Proposed legislation would limit criminal background checks for rental housing

Alex Lopez has a dream.

The 20-year-old from Southern California wants to be an international businessman, with a focus on online marketing. He’s in the process of completing his high school degree equivalent and exploring options for higher education. Lopez’s face held a look of earnest determination as he sat perched on a high stool in a Starbucks, describing where he’s been, where he hopes to go and the barriers that stand in his way.

Lopez, like millions of others living in this country, has a felony conviction on his record. His conviction for selling drugs in Southern California casts a shadow over every job interview he attends and every apartment application he submits. He can’t even move back in with his family because he can’t pass the background check and doesn’t want to endanger their rental housing.

The conviction, for which he’s already served his time, follows Lopez wherever he goes.

“I paid for it, that’s it,” Lopez said. “Well, that’s not it.”

“I’m pretty sure down the road I’m going to have to quit my studies for a little to find housing,” Lopez said.

Lopez spends most of his time split between work and school, a load he’s finding increasingly difficult to balance as the threat of homelessness looms. He’s living in transitional housing now, but the time limit on that will come up in just a few months, forcing him into the private rental market and the judgment that comes with it.

He’s worried that he’ll have to choose between housing and his education.

“I’m pretty sure down the road I’m going to have to quit my studies for a little to find housing,” Lopez said.

Stories like his caused Seattle City Councilmembers Lisa Herbold and Kshama Sawant to bring forward legislation that would limit the use of criminal records in rental housing applications by curtailing the amount of information available through background checks that landlords rely upon to weed out what they consider to be unfit tenants.

The bill, called Fair Chance Housing, proposes to help people with criminal records in several ways. First, it wouldn’t allow background checks to include criminal convictions older than two years. Currently background checks can include criminal history dating back seven years (“Washington background checking agencies are flawed and unenforced,” RC, July 26). Second, it requires landlords to offer a business reason for denying an application; simply citing a criminal conviction would not suffice.

There are exceptions: Shared housing, small buildings with an onsite landlord and some federally assisted housing would be exempt.

Proponents of the bill believe it doesn’t go far enough. They want to eliminate the provision that allows background checks to include criminal convictions of the previous two years.

Opponents feel that the bill is one more example of tenant-friendly legislation that’s come from the City Council in recent months that shifts the burden of solving social ills from government to private landlords.

“We should be looking at the criminal justice system, not put this onto individual landlords,” said William Shadbolt, who represented the Rental Housing Association of Washington at a panel discussion of the legislation in mid-July.

Four out of five report that their criminal history is a big reason they can’t find housing in a market that is already pricing people out.

Roughly 30 percent of people living in Seattle have a criminal record, according to the Office of Civil Rights, and 7 percent have a felony conviction. Four out of five report that their criminal history is a big reason they can’t find housing in a market that is already pricing people out.

The result: more people living on the streets struggling to survive and potentially falling back into criminal activity.

“Housing discrimination is very real in our city,” said Nick Straley, an attorney with Columbia Legal Services, a nonprofit legal team that has joined with the FARE Housing Coalition to support the legislation. “We as a city need to be affirmative and direct.”

The problem is growing.

In 2015, almost 7,900 people were released from prison in Washington state, according to the Department of Corrections. Nearly half of those went back to King County or one of the four neighboring counties. The Department of Corrections Reentry team reported that between 2013 and 2016, an average of 38 people a month went from the prison system into homelessness.

In 2017, that figure leapt to 85 people every month.

The federal government already frowns upon systematically denying housing to people based on their criminal history. In 2016 the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released guidance that required administrators of federally funded housing to look past a criminal conviction and supply substantive reasons that a prospective tenant was not a good fit.

“Bald assertions based on generalizations or stereotypes that any individual with an arrest or conviction record poses a greater risk than any individual without such a record are not sufficient to satisfy this burden,” the document reads.

Institutional racism has created a system in which people of color have disproportionately high rates of conviction and incarceration.

The reason: Institutional racism has created a system in which people of color have disproportionately high rates of conviction and incarceration, which means discriminating against people based on a criminal conviction equates to discrimination based on the color of a person’s skin.

The proposed legislation has raised concerns among small landlords, who worry about protecting their investments, the safety of their tenants and the increasing regulatory burden posed by laws coming out of Seattle’s government.

Landlords are leaving the market, weakening the supply of affordable housing in an increasingly unaffordable city, said Sean Martin, spokesperson for the Rental Housing Association, at a committee meeting on July 25.

“What you’re attempting to do imposing this by fiat will fail,” said one landlord at the meeting.

Anecdotes of criminal behavior and generalized fear of former convicts are not founded in data, and shouldn’t hamper this legislation, Straley told the committee.

“I have yet to hear a single story from any landlord that they were any safer because of screening,” he said.

Instead, such a policy could serve to make everyone safer, Straley said.

“The research is absolutely clear. The more people we get housed, the less crime we have,” Straley said.

Source: realchangenews.org