A 2021 law was supposed to remove a key barrier for people using federal housing vouchers when they tried to rent units in Colorado.
But fair housing advocates say some landlords are finding ways to skirt the source-of-income protection law to avoid renting or leasing to people using housing vouchers.
“I’m hearing consistently from consumers that they’re having difficulty using their housing vouchers,” said John Paul Marosy, education and outreach coordinator for Denver Metro Fair Housing Center, which works to eliminate housing discrimination.
“Some landlords and property managers state illegally that they don’t accept housing vouchers at all,” he said. “The second fairly common violation is landlords refusing to count the value of the voucher when they’re calculating the resident’s income to rent ratio. And a third form of discrimination that has come to our attention is the kind of landlord that operates several apartment buildings, who will steer the renter using a voucher from one building to another attempting to cluster voucher holders into one building, which is also illegal.”
Under an amendment to the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, it now is illegal for landlords to refuse to rent or lease housing to a person based on where their rent money comes from. The law defines a source of income as any legal and verifiable form of money paid directly, indirectly or on behalf of a resident to their landlord. This means a person’s rent can be covered by a loved one, a government or private assistance program, a loan, a grant, savings or work.
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Landlords are allowed to do credit checks on prospective tenants, but they must check credit for every new resident, according to the law.
If a landlord owns five or fewer single family rental homes, and no more than five rental units including any single family homes, they are not required to accept federal housing vouchers for any of the five single family homes, according to the law.
The law was intended to help keep people housed during the pandemic
The source-of-income protection passed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when additional protections were put in place to keep people housed and prevent further economic fallout.
But almost three years later, it’s unclear if it’s reducing discrimination against Colorado residents, especially people using housing vouchers.
Landlords can’t exclude residents because of their source of income, but the high cost of application fees and credit and background checks can be prohibitive, especially for people who qualify for housing vouchers. People who are eligible for this aid live on some of the lowest incomes in their communities.
The average application fee across the country is $30, according to RentPrep, a company providing tenant screenings for small landlords, which has also reported that landlords have charged up to $200 for applicants applying for housing in desirable neighborhoods.
Real Property Management Colorado, which leases and manages single-family homes, condos, townhomes, multiplexes and small apartment buildings, charges $55 to process an application, according to its website.
The looming expiration date on most vouchers and the nerve-wracking process of applying for a public benefit that is so scarce adds an emotional toll to the financial cost of searching for a place to live, the advocates said.
A common tactic landlords use to exclude voucher participants is making the price of a deposit so high the housing is impossible to afford, even with the federal aid, said Ana Gloom, who works at Housekeys Action Network Denver, which advocates for people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless in the city.
Some landlords will make the price of rent slightly higher than the voucher’s value, which is determined by ZIP code, and set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Although that is legal, it deters voucher participants from living there, said Peter LiFari, chief executive officer at Maiker Housing Partners, a housing authority based in Adams County.
The Colorado Civil Rights Division, within the Department of Regulatory Agencies, enforces the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, including the source-of-income law. The department enforces the law primarily through investigating complaints of discrimination and through mediation and education.
The department’s most recent annual report showed 3% of all housing discrimination complaints filed during fiscal year 2022 were about source of income, up from 1% the year before. The organization is expecting to publish another accounting early next year, said Kelly Wesolosky, outreach, education and community advisor for the Colorado Civil Rights Division.
“It’s really hard to look at that data and feel like you have a full picture,” said Katie O’Donnell, director of communications and public engagement at the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies.
“We get a very small percentage of what’s going on in the community for anything that we’re looking for complaints on,” she said. “But the more we hear from the public, the better job we do at making sure this isn’t happening.”
When people face housing or voucher discrimination statewide, they often don’t report it because they are afraid or don’t know they can, fair housing advocates said.
“They are usually rushing to find another place to try to use the voucher before time runs out, so a lot of them won’t file a complaint because it slows them down,” said Dianna Shimdl, housing coordinator at Connections for Independent Living in Greeley, which helps people with disabilities access public benefits and other services.
The Civil Rights Division is doing outreach and education to help Coloradans understand how to file a complaint, Wesolosky said.
“The number of complaints that get filed about discrimination is the tip of the iceberg,” Marosy added. “It takes courage, it takes energy and it takes the support of a community, for people to file complaints. So many people just accept discrimination and move onto another property.”
Feeling like the clients she serves
Voucher programs help people with very low incomes pay for rent. The voucher participant pays the landlord a portion of their monthly household income and the program pays the landlord the remainder of the rent.
The well-known Housing Choice Voucher Program, formerly called Section 8, is the largest in the country and serves people who earn 50% of the area’s median income or less.
Most people use their housing voucher to rent privately owned apartments or single family homes but people with disabilities can use the subsidy to pay for a room, an assisted living facility or group home, for example.
Other voucher programs are specifically designed to help veterans who are homeless, people with HIV and AIDS and families whose housing instability might cause their children to be placed in foster care.
Colorado has state voucher programs that help households involved in the child welfare system and people with mental illness, among others.
One woman who works at a human service organization dedicated to ending homelessness, domestic violence and child abuse said she has worked in the housing sector for years but didn’t know about the new source-of-income law.
She has used a voucher to help her pay to rent the same house in Lakewood for 14 years, but her landlord recently decided to sell the home and gave her one month to find new housing.
While searching for a new home that will allow her to use her voucher, she has encountered landlords who won’t accept the benefit. One landlord said they don’t want to work with the government, another said they don’t want to deal with the cumbersome paperwork associated with housing vouchers and another landlord said they wouldn’t accept the voucher because it was worth $50 less than the price of rent.
It has cost as much as $60 per application fee, each time she applies for housing for herself and her two kids. She has applied to four rental homes this month and has until the end of December to find housing.
A state law bans landlords from charging application fees higher than their actual screening costs. House Bill 1106 also requires the landlord to give the resident an itemized receipt of their incurred screening expenses.
“I’m totally feeling what my clients feel right now,” the woman said, as she began to cry. “I’m saddened. I feel frustrated and embarrassed.”
She spoke on condition anonymity because, she said, she doesn’t want her colleagues to know she’s struggling to afford housing.
Four people interviewed for this story said the complex public benefits process leaves voucher participants confused about their rights and how the program even works.
Myra Nagy applied for a housing voucher in 2012 while she was living on the streets of Denver and said she was given a one-hour orientation and some paperwork before she was encouraged to find housing.
“I was treated like I didn’t have any knowledge or any education or that I wasn’t able to communicate properly,” she said. “A lot of people see people on the street as lazy people who are addicted to drugs or alcohol who don’t care about what happens to them and so they see it as a waste of time to explain to them what the voucher program is.”
She received a voucher that allows her to live in a building owned by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless for the rest of her life as long as her income qualifies. However, Nagy wants to move to a safer community. But in order to do so, she needs a different housing voucher.
Applying for another voucher will be difficult because the resource is so scarce, she said.
The most recent lottery for housing vouchers through Denver Housing Authority was held Sept. 21 and 22. There are between 600 to 800 vouchers available for the more than 30,000 people who applied in the lottery, said Allison Trembly, director of communications and public affairs for Denver Housing Authority.
Lottery entries are selected randomly beginning this month with applications submitted for processing in 2024, she said.
Boulder Housing Partners opened the application period for its most recent lottery from Oct. 30 to Nov. 3. It received more than 2,200 applications and randomly selected 350 applicants. The organization will process applications over the next nine to 12 months as vouchers become available, said Karen Brunnemer, MTW and federal policy director at the organization.
Similarly, at Maiker Housing Partners in Adams County, there were 4,400 applications during the most recent lottery in July 2022. There are about 3,200 vouchers that remain active and have not yet been assigned, LiFari said. The organization doesn’t plan to reopen the voucher process again until the second quarter of 2024 as employees there continue to process applications from the July lottery, he said.
“We’re not going to open it if we have thousands of people from the most-recent lottery,” LiFari said. “We’ll move through those and give them the opportunity to be selected. Generally, when we have 1,000 people or less in the lottery, we’ll open a new one.”
Trying to house people with vouchers
Jacob Walker worked at Colorado Legal Services as a housing navigator from December 2022 until May. The goal was to help people in the eviction court process, who had a housing voucher, get into housing as soon as possible.
During those months, Walker tried to help 10 people find housing. One single Black mother who was spending almost all of her monthly income on applications was being routinely denied housing, Walker said.
“Trying to get her into a house was the most difficult process,” Walker added. “There was never anything explicitly said but you could hear the prejudice in landlords’ voices and you could hear their reluctance and how defensive they were when they would start being calculating, and really weighing each word, and trying to create some kind of justification to not accept people or make the unit sound like it wasn’t up to standard or something like that. We couldn’t get her into a house.”
By the end of the five-month stint, Walker was able to help a few other people find housing, sometimes because those landlords were eager to have residents fill their empty units, and other times, because Walker, “in a really gritty way,” told landlords they were discriminating against those clients by denying them housing.
“I think only a few of those people felt really secure in their housing,” Walker said. “If people can’t afford rent based on their wages, then wages need to go up, or rent needs to go down and until there’s some sort of equalizing measure, we’re going to continue to see the exact problems we’re seeing now because nothing fundamental is changing.”
Now Walker works for Denver Metro Tenants Union, which helps residents fight for better living conditions.
A need for more housing vouchers
LiFari has not had any clients at Maiker Housing Partners complain about landlords possibly violating the source-of-income provision. Most landlords like the voucher program because it’s a guaranteed payment for them, he said.
“We’ve had record high success rates, meaning once you give a voucher to a participant, the percentage of their ability to not lose the voucher and lease up is record high,” LiFari said.
To help help renters with the lowest incomes, Congress needs to add more funding to the program, he said. Due to funding limitations, only 1 in 4 Americans who are eligible are able to access a housing voucher.
“The only new vouchers that they have been creating are for special populations or folks who are unhoused, veterans, people with disabilities, foster youth — all vital needs — but they’re not expanding the program for family homelessness and people facing housing insecurity,” LiFari said.
Almost every day, LiFari receives emails from Coloradans desperately looking for a housing voucher because housing is too expensive for them. Many of them are earning 30% to 50% of their area’s median income and most are women experiencing domestic violence. “And we can’t serve them because we have thousands of people that are waiting for the same scarce resource,” LiFari said.