The Way It Was: Fair Housing Month Retrospective

By Jo Becker, Education/Outreach Specialist, Fair Housing Council of Oregon

Fair Housing Month, which falls in April, commemorates the anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing Act . This year it also marks our 20th anniversary of serving Oregon and SW Washington as the Fair Housing Council. April is a good time to reflect on what life was like before these rights were passed and to think about why civil rights activists and policy leaders pushed for their passage.

There was a time in Oregon’s history that it was actually illegal for African Americans and mixed-race individuals to be present in this state. Let’s be clear, slavery wasn’t legal here, but “those people” were not welcome to be here either. There was a time when African-Americans and Asians knew “sundown laws” were common and rushed through jurisdictions to assure they weren’t caught in certain towns after dark and risk being exposed to the threat of whippings by a county official.

There was also a time when Oregon was declared the most discriminatory state north of the Mason-Dixon Line; we boasted thousands of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members targeting minorities, immigrants and Catholics.

Is housing discrimination still a problem today? Unfortunately, yes! The KKK has largely disappeared. However, other white supremacist groups have not. Cross burnings in our area are rare, yet there have been two reports of cross burnings in just the last couple of years. We have also seen an alarming number of hate crimes and harassment based on religion, national origin, disability and sexual orientation. And, who hasn’t heard about the white supremacist group that recently visited John Day and was looking to purchase real estate there in order to make the town its new training and headquarters location?

Our Fair Housing Hotline also receives more than 3,000 calls annually. We have had instances of housing providers giving false information in order to keep out “certain people.” We’ve recently seen cases where landlords have required applicants to attend church and provide verification of such from their pastors. Not too many years ago there was also a home on the market in Gresham with a sign in the window that read, “Whites Only.” Historically (and reaffirmed by recent, local testing ), equally qualified testers are sometimes quoted different prices or offered different levels of service when the only distinction between them is a protected class status such as race, national origin, familial status, or sexual orientation. All of these instances prove that housing discrimination exists.

Please use this April as an excuse to get educated about Oregon and Washington’s troubled past, and also about civil rights and fair housing movements on the national level. Please learn the reality of the situation today—how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go. Furthermore, get involved, speak out and make a difference!

Visit http://fhco.org to learn more about fair housing and the FHCO. You can also take a quick Quiz to test your fair housing knowledge and find Easy Ways to Get Involved—each linked to our entry page.

This article brought to you by the Fair Housing Council; a nonprofit serving the state of Oregon and SW Washington. Learn more and/or sign up for our free, periodic newsletter at http://fhco.org.

Qs about your rights and responsibilities under fair housing laws?
Visit http://fhco.org or call 1-800-424-3247 Ext. 2.

Qs about this article? Do you want to schedule an in-office fair housing training program or speaker for corporate or association functions?
Contact Jo Becker at jbecker@FHCO.org or 503-453-4016.

Have property to promote?
Advertise vacancies or for-sales free across the Portland/Vancouver market at: http://housingconnections.org

Fair housing is not just about “them”; we all belong to one or more protected class

By Jo Becker, Education/Outreach Specialist, Fair Housing Council of Oregon

This is the last in a series of blogs about April being the federal Fair Housing Month. Fair housing laws apply to all housing transactions—sales, mortgage lending, home insurance, HOA’s, rentals and neighbor-on-neighbor harassment. The law even applies to student housing, designated senior housing, assisted living facilities and nursing homes as well as adult foster care homes and shelters, etc.

We often think of fair housing in terms of “them.” But to be clear, we all belong to one or more protected class. Each of us has a sex, a race and a religion (or not). We all have the right to choose where we live and to enjoy our housing without regard to protected class status. The bottom line is that fair housing applies to everyone and running afoul of the law not only harms individuals, families and society, but it can also be a costly mistake.

Because discrimination continues and there is still a lack of working knowledge about fair housing laws by both housing consumers and providers, FHCO proactively provides information on the law, acts as a resource for questions about fair housing and responds to complaints of illegal housing discrimination throughout Oregon and SW Washington. Despite our efforts, one out of every ten Oregonians believes he or she has been a victim of illegal housing discrimination.

Please be proactive and ensure that you understand your rights and responsibilities under the law! Please make an attempt to learn about fair housing and also visit the Breaking News section of our entry page at www.FHCO.org to read about national and local cases surrounding these related issues.

Are you interested in attending a fair housing class (good for core credits!)?
We post upcoming classes on our entry page under the heading of Events and Classes.

Are you interested in having an in-house presentation or class for your office, company or organization? You can find our current class list along with pricing information at: www.FHCO.org/pdfs/classlist.pdf.
—–
This article brought to you by the Fair Housing Council; a nonprofit serving the state of Oregon and SW Washington. Learn more and/or sign up for our free, periodic newsletter at www.FHCO.org.

Qs about your rights and responsibilities under fair housing laws?
Visit www.FHCO.org or call 1-800-424-3247 Ext. 2.

Qs about this article? Do you want to schedule an in-office fair housing training program or speaker for corporate or association functions?
Contact Jo Becker at jbecker@FHCO.org or 503-453-4016.

Have property to promote?
Advertise vacancies or for-sales free across the Portland/Vancouver market at: www.HousingConnections.org

SAN FRANCISCO — As we predicted, Facebook is switching to an open standard to handle user authentication across its entire platform of connected websites and applications.

Facebook is ditching its proprietary Facebook Connect system, which lets people use their Facebook username and password to log in to other sites around the web. In its place, the company will implement OAuth 2.0, an open source (and soon to be IETF standard) protocol for user authentication.

Viewed along side the barrage of other major announcements unleashed by Facebook at its F8 developer conference here on Wednesday, the move may only seem like a minor data point. But it is one with the potential to make a broad and deeply significant impact on the social web.

Right now, users expect three choices for logging in to a site with an existing ID: Facebook Connect, Twitter or OpenID. That forces publishers to implement three separate systems — one for OpenID, one for Twitter, which uses OAuth, and one for Facebook, which uses Facebook Connect. But once OAuth 2.0 is up to speed and more sites move over to it, things get simpler for site owners.

Where there used to be three options — Facebook Connect, OAuth and OpenID — there will now only be two. And the two that are left are both open source.

There are still details involving token management, auto-registration and other bits of complex backend plumbing to be sorted out, that Wednesday’s events don’t change.

But the move towards OAuth is a step towards interoperability the social web sorely needs. Most importantly, it will be easier to build pathways connecting OAuth and OpenID, since both are fully transparent, open standards and the proprietary Facebook Connect system has been removed from the equation. The switch paves the way for further integrations between existing technologies.

During a panel discussion about OAuth on Wednesday afternoon, Facebook engineer Luke Shepard said that by adopting OAuth, he hopes Facebook will “help drive it to become such a core part of the web, all the tools will end up supporting it.”

Twitter also recently began supporting OAuth 2.0 with last week’s launch of @anywhere, its suite of social-interaction tools.

But what about OpenID? It was one of the key technologies responsible for pushing the idea of single sign-on forward, so why isn’t Facebook supporting it yet?

“Developers aren’t asking for OpenID,” Shepard said when the question was posed to the panel. “They’re explicitly asking for us to make logins simpler and easier, not for us to implement OpenID. So now we’re doing that by implementing OAuth 2.0, because it’s simple and easy. Adding OpenID on top of it would just add a layer of complexity nobody is asking for.”

OpenID is indeed very complex, and because of that, it suffers from usability problems that have kept it from being widely adopted.

“It’s very easy to do user authentication over OAuth 2.0,” Shepard said.

Panel moderator David Recordon, who develops open technologies at Facebook, asked the audience of about 60 or 70 people: “How many of you here want Facebook and Twitter to adopt OpenID?”

Five people raised their hands (I was one of them).

Another panelist, Raffi Krikorian from Twitter, quipped, “That answers your question right there.”

Krikorian did offer a ray of hope for OpenID, though, noting that browser makers may provide the missing links that solve OpenID’s complexity problem.

“Since the browser exists in between the web service and the user, it makes perfect sense for the browser to handle those identity-management tasks,” he said. “I think that would be a huge step forward for the web.”

Another panelist, Yahoo’s Allen Tom, another long-time OpenID advocate, agreed that browser makers could definitely help fix OpenID’s UI problems.

“If browsers can eliminate the confusion in the whole authorization flow around OpenID, that would be ideal.”

See Also:

• Up Next For Facebook: Expect More Open Interactions
• Facebook Shows Off New Tools to Socialize the Entire Web
• Facebook Tags Everyone at F8 with RFID Chips

Google’s Chrome browser plans to jump on the Web Open Font Format bandwagon. A note in the Chromium project’s bug tracker says that “it appears that we have decided to implement WOFF in Chromium.” Work on adding WOFF support to Chromium is already underway, though there’s no timetable for when the new features will make it into a shipping version of Google Chrome.

The WOFF was conceived by Mozilla as an easier way for web designers to include fonts in their designs. The idea is to let web authors include WOFF fonts in their page designs by linking to the font files in their code the same way they link to images and other downloadable files.

WOFF attempts to address some of the problems with CSS 3’s @font-face rule, which allows for downloadable fonts, but says nothing about the format of the fonts. As we’ve noted before, using @font-face can lead to radically different results in different browsers. Last year popular website Boing Boing launched a redesign using CSS3’s @font-face rule, but ran into problems when things didn’t render correctly on older machines.

Another concern is page load times. Because WOFF has built-in compression, adding extra WOFF fonts to your pages shouldn’t slow them down as much as a traditional OpenType or TrueType font file.

Since WOFF support was added to Firefox (in version 3.6), Opera and Microsoft have both pledged their support and the format has been submitted to the W3C for consideration as a standard.

The IE9 beta doesn’t yet support WOFF, but Microsoft is an official sponsor of the W3C proposal and the IEBlog has written about WOFF so we hope to see WOFF support before IE9 is finished.

With Google Chrome onboard, Apple’s Safari may soon be the only currently shipping browser without WOFF support.

Perhaps even more important than browser support is the fact that font foundries are getting behind the new spec. WOFF fonts aren’t secure, so the format won’t be used by foundries wanting to regulate the use of their work. However, over 30 major type foundries — including Adobe, House Industries, Hoefler & Frere-Jones and ITC, LinoType — are already endorsing the format.

While WOFF doesn’t solve all the problems of web fonts, it’s a huge step in the right direction. With Firefox, Opera, IE and now Chrome all supporting WOFF, designers may soon be able to add just about any font to any webpage.

If you’d like to know more about WOFF, plus see examples of its use, head over to the original announcement on the Mozilla Hacks blog.

See Also:

• Mozilla Throws Its Weight Behind Improving Web Type, Adopts WOFF for Firefox
• Boing Boing’s Redesign Uncovers the Dark Side of Web Fonts
• Review: Typekit Delivers Custom Web Fonts to the Masses
• Typekit Hopes to Become the YouTube of Fonts

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Twitter has been an open network for some time. Now, they are ready to expand beyond geekdom and attach a level of communication across the Web, using a simple system and a network of high-visibility websites.

The impending release, called @anywhere, will let users follow Twitter accounts and post updates (tweets) to their feeds without ever visiting Twitter.com. Rrom the Twitter blog: Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning.

Initial partner sites include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Amazon and eBay are particularly interesting, considering the availability of Amazon Associates and the eBay Partner Network, as well as Salesforce.com and their huge affiliate network. Functionality like this will add an entirely new layer of interactivity to the sales process, as well as offer the ability for products to be spread virally. But @anywhere is not limited to big media properties – individual site owners will be able to incorporate the network using only a few lines of javascript, according to Twitter.

In addition, having sites like Bing, Citysearch, Digg, and The New York Times will bring Twitter front and center to a new group of consumers who are not yet using Twitter. For those marketing products or content on Twitter, this could be huge. Of course, it could also result in massive overload for regular Twitter users. At any rate, it’s a clear indication that Twitter is not satisfied being a niche service provider – they think they have a consumer-facing product that goes beyond geeks, bloggers, businesses and the press. And they have a good start – just about every major media company and website has their own Twitter account and they promote them relentlessly in print, on TV and even in radio.

If you think about it, @anywhere is a perfect evolution of Twitter, and a perfect antithesis to Facebook. Unlike Facebook, you don’t need to know people to connect — you just have to share a common interest or two. Now, users won’t even need to visit Twitter.com to connect, share and discover content. This will allow these connections to be made Web-wide. Where Facebook is holding users (and advertisers) captive, Twitter is setting them free. So the next question is, how will Twitter monetize on this?

——————————————————————————–

Original Post: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2010/03/16/twitter-creates-anywhere-opens-the-social-web.aspx

We got some encouraging news last week about March existing-home sales increasing almost 7% from their levels in February.

Unfortunately, a deeper look at the numbers from the National Association of Realtors reveals that inventory of for-sale homes also increased. Despite the higher number of sales, more homes were added to the market in March than were sold.

Figure 1 below shows the overall inventory of homes on the market.

Figure 2 shows the balance between homes sold each month, and the net of homes added or withdrawn each month (so, if more homes are added to the market than are withdrawn or sold, the number will be positive – see below for more detailed methodology).

While the fact that March sales numbers are increasing is undoubtedly a positive sign, the time series shown in Figure 2 does make one at least ponder whether the market is currently capable of clearing itself of inventory without paying people to buy homes (i.e., the homebuyer tax credit currently in place).  Most of our traction in working down inventory levels came in the late summer/fall of last year when home sales were spurred by the threat that the tax credits were going to expire.  Before and after that period, the addition of new inventory for sale usually outpaced sales, keeping inventory levels flat or rising.

This dynamic is being driven by the significant amount of “pent-up supply” in the market right now, that is, the pool of homeowners who have wanted to sell their homes in the past three years but, because of market conditions, either didn’t try or were unsuccessful.  Our last estimates of the size of this group of homeowners were that 8% of homeowners indicated that they were very likely to try to sell their homes in the next twelve months if they saw signs of improvement in their local markets.  These sidelined sellers closely watch the market for signs of a possible turnaround and rush in if there’s a hint of good news.

We’ll very likely see another mini-frenzy in home sales as we approach June (when the current tax credits are set to expire), although I doubt the boost will be as large as we saw last fall.  The ability of this purchased demand to push inventory levels down will be challenged by the flow of new listings into the inventory pool, something that happens each spring and summer.

It will be bad if we don’t make much headway in pushing down inventory levels through June, because we will undoubtedly see a reduction in home sales on a monthly basis in July and August (the “payback” of the tax credit seen from shifting demand that would have occurred in those months forward into the pre-July period).  This mid-summer drop-off will likely increase inventory levels so, if we haven’t been successful in pushing them down before then, we’ll likely end up with more inventory on the market than we have now, even after what is likely to be a robust homebuyer season in the spring and summer.

A few more details about how we arrived at the numbers in Figure 2: The formula used to arrive at the net number of homes added or withdrawn was:

March inventory – February inventory + Number of homes sold in March

If no new homes were added or withdrawn from the inventory in a given month, then the difference between the inventory levels in March and February would exactly equal the number of home sales in the current month and this net number would equal zero.

Additionally, all statistics used in this analysis were from the National Association of Realtors March existing-home sales report.

Here’s a great quick (1:14) video demo of Zillow’s Android application. Nice work by Erik Fikkert, Lead Reviewer at AppVee. See all of Zillow’s mobile apps.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The launch plan for the .CO domain name extension has been announced. .CO domains will be available through a select list of accredited partners.

A global Sunrise will take place from April 26 through June 10, allowing eligible trademark holders the right to apply for the .CO domain names corresponding to their marks before registration is open to the general public.

Landrush will occur from June 21 through July 13, and will be open to anyone interested in registering certain high priority domain names. General availability will begin on July 20, opening the .CO domain for registrations on a first-come, first-served basis around the world. Starting today however, early adopters can gain a true first mover advantage by applying to be included in the .CO Founders Program, an initiative designed to help those qualified develop and maintain domains with the .CO extension prior to the public launch in July. The .CO Founders Program is open to all interested applicants from individuals to businesses and big brands.

“The .CO Founders Program provides an excellent opportunity for early adopters to secure short and memorable domain names and truly help shape the .CO name space,” said Juan Diego Calle, CEO of .CO Internet. “Participants in the program will benefit by potentially being featured in an aggressive .CO advertising and marketing program; likewise they will be expected to actively promote their domain to benefit the broader .COmmunity,” added Calle.

If you’re interested in participating in the .CO Founders program you will need to submit an application at www.COinternet.co/cofounders.

—————————————————————————

Original article: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2010/03/09/here-come-the-co-domain-extensions.aspx

OpenID, the decentralized identity system that dispenses with usernames and passwords in favor of a single, portable web identity, promises to eventually change the way we login to our favorite websites.

While OpenID holds great promise, the reality today is that users sometimes don’t understand it. It’s an entirely different experience than a traditional login, so it can be confusing, and the user experience varies radically from site to site.

OpenID is, frankly, a work in progress. But, as developer Jeff Atwood recently wrote on the Stack Overflow blog, “I would rather be part of the solution than yet another brick in the wall of the problem… even if it involves a tiny bit of short-term friction.”

Atwood goes on to give an interesting developer perspective on what it’s been like to use OpenID on Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is an interesting case study since OpenID is the only way to create an account at the site (you can use Stack Overflow without creating an account, but there’s no way to sign up using a traditional username/password).

In other words Atwood and company made a big bet on OpenID and for the most part it appears to be paying off. Here’s some key points for developers that Atwood pulls from Stack Overflow’s OpenID experiences:

• Google is by far the largest OpenID provider at 61% of all registered accounts
• The change from “enter your OpenID URL” to “click the logo of the company that provides your identity” is a huge usability improvement (I’d disagree with this one, if anything, Chris Messina’s OpenID Connect proposal seems more like the future of the OpenID UI.).
• Support for multiple OpenID providers is key, since it gives your users the ability to change OpenID identities whenever they want. This is important, as their current OpenID provider could disappear, locking them out of their account.
• The OpenID protocol itself can be implemented in unusual or incomplete ways by different providers. Atwood points to specific problems in the way Gmail handles OpenIDs, which require Stack Overflow to request your e-mail address as a kind of fingerprint for your OpenID.

The Stack Overflow crew seems to be happy with its OpenID-only account system. It’s worth noting that Stack Overflow obviously attracts users with a higher-than-average tech savviness, but the lessons Atwood details are relevant even if OpenID is only one of your site’s many sign-in methods.

See Also:

• OpenID: Over One Billion (Potentially) Served
• Rethinking Web Logins With OpenID Connect
• Facebook Opens Up to OpenID
• Be Your Own Open ID Provider
• OpenID Is Here. Too Bad Users Can’t Figure Out How It Works