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Showing posts with label Maryland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maryland. Show all posts
Friday, April 19, 2024
Monday, March 25, 2024
Study Confirms Maryland Has Shortage of Affordable Housing Units
The just-released The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) has found that across Maryland, there is a shortage of rental homes affordable and available to extremely low income households, whose incomes are at or below the poverty guideline or 30% of their area median income. Many of these households are severely cost burdened, and spend over half of their income on housing. Severely cost burdened poor households are more likely than other renters to sacrifice other necessities like healthy food and healthcare to pay the rent, and to have unstable housing situations like evictions.
"Cost Burden" is defined as spending more than 30% of household income on housing costs. "Severe Cost Burden" is spending more than 50% of household income on housing costs.
According to the NLIHC study, historic drivers of housing inequity include:
- Decades of racial discrimination by real estate agents, banks, insurers, and the federal government have made homeownership difficult to obtain for people of color.
- Many factors kept people of color (POC) from being able to purchase homes through the 1950s: the pervasive refusal of whites to live in racially integrated neighborhoods, physical violence targeting POC who tried to integrate (which was often tolerated by police), restrictive covenants outlawing home sales to Black buyers to integrate neighborhoods, and federal housing policy that denied borrowers access to credit in minority neighborhoods (Massey & Denton, 1993; Coates, 2014; Rothstein, 2017).
- Being denied the ability to purchase homes meant that POC did not benefit from the appreciation in home value, a major driver of the racial wealth gap.
- While overt discrimination was outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, subtler forms of housing discrimination continue. HUD’s fair housing tests in 28 metropolitan areas found that Black homebuyers were shown 17.7% fewer homes than similar white homebuyers (HUD, 2013).
- More recent fair housing investigations show similar discrimination, including being shown fewer homes and not being given the same information as white buyers (Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, 2018; Choi, Herbert, Winslow, & Browne, 2019).
- Today’s credit scoring system and lending practices also are barriers to POC homeownership (Rice & Swesnik, 2012; Bartlett et al., 2019).
Other Key national findings of the NLIHC's study are:
• The shortage of affordable rental housing primarily impacts renters with extremely low incomes. Extremely low-income renters in the U.S. face a shortage of 7.3 million affordable, available rental homes, resulting in only 34 affordable, available homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter households.
• The shortage of affordable rental housing is more acute than before the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2022, the shortage of affordable and available rental homes for extremely low-income renters increased by more than 480,000.
• Black, Latino, and Indigenous households are disproportionately extremely low-income renters and disproportionately impacted by this shortage. Some 19% of Black non-Latino households, 16% of American Indian or Alaska Native households, and 13% of Latino households are extremely low-income renters, compared to only 6% of white non-Latino households.
• Extremely low-income renters are more likely than other renters to spend a large part of their income on rent. A total of 87% are cost-burdened with 74% are severely cost-burdened. Extremely low-income renters are almost a quarter of all renters, but 44% of all cost-burdened renters and 69% of severely cost-burdened renters.
Regarding Maryland:
- 197,310 or 26% of Maryland renter households are extremely low income.
- The state has a shortage of 134,192 rental homes affordable and available for extremely low income renters.
- $37,740 is the average income limit for 4-person extremely low income household.
- $64,642 is the annual household income needed to afford a two-bedroom rental home at HUD's Fair Market Rent.
- 73% of extremely low income renter households have a severe cost burden.
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Wednesday, January 17, 2024
MD Stop the Hare is January 18th
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Wednesday, December 20, 2023
Free Implicit Bias Training on January 10th
Source: Maryland Commission on Civil Rights email, December 20, 2023. |
Thursday, December 14, 2023
National Apartment Management Company Entrata Agrees Not to Discriminate
A management firm that administers leases and tenant applications in Washington, D.C. and buildings across the country - including in Baltimore - has agreed in a settlement to evaluate its software and ensure none of its properties discriminate against renters who receive government housing subsidies. The settlement agreement, announced December 12th by the D.C. Office of the Attorney General (DCOAG), Brian L. Schwalb (D), resolves a lawsuit filed by the Equal Rights Center against the owners and managers of the Adams View Apartments, a Ward 3 apartment complex located in Cleveland Park, which offers studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments for rent.
The full settlement agreement is available here.
Low-income renters who receive government assistance are protected against discrimination in D.C. by several laws, including the District’s fair housing legislation. It is against the law to discrimination based on “source of income” for paying with government-backed vouchers rather than money from their own checking accounts.
Earlier in 2023, the ERC filed suit against the owners and managers of the Adams View Apartments (Adams Investment Group, Adams-Cathedral LLC, the Barkan Management Company, Broadhouse Management Group LLC, and Entrata, Inc.) alleging violations of the District’s Human Rights Act and Consumer Protection Act. The ERC alleged that the building and its operators systematically refused to accept voucher-holders as tenants. Defendants in the case have said that they did not use discriminatory practices and, according to the settlement agreement, agreed not to discriminate in the future against any prospective renters on any basis prohibited by federal or local law.
Lehi, Utah-based Entrata, according to its website, "Offer(s) a wide variety of online tools including websites, mobile apps, payments, lease signing, accounting, and resident management, Entrata® PaaS currently serves more than 20,000 apartment communities nationwide." It runs software that enables landlords and property managers to run more leasing processes digitally, and was formerly known as Property Solutions.
Under the settlement:
(1) Entrata agreed to review and change its practices in jurisdictions where source-of-income discrimination is prohibited - such as Maryland - and hard-encode in its internal operations and documents that housing vouchers are accepted at the properties it represents.
(2) The company further agreed to “undertake a review of the current” operating documents to “ensure that [in no] state that Housing Choice Vouchers, Section 8, or other housing vouchers are not accepted.”
(3) Undergo annual fair housing training for all staff involved in any aspect of the rental process, in addition to regular evaluations to verify ongoing compliance with DC law.
(4) The defendants also agreed to pay $235,000 to the ERC and the District “for restitution, damages, future training and compliance, attorney’s fees, and civil penalties,” the D.C. attorney general’s office said.
OAG’s civil rights work complements the work of the District’s Office of Human Rights (OHR), which is the primary District agency that investigates individual discrimination complaints. You can file a complaint with OHR at ohr.dc.gov/service/file-discrimination-complaint or call 202-727-4559.
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