National News
Background Check Policies for Apartment Applicants May Be Illegal
May 10, 2016 posted by Steve Brownstein
Apartment building managers may be breaking the law if they deny housing to all prospective residents who fail a background check, according to the latest guidance from federal officials.
“A policy or practice that denies housing to anyone with a prior arrest or any kind of criminal conviction cannot be justified,” according to guidance issued April 4 by Helen Kanovsky, general counsel for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Apartment building owners and managers are scrambling to understand and comply with this latest interpretation of the federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it illegal for housing providers to discriminate against a variety of protected classes of people, including minorities. Many landlords are now uncertain how to balance their responsibility to keep their communities safe with their responsibility under the law not to discriminate.
“HUD has created a tremendous amount of uncertainty with the guidelines,” says Paula Cino, vice president for the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC).
For years, federal officials sent a totally different message about criminal background checks. HUD once directed public housing authorities not to rent their subsidized apartments to residents who failed criminal background checks. “Earlier in the 1990s, there was a ‘one-strike, you’re out’ policy,” says Elayne Weiss, policy analyst for the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “These new policies are a bit of a revision.”
However, new realities forced federal officials to reassess. Nearly one-third of the U.S. population, or as many as 100 million people, now have some kind of criminal record, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people are released from jails and prisons having served their time. At the same time, technology is making background checks more common for prospective residents.
“Research shows that people who come out of prison and can’t find housing often become homeless, have high rates of recidivism and often end up back in prison,” says Weiss. “Their not having housing doesn’t help anyone.”
To make matters worse, many third party background checkers simply provide a “pass” or “fail” result, which the prospective resident is unable to contest, says Weiss. “These background checks can be filled with errors and inaccuracies… and you won’t be able to refute that claim,” she says.
