street roots
July 19, 2013
Discrimination
ban on Section 8
to become law
BY JAKE THOMAS
STAFF WRITER
or people who use a federal housing
voucher subsidy to rent an apartment,
one phrase has been a constant
barrier: “No Section 8.”
Under Oregon law, and despite a whole
list of equal rights protections for renters,
landlords could legally bar anyone who
received Section 8 housing assistance from
consideration at tenants.
This session’s passage of HB 2639
changes all that. Starting in July 2014,
landlords will no longer be able to
discriminate against Section 8, or Housing
Choice voucher holders.
“It will open up a lot of desirable,
affordable apartments in places in the city
where it has been off limits,” says Portland
City Commissioner Nick Fish, who
campaigned for the measure. “To landlords,
it says is you have to treat a voucher holder
the same as any other prospective tenant. It
takes the stigma out and gives the voucher
holder equal standing.”
Congress established the Housing Choice
program in 1937 to subsidize the rent of the
very poor, elderly and disabled. In order to
be eligible for the program, participants
must make 50 percent or less than the
median family income, less than $34,000 for
a family of four in the Portland area.
Despite guaranteed rent, some landlords
F
are reluctant to take Section 8 tenants
b ecau se they w orry they will be bad tenants
and find the program burdensome. And in a
saturated rental market, property owners
and landlords could afford to turn away low-
income renters.
“This is probably the tightest rental
market in Portland in the last three
decades,” says Steve Rudman, the executive
director of Home Forward. Home Forward is
the local housing authority that administers
the Housing Choice program for Multnomah
County.
There are 8,400 households throughout
Multnomah County that use the program,
and it contributes over $50 million in rents
annually. When Home Forward opened up
its waiting list for Housing Choice vouchers
in November last year for 10 days it received
21,000 applications for 3,000 spots, far
outstripping Home Forward’s ability to meet
demand.
Voucher holders have an initial 60 days,
with the possibility of getting extensions, to
find a landlord who will accept them.
However, in a tight rental market many
voucher holders end up losing their voucher
and their chance of getting housing that falls
in their budget- sometimes after years of
waiting to get into the program.
The recently passed bill seeks to change
that by barring landlords from turning down
tenants solely because they hold a voucher.
It also establishes a statewide fund to help
landlords recoup lost rent or expenses from
damages to their property caused by
voucher holders. Additionally, it expedites
federal inspection requirements that some
landlords have found burdensome.
Landlords, under the bill, can still reject a
tenant because of a poor rental history.
These provisions, according to Rudman,
were key to getting landlords to drop
opposition to the legislation.
Currently, roughly 2,500 landlords
participate in the program in Multnomah
County, says Rudman. While it’s unclear how
many more landlords might participate in
the program as a result of the legislation,
Rudman says he expects that number to rise
because there are plenty of good tenants
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who hold vouchers and would pass
background checks for rentals but might be
currently turned down by landlords reluctant
to participate in the program.
“My sense is that if some tenants go
through the normal screening process, there
will be some that will pass that screening
process,” he says.
This isn’t the first time this issue has
caught the attention of local elected and
housing officials. In 2008, in response to a
significant number of voucher holders unable
to find housing before their voucher expired,
Home Forward (then the Housing Authority
of Portland) and then-Housing Commissioner
Nick Fish convened a task force to address
the problem. The task force helped raise the
acceptance rate for vouchers from 75 to 90
percent, in part, by establishing a fund to
help landlords recover costs from damages
or unpaid rent from Section 8 tenants and by
making the inspection process easier. Some
of these approaches were incorporated into
the recently passed bill.
This isn’t the first time the legislature has
looked at this issue, says Rudman, and it was
successful this time around because it had a
powerful backer: House Speaker Tina Kotek,
who worked early on to broker compromises
between real estate interests and housing
advocates.
However, the bill almost didn’t clear a
critical final hurdle in the waning days of the
legislative session. The Senate narrowly
voted it down on the first attempt. In a
second vote, the bill passed, 16-13.
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