We’re here in California looking for a place to live. It is not a particularly pleasant task. You call about an apartment, and people don’t call you back. You talk to someone who says the apartment really isn’t for rent yet, but it will be soon, and they can’t show it yet, but they can show it soon, and it’s all very vague, and you realize that this person wants to make sure that only The Right People get to rent in this building, like probably only white people who seem “respectable.” You go to see an apartment in your price range, and it’s in a building that is well-maintained but was originally poorly built. We’ve always been lucky in the past, and have always found a good landlord renting a decent apartment at a fair price — but every time we go house-hunting, we realize that our experience is probably not the norm, which seems so sad.