Across our city, too many people are homeless or unstably housed. What we don’t need are insurmountable barriers to housing that target people of color and those who are currently homeless.
When it comes to housing, our City of Roses has a history with such barriers. Redlining, for example, was a standard practice that systematically excluded people of color from housing in “redlined” neighborhoods. More recently, we have seen gentrification disperse people out of once-affordable neighborhoods to more distant areas and communities.
Injustice builds upon injustice. When historical injustices are perpetuated by habit and tradition, but not scrutiny and fact, injustices are compounded. The market won’t correct itself without government correction.
Housing, specifically rental housing, is riddled with barriers – specifically to people with small incomes. It’s these barriers that add another cog in the wheel of poverty and homelessness. In this state of housing emergency, it’s time to be bold and break out of this cycle.
As part of her agenda for tenant-focused reform, Commissioner Chloe Eudaly’s office has researched the discriminatory barriers present in many tenant screening criteria, convening numerous meetings and revising 33 drafts of a proposed ordinance, according to her policy director, Jamey Duhamel. The City Council heard hours of testimony on April 3 and will review the amended version on May 23 starting at 3 pm.
This is a thoughtful and thorough ordinance. Fair Access in Renting, or FAIR, tackles several issues that create inequitable barriers to housing, including criminal records, poor credit histories, and restrictions on identification and income requirements.
Under Eudaly’s proposal, landlords are offered two approaches for screening tenants. There is a reduced-barrier tract that sets new criteria that are more forgiving of criminal histories or low credit scores. But it is not mandatory, nor should it be.
The other option allows a landlord to continue to use the screening criteria of their choosing – as allowed by state law – but they need to add an individualized assessment. With this assessment, the tenant can provide additional documentation and make their case on issues that might otherwise result in their application being denied. Instead of a wholesale dismissal based on a form, prospective renters would have the opportunity to state their case.
When it comes to income requirements, there’s no question that the commonly accepted practices are preventing good renters from getting into housing.
Year after year, the State of Housing report in Portland documents a dismal reality for households of color that are perpetuated by our existing screening criteria. African American and Native American families cannot, on average, afford to rent any apartments in Portland without being cost burdened. This is based on the calculation that they need to earn three times the rent – a common calculation for landlords – to qualify. The FAIR ordinance would prescribe a standard of two times the rent. This is clearly imperfect; people will be rent burdened, and we need to continue to fight for higher incomes and lower rents. But in the imperfect present, people need to be housed, and preferably housed in neighborhoods of their choosing so they have their communities, their support networks, nearby – all critical elements of stability.
Directly related to the income qualifier is credit ratings. The reliance on credit scores perpetuates racial discrimination in the housing market. The National Fair Housing Alliance describes a “dual credit market” in which communities of color have less access to banks and credit unions, disproportionately relying on alternative financial services – the payday lenders, check cashiers and other high-cost lenders.
On the matter of criminal histories, the carceral state is heavily skewed against people of color and those who are unhoused. In Oregon, African Americans are five times more likely to be imprisoned as their white counterparts. As Michelle Alexander puts it in her book, “The New Jim Crow,” the mass incarceration of African Americans is a “racial caste system that marginalized large segments of the African American community, segregates them physically (in prisons, jails and ghettos), and then authorizes discrimination against them in voting, employment, housing, education, public benefits and jury service.” To not address this is to perpetuate this system of discrimination.
In a new study, Wilder Research looked at housing outcomes, based on stability, among people with criminal histories. The resulting report concluded that “the effect of a prior criminal offense on a resident’s housing outcome declines over time. The impact of a misdemeanor becomes insignificant after two years, while felonies become insignificant after five years.”
At Street Roots, we see how a moment entangled in the legal system can lead to a lifetime of obstacles. People who live on the streets are simply exposed to more encounters with the police, which results in criminal records, which then create more barriers to housing. It is a frustrating, disappointing and absurd cycle.
For our part, Street Roots is working both upstream and downstream to address this. Our proposed Portland Street Response would work to ensure that non-criminal crises on the streets aren’t unnecessarily elevated to the criminal sphere. And for those who already have a history, we’re piloting a program with the Portland Housing Bureau and the Metropolitan Public Defenders so our vendors can get records expunged. The outcomes will be studied through the lens of housing accessibility, and if all goes well, the project could be replicated for other outlets.
Rental screening criteria revisions sit right in the middle of this inequitable legal mess.
Landlords have sounded the alarms. They usually do. When City Council passed inclusionary zoning – requiring that developers include low-income housing options in any apartment complex with 20 or more units – opponents from the developer world argued it would cool the market. Developers would pack up and new construction would move elsewhere, away from Portland, they claimed. Builders wouldn’t be able to make projects pencil out. But while there was a temporary cooling of the market, development is back on track toward pre-ordinance figures.
The signs are strong. Lisa Bates, associate professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University, performed a “beta test.” She applied data from the OneApp tenant application to the new, optional reduced-barrier screening criteria to simulate the effects, and saw greater access for people of color, people who have low incomes, and people who rely on housing choice federal vouchers.
Over the next few weeks, City Council should make this as strong as possible, incentivizing landlord participation in the low-barrier option when appropriate. And all of these changes will need to be clearly communicated to tenants and landlords, and enforcement strengthened wherever possible.
In a state of housing emergency, the FAIR ordinance is a bold and necessary step.
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