With the Baltimore County Council’s 6-1 vote against the source of income discrimination bill, landlords can continue to turn away individuals, families, the elderly and disabled looking to rent apartments and homes with federally-subsidized housing choice vouchers.
District 4 Councilman Julian Jones was the sole council member who supported Bill 46-16 at the Aug. 1 meeting, which brought out dozens of fair housing advocates from churches and non-profit organizations, and people representing management companies, real estate agents and landlords who opposed the bill. Very simply, Jones said, the bill is about “prejudice and discrimination.”
County Executive Kevin Kamenetz was required to introduce the bill as part of a settlement between the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Baltimore County to address discriminatory housing practices.
Baltimore County has more than 6,260 housing choice voucher holders; 90 percent of them are Section 8 and the remaining 10 percent are for veterans, the elderly and the disabled.
The largest concentration of people holding vouchers live on the east side in neighborhoods such as Dundalk, Essex and Middle River, according to the county’s Office of Housing. The second largest number of tenants, 2,525, are clustered in Owings Mills, Gwynn Oak/Woodlawn, Windsor Mill, Randallstown, Reisterstown and Pikesville.
The bill would have prevented landlords and management companies, such as those for the new apartment complexes going up in Cockeysville, from rejecting prospective tenants solely because they would be paying their rent with a voucher. As a result, renters also could have taken advantage of living in “higher opportunity” areas such as Timonium, which currently has just a dozen people using vouchers; White Marsh and Lutherville, which has one, and Mays Chapel, which has six.
Jones said, “If someone gets a voucher today, they have two choices—east side and west side. You can’t go to Towson, you can’t go to Lutherville, you can’t go to Cockeysville because all of those apartments are saying ‘no vouchers.’ If nothing changes, what makes you think that number will not grow. If you disburse it evenly, then it’s not a burden on anybody.”
Landlords could still legally reject an applicant based on other criteria, such as criminal background checks and credit history.
Section 8 is a hot button issue that attracted a lot of debate pro and con. Acknowledging that the intent and benefits of the bill were difficult for some to understand, Jones held a well-attended community forum on July 19 at the Randallstown Library, with Marsha Parham, executive director of the housing office, presenting. “Once I explained the issue, [constituents] understood.”
Mention of “Section 8,” stirs fear and unfairly conjures images of a young African-American woman with a lot of children who will “beat up my kids and break into my shed,” Jones said.
Community members were split on the issue. Some took a “not in my neighborhood” position, commenting that people with housing vouchers were not good neighbors vested in keeping the community safe and clean, and their presence would bring down property values.
Others shared that landlords with properties in areas such as Towson and Lutherville with access to better schools, jobs and quality of life should take more low-income people so they do not continue to be concentrated in the northwest.
Council members explained their points of view. Council Chair Vicki Almond, who represents Reisterstown and Pikesville, said she was conflicted and took issue with the fact that the executive branch did not consult council members regarding details of the bill and negotiations of the HUD settlement agreement from which it’s drawn. “It is concerning for me when such an important issue is unable to be resolved, and is not resolved at the state and federal level, and yet local government is forced to take action,” she said.
Cathy Bevins, whose District 3 includes the east side, felt the bill would increase the number of voucher holders moving into her district. She told Andrea Van Arsdale, director of planning, who testified on behalf of the administration, “Until you can guarantee me that I won’t receive more vouchers through a bill of this sort, I just don’t know how I could ever support this.”
Arsdale responded, “I can’t ever guarantee that. I can guarantee your situation will not change unless you have a bill like this.”
Tom Quirk, who represents Catonsville and parts of Woodlawn, said he heard from constituents in West Edmondale, Edmondson Heights and Gwynn Oak, who had concerns based on their own personal experiences.
“I think the bill can be passed with more time and effort given to some of the legitimate concerns,” Quirk said. Examples are exempting landlords from the bill if they had one or two smaller properties, streamline the process for landlords to rent to receive housing vouchers, and automatically designating a certain percentage of larger number of properties for housing vouchers. “I definitely support the goal. There should be more discussion to craft a better bill to achieve the overall goals.”
Shortly after the meeting, Kamenetz tweeted that he was disappointed the bill did not pass, but was “encouraged by the incredible support that it received over the past few months.” Calling the bill good public policy, he said, “The deconcentration of poverty remains a very important goal, and one to which I am committed.”
According to the terms of the agreement, the bill must be reintroduced after Maryland 2018 gubernatorial elections.
Del. Stephen Lafferty has co-sponsored similar state legislation, House Bill 769, the Home Act of 2016, which also extended to other real estate transactions, such as home sales, and broadened the definition of source of income to inheritance, gifts and pensions. The bill failed.
“People have to better understand the value [of the issue]. A lot of it is education,” Lafferty said. “I’m hopeful individual council members will reach out to advocates to get better educated, to better understand the data and better understand the implications and really think harder about some of the testimony about how vouchers have made a difference in their lives. It’s a very difficult political issue. Baltimore County is a very hyper-segregated county where discrimination has been rampant.”
Jones said, “We have landlords who accept vouchers who voted against the bill. Some landlords don’t want tenants to have choices. They want them to stay right there [in certain areas and complexes].
“I did my best to convince people,” Jones said. “I think was the right thing to do.”