Landlords Can't Ban Ex-Convicts

This is how our criteria currently reads on our application:

Our Criteria:

We do not deny housing for race, color, religion, sex, national origin, handicap, sexual orientation, marital status, or familial status.

We do deny housing to individuals:

• when the application is not complete or accurate
• where there is not sufficient income/resources to pay rent and live
• where there is poor prior tenancy: evictions, violations, damage to rental property, poorly handled move outs, amounts are still owing to landlords or utilities.

Criminal activity is at our discretion depending on severity, number of convictions, and how long ago.

On our scoring sheet we reduce an applicant some points if they have had a conviction in the past 4 years, and reduce more points if it has been in the past 3 years or is more than two convictions. We disqualify for level 2 or level 3 sex offenders.

We have rented to people with a criminal record. One of our best tenants at present had a difficult time finding housing due to some trouble with the law. We see a lot of domestic violence counts.

With this recent guidance from HUD on interpreting the Fair Housing Act, I feel like our policies are defendable, but not sure I’d want to get in a drawn out expensive battle over it. We may want to shorten up the timeframe to one and two years, and strike our additional vague disqualification for a criminal record that "could destroy our property or terrorize the neighborhood". That one has been our “flexibility” clause, but is hard to objectively measure and can be interpreted to have a pretty low threshold.