A serious question: Where should people with criminal records be allowed to live? Their options are extremely limited. Consider the case of a young woman recently released from serving a term for a drug offense, whose mother lives in a public housing project. HUD rules make her ineligible to move in with her mother, most private landlords won’t rent to her, and buying a home is unrealistic. Most options that remain are a little sketchy.
I think we would all agree that ex-offenders should be reintegrated into society as quickly as possible, but when laws and attitudes are a barrier to housing, how can that be accomplished?
@sherpa individual landlords that own just a few properties and do not use a management company are somewhat more likely to rent to a convicted felon than larger corporations and those landlords that do use a property management company.
Partially because they do not utilize the background check programs in order to know about the convictions.
Otherwise, people that have this often sometimes couch surf or move in without the landlord knowing immediately.
How easy is it to evict a problem tenant? In the case of one property - it is almost impossible - it takes years, costs a phenomenal amount of money and you risk winding up in court. In the case of another - eviction for cause is a straightforward process, completed in a fair time frame. Therefore my answer as to whether or not we’d rent an individual with questionable items on their report is simple - it depends on the laws and general political climate of where the property resides.
@dietz199 - That raises another interesting question. Would it be appropriate/legal/ethical to require a higher security deposit and/or charge higher rent of a felon as compensation for the risk the landlord is taking?
@sherpa I know I am not dietz199 but have experience in what you are asking. It is legal and ethical to require a higher security deposit, not necessarily higher rent.
@publisher I think you probably know the answer to that. Requiring a higher deposit based on a persons color is discrimination. Requiring a higher deposit based on an applicants choices of passed behavior, when that behavior could pose a risk to the land lord is not discrimination.
Whatever race an applicant is, if that applicant has chosen to do something that gets him/her evicted from one apartment, or to file for bankruptcy, or to get convicted of a violent crime, raises red flags for a landlord.
Race or single parenthood does nothing to either prove or disprove whether or person has a history of paying their bills and being a safe, responsible resident so would not be considered.
@bajamm: My point is that how does one distinguish among convicted felons–the majority of whom are minorities–when determining who gets charged a higher security deposit ?
Can one distinguish by type of crime that resulted in a felony conviction ?
There are issues regarding unlawful discrimination intertwined with one’s criminal status. Because of the disparity of races with felony convictions, it could be argued that charging felons higher security deposits constitutes a practice of illegal discrimination.
@publisher I understand the data on minorities being convicted more often than white people. I also know that most applicants I accepted were charged the regular deposit rate.
I can not speak to what other property managers did and why they did it. All I know is what I did and why I did it. I needed to prove to the owner (and the courts if we were ever sued) that I followed the fair housing laws.
Often times I did not know someone’s race as I was working on their application. The applications came to me in one of 3 ways. If they came online or through our door slot, then I did not see the person and didn’t know what they looked like. Even if the application was handed to me directly I sometimes got the comment that this is from my friend or from my sister in law or whatever and I still may not know what the person looked like.
So, all I had was the information from the back ground check. I would not be able to say to my boss that I wanted to accept someone with a conviction because maybe they are African American and African Americans oftentimes do not get a fair shake in our court systems. I would have been asked how was I going to guarantee that our property and its residents were going to be kept safe from a rapist or a child molester or a murderer?
I just don’t draw the came conclusion as ucbalumnus. Ucb posts: “In other words, landlords who use this particular service do not believe in the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.”
For me, I would say- landlords who use this particular service believe in obtaining a full picture of a prospective tenant before entering into business with him/her.
Presumption of innocence is a legal concept. The rest of society does not have to abide by the same concept. In fact, many times the law is never involved in something and we have to make our own judgments.