Fair Housing at 40 (JPM)

Take steps to minimize housing discrimination risks

by Liam Garland

The following is an excerpt from the Mar/Apr 2008 issue (Volume 73, Number 2) of JPM�, Journal of Property Management.���

There are at least 3.7 million incidents of housing discrimination annually. The sheer number of violations represents a potential flood of liability for housing providers and managers.

Forty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act (FHA), race discrimination in housing is still a major problem. In 2000, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) attempted to measure the occurrence of race discrimination by conducting thousands of undercover rental �tests.� The result was that whites were favored in more than 20 percent of rental transactions.

The FHA, originally prohibiting discrimination based on race, national origin and religion, was amended twice to add sex as a protected class in 1974, and then familial status and disability in 1988. The amendment entitled a person with a disability to reasonable accommodations if those accommodations are necessary for the tenant to gain equal use and enjoyment of the complex.

While reasonable accommodation requests can involve almost any type of housing issue imaginable, most involve parking, service animals, unit transfers, change in rent payment due dates, forbearance from evictions, extensions of time to vacate and caregivers.

Many housing providers reject these requests perhaps not from ill-will but from ignorance of the law.

Penalties for housing discrimination can be stiff. A resident who wins his or her discrimination case is entitled to compensatory damages, punitive damages and even civil penalties. Actions that lead to claims include:

• Lying about unit availability.
• Imposing unequal terms in the application process or during occupancy
• Steering (or segregating) by floor, building or neighborhood
• Eviction
• Retaliating
• Refusing to permit reasonable accommodations or modifications for those with disabilities

A housing provider�s lack of fair housing awareness�or an employee�s uninformed mistake�could lead to an expensive lawsuit. Housing providers can take the following steps to minimize risk of a complaint being filed against them:

1. Get training�It is essential to stay informed of fair housing laws. Make sure your trainer is an expert in fair housing or consult with a local government agency, law firm, apartment owners� association or fair housing organization. (A searchable list of fair housing organizations can be found at www.nationalfairhousing.org). Moreover, IREM and the National Apartment Association (NAA) have co-produced Fair Housing and Beyond.
2. Monitor and Reinforce�Once your leasing agents have been trained, review the fair housing laws at regular meetings. Use real-life scenarios to ensure staff understands fair housing.
3. Self-test�Use undercover testers with your leasing agents to uncover discrimination acts before a lawsuit and take appropriate action against the violator.
4. Investigate complaints�A housing provider facing a fair housing claim should find an attorney versed in fair housing in order to conduct a rigorous investigation, including interviews with residents, witnesses and employees, and a review of pertinent rental records. Only then can a proper course be charted.

Liam Garland (lgarland@hrc-la.org) is director of litigation at the Housing Rights Center in Los Angeles.

IREM Members have free access to the JPM� online archives and the �Online Exclusives,� articles that are only available on the IREM Web site. Non-members can subscribe to JPM� at www.irem.org/jpm.