D.C. Attorney General Goes After Another Landlord For Discriminating Against Voucher Holders
Advertisements for Southeast D.C. apartments run by Maryland-based Curtis Investment Group included the language “**NOT ACCEPTING VOUCHERS AT THIS TIME**” and “we are not accepting any vouchers or rapid rehousing” as recently as this month on both its own website and third-party sites like Apartments.com, Racine’s lawsuit alleges. The complaint includes images of the advertisements in question. D.C.’s Human Rights Act prohibits housing discrimination based on a person’s source of income.
The lawsuit calls on the court to stop Curtis from this practice with an injunction, and to impose civil penalties on the company. Curtis has not responded to a request for comment.
About 10,500 D.C. households use housing vouchers, a federally funded program that pays part of a qualifying tenant’s rent to private landlords. Additionally, the city runs a rapid re-housing program for people and families experiencing homelessness, in which the D.C. Department of Human Services pays the rent directly to the landlord for up to a year, with participants then paying a percentage of that rent to the city.
While it’s illegal to discriminate against tenants who refuse to rent to people who use federal rental assistance vouchers or are part of the rapid re-housing program, landlords and rental companies in D.C. continue to do so in plain language in housing advertisements. Approximately 15 percent of D.C. landlords refuse to accept vouchers, per an Urban Institute study, and a WUSA 9 investigation from September found that more than 100 Craigslist housing ads in the District included phrases that explicitly said vouchers weren’t accepted. At-large Councilmember Elissa Silverman introduced legislation at the D.C. Council in March that would further penalize landlords who discriminate against voucher holders.
This isn’t Racine’s first time suing property management companies for allegedly refusing to rent to people using housing vouchers—he filed a lawsuit against Evolve and Evolve Property Managementfor the same reason in November. And these lawsuits are part of a broader effort from Racine’s officeto go after bad landlords for issues like building neglect. Coupled with the complaint filed against Curtis Investment Group, Racine sent letters to housing ad hosts Craigslist, Zillow, and CoStar Group, which owns Apartments.com, to call for meetings to discuss how the companies “can help ensure that advertisements that violate the prohibition on source-of-income discrimination either do not appear on your platforms or are quickly removed.”
The most recent lawsuit marks the start of the D.C. AG’s newly launched civil rights division, for which the D.C. Council gave Racine the go-ahead and funding. The new division already has two lawyers and will have two more attorneys plus an investigator when the money from the council comes through in October. In July, the office is hosting a series of listening sessions to learn about residents’ experiences with discrimination.
“Today’s actions illustrate that the Office of the Attorney General is making civil rights a priority going forward,” Racine tells DCist. “We’re in a housing crisis. Housing is a precious commodity and it is not being distributed equally and, in many instances, it’s not being distributed lawfully … Laws are on the books and we intend to enforce them.”
Racine says the new division is a response to the uptick in hate crimes in the District and to what he deems as the current failures of the federal government in protecting residents’ civil rights. “There is no doubt about the fact that the federal government has largely removed itself from prosecuting discriminatory action,” he says. “It’s incumbent on states and jurisdictions like the District of Columbia to fill that vacuum.”
This story has been updated with comment from Karl Racine.
Source: dcist.com
Accessibility