PRRAC Advocates Fairer Screening Rules for HUD-Assisted Housing

On June 10, 2024, the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) submitted comments in support of HUD’s proposed rule to eliminate discriminatory uses of criminal records in screening tenants for admission to HUD-funded housing (89 Fed. Reg. 25332). PRRAC is a civil rights policy organization dedicated to the cause of fair housing, and the urgent need to address the continuing segregation of many low-income families of color in high poverty, low opportunity neighborhoods, a condition that is perpetuated by housing, land use, transportation, and education policies at every level of government.

PRRAC's comments included strong support for the elimination of the long-standing (and illegal) practice of re-screening voucher tenants who move from one public housing authority's "area of operation" to another PHA’s town. PRRAC also stressed the relationship of government-sponsored segregation and disproportionate policing and arrests in predominantly Black and Latino communities as a relevant fair housing consideration in HUD’s reassessment of the use of criminal records. 

A few weeks after HUD issued the proposed rule, HUD's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity also issued helpful general guidance on fair housing impacts of some common, but often discriminatory, tenant screening practices.

The PRRAC also recently released an update of its "State, Local, and Federal Laws Barring Source-of-Income Discrimination (originally published as Appendix B to Expanding Choice: Practical Strategies for Building a Successful Housing Mobility Program, 2013), June 2024. According to the Center for Policy Alternatives’ calculations, at the time the original report was released, source of income discrimination laws protected 34% of voucher holders in the nation. With the addition of seven states since December, 2018 (New York, California, Colorado, Rhode Island, Maryland, Virginia, and Illinois) and a number of new municipalities, the PRRAC now estimates that over 57% of voucher holders are now covered.

Read the PRRAC Source of Income Laws Report

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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Read the NLIHC study's Maryland profile.

Injustice, Inc's Author to Speak at HPRP's Free Speaker Forum on September 20th

Next Wednesday, September 20th: HPRP's Speaker Series!

On September 20th, you are invited to attend the Homeless Persons Representation Project (HPRP)'s kickoff of their 2023-2024 speaker series. Speaking will be University of Baltimore School of Law Professor Daniel Hatcher, Esq., and he will discuss his new book, Injustice, Inc.: How America's Justice System Commodifies Children and the Poor (University of California Press, 2023).

When: Wednesday, September 20th, 5:30 - 7:30 PM

Where: Enoch Pratt Central Library (400 Cathedral St., Baltimore, MD 21201), Wheeler Auditorium

This talk will be moderated by Youth Action Board Co-Chair Levy Johnson and Jenny Egan, Esq., Chief Attorney for the Juvenile Division of the Public Defender in Baltimore and co-founder of the Baltimore Action Legal Team.

This event is free, but registration is encouraged. Given the COVID-19 surge, masking is strongly encouraged and this event will be recorded for those unable to attend.

Here is a summary of the speaker's book:

From UC Press: "Injustice, Inc. exposes the ways in which justice systems exploit America's history of racial and economic inequality to generate revenue on a massive scale. With searing legal analysis, Daniel L. Hatcher uncovers how courts, prosecutors, police, probation departments, and detention facilities are abandoning ethics to churn vulnerable children and adults into unconstitutional factory-like operations. Hatcher reveals stark details of revenue schemes and reflects on the systemic racialized harm of the injustice enterprise. 

"He details how these corporatized institutions enter contracts to make money removing children from their homes, extort fines and fees, collaborate with debt collectors, seize property, incentivize arrests and evictions, enforce unpaid child labor, maximize occupancy in detention and "treatment" centers, and more. Injustice, Inc. underscores the need to unravel these predatory operations, which have escaped public scrutiny for too long."

                        

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Source: Homeless Persons Representation Project email, September 13, 2023.

 Results of a Recent Study

Study Finds Baltimore Children who moved from High-Poverty to Low-Poverty Areas had Improved Asthma

The health of Baltimore children with asthma in a subsidized program assisting them to move from high-poverty to low-poverty neighborhoods significantly improved, according to a study just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The children experienced fewer asthma attacks after moving and had symptoms on fewer days. These were improvements on par with medication used to treat the chronic condition, said Dr. Craig Pollack, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Hopkins School of Nursing and a lead author of the study.

Asthma constricts airways in the lungs and causes wheezing, chest tightness, coughing, and trouble breathing. It affects 13.7% of adults in Baltimore compared to 9% across the state and country. About a third of Baltimore high school students have been told by a doctor or nurse that they have asthma, compared to about a fourth statewide. The city also has the highest rate of emergency department visits due to asthma in Maryland. Nationwide, Black children are two to three times more likely to have asthma than white children, and have more than twice the risk for emergency department visits and hospitalizations because of the disease, according to the study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study found that a major reason why children’s asthma got better after their families moved was because their new neighborhoods had fewer stressors. “Housing mobility programs that help families overcome the barriers to moving can also impact health,” Dr. Pollack said. “As policymakers and practitioners are thinking about the cost of these programs, they should consider the health benefits as well.”

Dr. Corinne Keet, a professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and another author on the study, commented "Anyone living in Baltimore understands the impact of violence and poverty on people’s health,” she said. “I mean, it’s pervasive.”

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Sources: Angela Roberts, "Study: Baltimore children moved from high-poverty to low-poverty areas saw their asthma improve," Baltimore Sun, May 16, 2023.

EVICTED AUTHOR TO PRESENT 3 FREE VIRTUAL LISTENING SESSIONS ON POVERTY ON JANUARY 9-18

You can register for one of the three sessions by clicking on the following links. Space for each is limited, so be sure to register ahead of time.

• January 9th, 10-11 a.m. ET, in conversation with Prof. Reuben Miller, University of Chicago, 2022 MacArthur Fellow, author of Halfway Home. Register HERE.

• January 12th, 1-2 p.m. ET, in conversation with Rasheedah Phillips, Director of Housing, PolicyLink. Register HERE.

• January 18th, 8-9 p.m. ET, in conversation with Diane Yentel, President and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Register HERE.

Matt Desmond published Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which sought to reveal the human costs of the housing crisis. It received the Pulitzer Prize. Some reactions were:

 “Astonishing... Desmond has set a new standard for reporting on poverty." - Barbara        Ehrenreich, New York Times Book Review.

“Evicted stands among the very best of the social justice books.” - Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and Commonwealth. 

“Gripping and moving—tragic, too.” - Jesmyn Ward, author of Salvage the Bones.

“Evicted is that rare work that has something genuinely new to say about poverty.” -  San Francisco Chronicle.

He will publish his next book, Poverty, by America in March, 2023. Poverty, by America seeks to answer two questions: Why is there so much poverty in America, and how can we finally eliminate it? Desmond argues that "many Americans are actively making poor families poor by exploiting them, segregating them, and supporting a welfare state that gives the most to people who least need it." His goal with this book is "to spark a public conversation about how each one of us can become a poverty abolitionist, unwinding ourselves from our neighbors' deprivation."

He will be hosting three virtual listening sessions, inviting community organizers and service providers from around the country to attend. Each session will begin with explaining the book, and then a conversation with one of three interlocutors about some of its themes and arguments. Most of the sessions will be attendees' questions and comments, to stimulate a discussion about how to move the poverty debate, strategic policy opportunities, and how to leverage attention on poverty.

Once you register for a session, you'll be able to submit questions or comments early. You'll also have the opportunity to receive an advance copy of Poverty, by America.

For more information about the events, contact CrownPublicity@penguinrandomhouse.com.

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Source: https://matthewdesmondbooks.com/, December 7, 2022.