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steps can complicate options.

Add those requirements to the personal desires any person may have for an apartment — like in-unit laundry or a place to sit outside — and Vonesh has a puzzle on his hands.

It is a puzzle that gets more challenging when some landlords, Vonesh says, won’t even take a glance at Justin’s application.

“I have lost count of the apartment managers who told (me) that they don’t accept (vouchers)” since Justin got a voucher in 2018, Vonesh said. “ ey don’t want to deal with the bureaucracy and perceived problems with low-income renters.”

Discrimination over source of income e apartment managers who told Vonesh they wouldn’t accept housing choice vouchers — if they said so after January 2021 — could have been breaking the law. at’s when House Bill 20-1332 took e ect, outlawing housing discrimination based on a person’s source of income. e state law added this category to other protected classes including disability, race, color, creed, familial status and more. e center is a private nonpro t organization that works to investigate matters related to housing discrimination across the metro region.

In practice, this law means landlords in Colorado with more than three rental units must accept housing choice vouchers. ey cannot use Justin’s federal aid as a reason to turn him away.

Despite facing this issue, Vonesh never led a complaint with state o cials. e process seemed cumbersome and time-consuming, and it was more important to him to put his time and energy toward nding Justin a home, he said.

Vonesh isn’t the only one concerned that landlords discriminate in this way. Housing advocates across the metro area say they’ve seen evidence of housing discrimination based on source of income.

“Complaints about housing vouchers — and landlords refusing to accept them or refusing to count the value of the voucher — is the number three source of complaint that we received (in the past 18 months),” said John Paul Marosy, outreach and education coordinator at the Denver Metro Fair Housing Center.

Although there may be some bad unaware of the law.

“From our experience, the vast majority of landlords don’t intentionally discriminate in this way,” he said. “But it is incumbent on them to educate themselves.”

In a few cases, discrimination against voucher holders is outright. But more commonly, landlords create barriers for voucher holders without doing anything that appears to break the law, advocates say.

One of these barriers is the minimum income requirement. is is when a landlord requires a potential tenant to prove they make a certain ratio of income to rent.

Vonesh ran into this problem recently when he was checking out an apartment in Arvada for Justin. Right as he started to think it might work out, the apartment manager shattered his plan.

“ ey said, ‘Oh, you know, we can take a voucher, sure — but you still have to prove three times (the rent in) income,’” Vonesh said.

With Justin’s income — all from federal aid — this requirement was impossible to meet.

The income barrier

Aubrey Wilde, advocacy program director at Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, said income requirements are one of the biggest barriers for people with vouchers.

“We have folks with vouchers who technically should be able to use those vouchers, in most cases, being asked to prove that they earn three, four, ve — even eight — times the rent amount in income,” Wilde said, recounting numbers from her and other advocates’ work with people searching for housing.

Jack Regenbogen, deputy executive director at the Colorado Poverty Law Project, said he and other advocates consider this behavior to be a form of discrimination.

“ ey’re not saying anymore, ‘We won’t accept Section 8,’ but they are discriminating based on the amount

George Vonesh shows handwritten math problems calculating payment standards, income levels and his grandson’s voucher subsidy — complex calculations required to find his grandson a home.

Although many voucher holders can’t meet income requirements, Marosy from the Denver Metro Fair Housing Center said the voucher itself is a dependable sign that the tenant will be able to pay their rent each month.

“If you look at it from the landlord’s point of view, this is a guaranteed source of income,” he said. “ ey know for a fact that this individual has this voucher and that money will be there for months and months to come.” is legal blurriness has created a situation where landlords can reject a voucher holder for not making three or more times the full rent amount in income. e Colorado Apartment Association, a leading state group for landlords, was a vocal opponent of the bill. Spokesperson Drew Hamrick said the income requirement cap — which will allow people to spend

But House Bill 20-1332 sets no limit to the income level a landlord can require. And for people with vouchers, there’s no clarity about whether a minimum income requirement applies to the whole rent, or just the portion of rent a voucher holder is paying out of pocket.

A new law rough months of lobbying and testifying, the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and the Colorado Poverty Law Project worked with legislators on a new law this year, Senate Bill 23-184, that addresses income requirement barrier for voucher holders. It will go into e ect in August.

“It caps the minimum income requirement at two times the cost of rent,” Wilde said.

50% of their income on rent — will set tenants up for failure.

“Anyone signing a contract that they’re promising to pay that much of their income in rent is going to default under it,” he said. “No one can a ord to do that.”

Hamrick said landlords do not care about the source of a tenant’s money — but they care that they get paid.

In landlords’ eyes, he said, the housing voucher program adds the risk of additional expenses they might not be compensated for. ese potential expenses include rent lost while o cials inspect a unit to see if it meets federal standards. He added there are other risks, like the chance that a tenant might not be able to pay for repairing property damage.

Instead of mandating that landlords accept vouchers, Hamrick said, legislators should work to make the program more nancially attractive for landlords.

He said the new cap is not a sustainable decision for rental housing providers, who will have to accept tenants more likely to default on rent. He added that more defaults would likely make rents rise across the market over time.

“ e Colorado legislature has substituted their own business judgment for the judgment of the entire market and made a bad business decision here,” he said.

Regenbogen, however, said he thinks people paying half their income on rent will still be able to make ends meet. Low-income people, he said, have always had to be resourceful — and housing is a necessity they deserve the opportunity to have.

“(Paying half of one’s income on rent is) not ideal, but what’s worse was the previous status quo where if people weren’t earning an arbitrary multiplier of what rent is, then they could very possibly nd themselves either in the homeless shelter or on the street,” he said.

He added that the new number re ects a reality in Colorado — where more than half of households are rent-burdened, meaning they are paying more than the recommended 30% of their income on rent, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau data.

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