In 1987, as a television news reporter in New York City, I was shocked when its first black police commissioner, Benjamin Ward, attributed most of the city”™s violent crime to African-Americans. Young black men, he said, “are committing the genocide against the blacks, they are ripping off the neighborhoods, they are doing the shooting out in southeast Queens and killing innocent people as they fight over their drug locations.”™”™
The next day he told ministers in Brooklyn, “”˜”™I”™m sorry that I had to say what I said last night, that our little secret is out of the house.”™”™ Crime rates since then have plummeted in New York City, but young African-Americans are still overrepresented in arrests and conviction statistics.
Today that fact forms the basis of a new HUD ruling prohibiting landlords from disqualifying a prospective tenant just because they have a criminal record. It”™s an outgrowth of last year”™s Inclusive Communities Decision that upheld the “disparate impact” liability under the Fair Housing Act. It”™s a prohibition on adopting policies that intentionally or unintentionally discriminate against protected classes under the act, which race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability, and familial status.
The HUD Office of General Counsel (OGC) finds that because African-Americans are arrested and convicted in higher numbers compared to the general population, they suffer a disparate impact when landlords disqualify tenants solely on the basis of arrests or felony convictions.
In an advisory, the OGC says that owners must look at the nature, severity or “recency” of the criminal conduct and then make an “individualized assessment.” Arrest records alone cannot be used as a basis to disqualify a tenant, because an arrested person is presumed innocent. But what about sex offenders?
An advisory from the law firm of Nixon Peabody says, “Significantly, OGC”™s guidance does not acknowledge that HUD itself requires owners of HUD-assisted housing to exclude persons who are registered sex offenders or have been evicted for drug-related criminal activity, and allows them to deny admission”¦[for] other types of criminal activity.”
The law firm”™s advisory speculates that bad credit might be next to be prohibited as a screening tool by landlords because of disparate impact on minorities.
With the crisis of affordable housing, and the huge incarceration rates in the U.S., many offenders find themselves out of luck when it comes to housing. My nonprofit agency gets letters on a regular basis from prisoners about to be released who cannot find apartments. They often end up homeless, struggling to find landlords who will take them.
But with the new ruling, all landlords must stop screening tenants on the basis of criminal records alone ”” called one strike policies ”” or face charges of discrimination.
Alexander Roberts is executive director of the fair housing group Community Innovations Inc., headquartered in White Plains. He can be reached at aroberts@chigrants.org or 914-683-1010.
Myself and my wife are being denied Fair Housing and or section 8 voucher. By Yonkers Municipal Housings. We both completed our fingerprints on January 6th 2016 at 10 Kenmore Ave. But now we’re being told that we do not have an application on files. I am 56 Years old and my wife is 55 years old. We both are on Social security. “SSI”. But we are still being denied assistance by MHA. We are in desperate search of some plausible answer.