Bill would stop discrimination over housing vouchers

‘Your money is no good here.” Right now, Ohioans with rent payment in hand are being turned away from decent housing in good neighborhoods simply because they are using a voucher to help pay the rent. Known as “source of income discrimination,” the refusal to accept vouchers creates extra burdens on households with low incomes, perpetuates inequality and undermines fair-housing laws. This form of discrimination is illegal in several states and numerous cities and counties.

House Bill 229, recently introduced in the Ohio legislature by Reps. Adam Miller and Terrence Upchurch, would add Ohio to that list.

More than 229,000 households in Ohio use a federal Housing Choice Voucher (often referred to as “Section 8”) to pay for part of their rent, while others use similar local and charitably funded voucher programs. The goals of these programs are to eliminate the concentration of poverty and to provide households with low incomes the ability to choose safe, decent housing in whatever neighborhood best meets their needs. The voucher goes directly to the landlord and operates as a guaranteed source of rent, backed by the U.S. government.

Yet throughout Ohio, voucher holders find themselves blocked from many housing opportunities that their voucher would otherwise enable them to afford. Even a casual browsing of rental advertisements will quickly reveal numerous declarations of “No Section 8,” informing housing voucher holders they are not welcome to apply. Research has shown that when source-of-income discrimination is legal, voucher holders end up restricted to small geographic areas where they can find landlords who accept vouchers — even if those areas do not have the type of housing, schools or neighborhood resources that would best meet their family’s needs.

A 2017 field test conducted by the Fair Housing Center for Rights & Research found 92% of voucher holders were denied when they applied for housing in Cuyahoga County neighborhoods that had a low concentration of voucher holders.

The burdens caused by source-of-income discrimination fall disproportionately on people who have historically faced systemic barriers to housing because of their race, sex, disability or familial status.

Federal and state fair-housing laws made discrimination based on these characteristics illegal, but source-of-income discrimination undermines these protections. For example, more than 90% of those who use vouchers through the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority are African American, which means when housing is refused to a voucher holder, 9 of 10 times that housing is being denied to an African American household.

Further, the Fair Housing Center found illegal race-based discrimination occurs more often when landlords have the option to accept or refuse a voucher: Using paired testers (like “secret shoppers”), the Fair Housing Center compared the experiences of African American and white housing seekers using a voucher against the experiences of African American and white housing seekers without vouchers. African American testers were denied or ignored more often than the white testers when neither was using a voucher. When both the African American and white testers mentioned vouchers, the difference in treatment between the African American and white testers nearly quadrupled.

Prohibiting source-of-income discrimination does not require landlords to rent to tenants who are otherwise unqualified for the unit or unable to make the rent payment. It simply prohibits landlords from discriminating against tenants based on the lawful source of the rent payment. State and local laws require all rental properties to be maintained for safe and habitable occupancy — when a voucher is used, the rental property must be inspected to ensure it meets such basic health and safety standards.

In exchange, the voucher provides guaranteed rent payments directly to the landlord.

A study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found source-of-income nondiscrimination laws make a difference: Landlords are less likely to deny vouchers, and voucher holders are more likely to use their voucher to secure decent housing. Adding source-of-income nondiscrimination to Ohio’s fair-housing law is a modest but important step toward removing barriers to housing access for families with low incomes.

This bill and similar proposals at the federal and local levels provide an equal playing field for housing voucher holders.

Megan E. Hatch is an assistant professor of Urban Policy and City Management at Cleveland State University, Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs.