Over 2 million low-income families use Section 8 housing vouchers to cover their rent. The program is one of the federal government’s most effective, keeping more than 5 million individuals housed. Nationally, all vouchers are getting used. But housing voucher discrimination limits where exactly recipients can live. A household with a voucher sometimes discovers that the only willing landlords are in unsafe neighborhoods, or that they must need to move into a different school district to use the voucher. There also are a number of landlords who say that the reason why they're not renting to someone is because of the voucher when really it is because of their racial discrimination or discrimination on the basis of disability.
To combat this, 17 states and dozens of cities and counties ban source-of-income discrimination covering almost 60% of renters. Enforcement of these laws, though, is lacking or spotty in many places. The best systems for enforcement include well-publicized outreach to property owners and the real estate community to inform them of the law and their obligations.
The most powerful method of enforcement involves “testing,” in which a government agency or nonprofit organization submits two very similar rental applications to a property owner, with one application including a housing voucher and the other without. Authorities than can determine if discrimination possibly is suspected, and proceed with enforcement. Subsequent publicizing of those results and getting public judgments is important to show other property owners that the city or state is serious about voucher discrimination enforcement.
However, such testing is expensive. Funding for housing discrimination testing comes primarily from HUD, which until February 12, 2024, did not give funding to its funded agencies to do sources-of-income discrimination investigations. This decision to fund HUD recipients is a positive development. Unfortunately, most agencies and nonprofits do not receive HUD funding, and cannot do testing because of the cost. Commitment and action by these authorities is also needed to reduce this stubborn problem.
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Read the Route Fifty January 31, 2024 article.
