Housing groups want to ban this ‘unnecessary hurdle’ for renters with vouchers
A coalition of Charlotte affordable housing advocates wants to ban landlords from refusing tenants because they pay with government vouchers or other forms of income, such as disability payments or child support.
Charlotte would be the first city in North Carolina to pass such protections and ban “source of income discrimination.” The term refers to disparate treatment of tenants who pay rent with federal and local housing vouchers or other subsidies. Landlords might set different application terms, deny applications, or refuse to show a unit to these tenants.
These protections are often associated with federal Housing Choice vouchers, commonly known as the Section 8 program, but local supporters of the proposed change say it would also protect renters using veteran supportive housing vouchers, disability payments, child support or student loans.
Landlords who won’t take these payments make it even harder to find affordable housing in Charlotte, said Fulton Meachem, CEO of Inlivian, formerly the Charlotte Housing Authority.
“It is really difficult for a family to find housing here in Charlotte under normal circumstances,” Meachem said. “You don’t want to create one more hurdle for a family, for a veteran that’s looking for a place to live. And this is an unnecessary hurdle.”
What is source of income discrimination?
Supporters want to amend the city’s fair housing ordinance to add “source of income” to the protected classes of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability and familial status already in the law.
It means landlords couldn’t exclude potential tenants who meet other criteria, such as credit history or a criminal background check, solely because of where the rent payment comes from.
Supporters of the proposal, which include Inlivian, Habitat Charlotte, the Salvation Army Center of Hope, Community Link and a dozen other housing and social justice organizations, plan to bring the proposal to city council early next year.
The proposal also contains a “first come, first served” provision that would prohibit landlords from sitting on an application from a voucher holder to wait for other applicants.
But Kim Graham, executive director of the Greater Charlotte Apartment Association, said members of the organization “do not discriminate on source of income,” and called the proposal unnecessary.
“There are a number of criteria that rental property owners use to qualify (tenants),” she said, including criminal and rental history. “I’d be cautious to be jumping to the conclusion that source of income is one of those reasons. It’s easy to say when demand is high. There are far more renters than there are apartment homes available.”
Graham said the apartment association will host a public event on the topic in January.
Supporters of the change say giving tenants more choices in neighborhoods with better opportunities relates to the larger effort to boost economic mobility in Charlotte by deconcentrating poverty.
“A lot of these social woes that we run into, a lot of them are related,” said Ryan Carter, advocacy and outreach coordinator for Habitat Charlotte. “The reality is that if you’re not stably housed, everything gets compounded.”
In Charlotte, there aren’t enough vouchers allocated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for how many families would financially qualify.
About 6,000 households in Charlotte are on the waiting list for Housing Choice vouchers and wait five years on average.
One in five households that receive a voucher in Charlotte doesn’t find housing in time to use it, according to Inlivian data.
The housing authority’s board voted in September to extend the time voucher holders have to find housing from 120 to 180 days because many tenants struggle to find housing in time.
Fifteen states and nearly 100 cities and counties have source of income discrimination laws, according to the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, which tracks such legislation.
“With the housing affordability crisis and the difficulty that families have breaking into the housing market, many cities are concluding this is a crucial protection,” said Philip Tegeler, the organization’s executive director.
A 2018 Urban Institute study commissioned by HUD shows widespread discrimination by landlords who refuse to accept vouchers. Tenants fared better, however, in cities that had source of income protections.
Those cities had lower rates of landlords refusing to accept vouchers: 15% in Washington, D.C., and 31% in Newark, New Jersey. Cities without such protections had higher rates of discrimination: 78% of landlords refused in Fort Worth, Texas; 76% in Los Angeles, and 67% in Philadelphia.
Shneila Lee said additional tenant protections would help families like hers. She has been searching for four months for a landlord that will take her voucher from the Salvation Army. The 33-year-old has five daughters—two with special needs—and said the stress of repeatedly getting rejected despite having no criminal or eviction history is crushing. She estimates she’s spent $300 just in the last month putting in non-refundable applications.
“When they look at a piece of paper and check yes or no, they can go home and sleep at night,” she said of the rejections. “But when I get that ‘no’ I toss and turn at night....The paper that is coming across their desk is connected to real people.”
HB2 repeat?
The last effort by Charlotte officials to extend anti-discrimination laws brought on the dramatic political showdown with the General Assembly.
City Council in 2016 expanded Charlotte’s anti-discrimination ordinance with new legal protections for gay, lesbian and transgender people, including a provision that ensured people could use the bathroom that matched their gender identity.
House Bill 2, what became known as the “bathroom bill” reversed Charlotte’s ordinance, nullified local ordinances around the state that had expanded protections for LGBT residents. A compromise bill signed into law in 2017 put a moratorium on cities and counties to amend their discrimination ordinances until 2020.
Supporters of the tenant protection proposal say though their plan involves amending the fair housing ordinance and not the city’s non-discrimination law, whether the General Assembly will intervene is still unknown.
Landlords have previously told the Observer that additional hurdles like mandatory inspections delay getting tenants into their units and receiving rent payments make some reluctant to participate in the Section 8 program.
Inlivian officials point to changes they’ve made to the program, including speeding up initial inspections, rental contracts and subsidy payments, changing annual inspections to every two years. The housing authority has implemented a landlord incentive program, which includes a sign-on bonus and payments for damage beyond normal wear and tear.
Still, Meachem said he is “optimistic” about the reaction from city officials and the business community, given that affordable housing has become a key issue in Charlotte.
“We’re not going back behind the closed door to start talking about the affordable housing issue,” he said. “It’s at everybody’s kitchen table and in a lot of board rooms, and we expect it to stay there.”
This work was made possible in part by grant funding from Report for America/GroundTruth Project and the Foundation For The Carolinas.
This story was originally published December 16, 2019 at 9:31 AM with the headline "Housing groups want to ban this ‘unnecessary hurdle’ for renters with vouchers."
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