VOUCHERS

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 or- ganization 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 actors, Marosy noted that most discrimination against voucher holders comes from landlords who are 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.

BY NINA JOSS NJOSS@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

In Colorado, where discrimination based on source of income is illegal, some landlords are opposed to the mandate that they have to accept housing choice vouchers.

Drew Hamrick, a spokesperson for the Colorado Apartment Association, a leading state group of rental housing providers, said he thinks the vast majority of landlords follow the state law.

But across the nation, he said, many landlords resist participating in the voucher program. In some states, it is legal to reject a prospective tenant because they have a voucher. eir resistance is rooted in administrative costs.

“ ere’s so much red tape involved,” Hamrick said.

Although landlords do not care what the source of a person’s money is, Hamrick said, they care that they get paid. e voucher program is problematic because it adds the risk of additional expenses that landlords might not be compensated for, he said.

ese potential expenses include rent that can be lost while o cials inspect a unit to see if it meets federal standards. He also said there are other risks, like the chance that a tenant might not be able to a ord to pay for repairs needed for potential property damage.

Due to these concerns, Hamrick said the State of Colorado was unfair to mandate that landlords accept vouchers by approving House Bill 20-1332 in 2020.

“It was a bad legislative decision because, really, what you do when you (have) a problem like that is you x the program so that it’s more attractive to participate in, rather than saying, ‘Hey, we get the program doesn’t work that well, but you’ve got to play,’” he said.

A spokesperson from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, acknowledged that there are areas of the voucher program that can use improvement, but highlighted that many of the rules landlords oppose are necessary. For example, he said inspections are crucial to ensure units for voucher holders meet basic health, safety and quality standards.

“All of these kinds of rules to ensure that the funds are used e ectively, I mean, it comes with red tape — and to some extent, there’s no way around that,” the spokesperson said. e HUD spokesperson said the program cares about landlord concerns and has made changes in response to what they have heard. One of these changes is o ering virtual options to streamline the inspection process.

HUD also recently gave public housing authorities the right to use some of their administrative funding to cover potential nancial losses for landlords to incentivize them to accept vouchers, the spokesperson said.

But with public housing authority budgets varying across the country, some have the ability to provide incentives like this, while others’ budgets are already stretched too thin.

How much source-of-income discrimination is reported?

Nonpro t groups that work directly with people impacted by source-of-income discrimination tend to see more instances of it than are o cially reported.

According to the Colorado Civil Rights Division, which processes housing discrimination complaints, fewer than 10 complaints have been led on the basis of source of income since House Bill 20-1332 went into e ect in 2021.

But the division’s data does not accurately re ect how much discrimination is truly happening, said Katie O’Donnell, a spokesperson for the division.

“It’s absolutely happening all over Colorado,” she said. “We hear about a very small portion of it.”

Many instances of housing discrimination go unreported due to fear of retaliation and a lack of understanding about the process of ling, she said.

George Vonesh, for example, is a grandfather seeking a home for his disabled grandson who is on a voucher. Despite several incidents that could be considered discriminatory, Vonesh has never led a complaint with state o cials. e process seemed cumbersome and time-consuming, he said, and it was more important to him to put his time and energy toward nding his grandson a home.