It’s hard to sympathize with the Parkoff Organization, the New York real estate firm that owns some 4,000 apartments across the city. According to a new lawsuit, housing “testers” caught the group discriminating against potential tenants whose rent would have been subsidized by housing vouchers. The Fair Housing Justice Center (FHJC), which brought the suit, claims that Parkoff turned away or “ghosted” testers posing as voucher holders, “while encouraging testers with income solely from employment and showing them not only listed, but even unlisted units.”
Discriminating against housing-voucher recipients is illegal in New York and 15 other states. And to the extent that New York City’s voucher holders are more likely to be African American (34 percent) or Hispanic (52 percent), such discrimination has potential racial overtones. According to Elizabeth Grossman, general counsel for FHJC, “There is no valid or even rational reason for landlords and brokers to discriminate against those with housing vouchers.”
That’s just not true. Landlords have legitimate reasons to be skittish about accepting voucher tenants. Voucher recipients are often unable to pay even their limited share of the rent. Federal funds cover 70 percent these renters’ costs, but low-income tenants still must pay the remaining 30 percent. HUD data show that some 95 percent of New York City voucher households are not just low-income—they are “very low income.” Sixty-two percent earn less than $20,000 a year. What’s more, roughly 25 percent of Housing Choice Voucher recipients are female-headed households with children, many of which are led by single mothers; families with a single source of income are at greater risk of losing it. (HUD data indicate that roughly 4 percent of New York’s Housing Choice Voucher recipients are two-adult families with kids, reinforcing how two-parent households are less likely to be poor in the first place.) For landlords, evicting tenants for nonpayment is, at best, costly and slow. Accounts of the process vary, but evictions typically take five months, with owners losing income that they’ll never get back.
The voucher population presents additional challenges for landlords. New York State gives voucher priority to “Households determined by the [local Continuum-of-Care] as meeting the definition of chronically homeless,” as well as “homeless families with minor children.” Many of the chronically homeless are troubled by mental illness and substance abuse, which cannot help but concern owners of working- and middle-class apartments where the rents are relatively modest—and within the range paid by the HUD subsidies—but whose tenants are not affluent enough to insulate themselves from those with social problems. Admitting the chronically homeless could prompt some of those tenants to leave, as has happened elsewhere across the country. As the Washington Post reported, for example, since a group of “previously homeless men and women” moved into an upscale D.C. apartment complex, “[p]olice visits to the building have nearly quadrupled since 2016,” and “[s]ome tenants have fled.” The D.C. building’s rise in police visits dovetails with a study by Texas A&M of voucher households in Houston, which found that “voucher receipt increases violent crime, and that this increase is driven by men.”
The voucher program is not going away. It now outstrips public housing projects nationwide as the most common form of subsidized housing. Reform is needed to ensure that the program serves as a path to upward mobility and does not deter owners such as Parkoff from renting to voucher recipients. First, policymakers should implement a time limit on the program, akin to cash welfare, motivating tenants to become self-sufficient and making way for the many households on the waiting list. Second, rents should not go up with income, allowing tenants to save and be prepared for their eventual exit. Finally, rents should not rise if a tenant decides to marry. Giving single parents voucher priority inevitably subsidizes single parenthood—a ticket to intergenerational poverty.
These reforms would make property owners more willing to accept voucher holders and prepare those tenants for self-sufficiency. All that’s lacking is the political will.
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