many years ago, but I’ve always found its articles well researched and serious when I’ve read it.
yeah, but the landlord complaints arent that the women is unsafe, its that shes a sl*t for wanting to live without family…
And single Indian guys might be lafangas too.
…and the fact having a male friend spend the night is taboo isnt that its a safety issue. i mean, having a boyfriend over prob makes it safer, but its the fact that she is having a boyfrined over, so is therefore a drty wh0re.
a
Folks,
It boils down to the same issue. In the absence of strong property rights, the personal biases of the landlord rule the roost. The biases vary from landlord to landlord. Yes. A single man may be murdered as well. Yes, a married woman may be raped as well. But it all depends on the landlord’s perception – not yours. He will calculate the probability of the event happening and base his decision on that. If he is personally biased against a certain lifestyle, it will become a factor in his decision making. It is natural.
If you want to take the bias out – bring/enfore the law.
M. Nam
Looks like you haven’t read the whole article.
im not sure if the landlord in this case is behaving as if he has the bias that single women living alone are likely to get killed, and therefore will decreasemy rental stream. it sounds like he is behaving like he thinks these people are immoral drty sl*ts, and doesnt want to rent to them cause they are l00se.