State Housing Secretary Ed Augustus speaks at a press conference announcing an anti-discrimination ad campaign on Dec. 6, 2023. Photo by James Sanna | Banker & Tradesman Staff
Landlords and tenants will soon start seeing ads pop up in their social media feeds and in newspapers declaring that “voucher discrimination is illegal,” part of a new advertising and enforcement campaign aimed at reducing the frequency at which property managers and real estate agents discriminate against people who use programs like Section 8 to pay part of their rent.
State Secretary of Housing and Livable Communities Ed Augustus joined fair housing activists and staff from Suffolk University Law School’s Housing Discrimination and Testing Program to announce the push in a press conference Wednesday. The push comprises a $100,000 social media and print ad campaign and a $500,000 grant to the Fair Housing Alliance of Massachusetts to continue its testing and community education work.
It’s illegal under Massachusetts law for a landlord to refuse to rent an apartment to someone based on where they get the money to pay their rent. Limited testing by the Suffolk Law program from 2018 to 2019 found that real estate agents and landlords refused to show units to undercover housing testers claiming to hold a rental voucher 12 percent of the time if they were white and 18 percent of the time if they were Black.
“Renters are often turned away because landlords don’t want to deal with the cost of complying with the Massachusetts lead law,” Massachusetts Fair Housing Center Executive Director Maureen St. Cyr said at Wednesday’s press conference.
St. Cyr also related stories she and her staff have heard from tenants they’ve represented, like a 10-year Worcester tenant’s building was sold to a new owner and the new property manager sought to evict them because they “didn’t want to deal” with the tenant’s voucher or where a group of Chicopee tenants were evicted by a new, out-of-state investor who thought the renters’ vouchers meant they weren’t able to charge market rate.
“We know these stories happen every day in the commonwealth,” she said.
Few Small Landlords Get Training
In addition to garden-variety classist discrimination, said Greater Boston Real Estate Board CEO Greg Vasil, part of the problem is that the vast majority of small landlords aren’t part of a large company or a trade association, both of which would offer them training on how to avoid discrimination like this.
“It could be almost anyone. The requirements for a [real estate] license are a very low bar to entry,” he said in an interview.
Apartment-owning companies typically try to prevent discrimination by their property managers, he said, due to peer pressure from others in trade associations like GBREB, which largely represents corporate landlords and large property owners.
“For me, anything that can be done to draw attention to Section 8 discrimination is a good thing,” Vasil said.
But Doug Quattrochi, executive director of landlord trade group MassLandlords, questioned whether the state’s ad campaign would work, given the simplicity of the messaging, the complexity of the issues and existing communication challenges between state officials and landlords.
“People don’t want to be evil or illegal, they want to know the right path to walk” and they need formal training to do that, he said in an interview Wednesday morning. “Tonight we’re going to be having a nice dinner in Worcester to tell folks about changes to the state sanitary code and I’m sure a lot of jaws are going to drop because they didn’t get the memo about these changes eight months ago.”
Voucher-Holders ‘Not Competitive’
In addition, Quattrochi said, while his organization successfully lobbied the state legislature to double the state deleading tax credit in its fall tax-relief bill, to $3,000 per unit, that pales in comparison to the $15,000 it tends to cost to make an apartment with lead paint on its windows safe for children to rent, or the $6,000 to $7,000 it costs to de-lead an apartment where the windows have no lead paint on them.
“The lead law has been a smash-hit success in Massachusetts – lead poisoning cases in children have fallen dramatically,” he said, “But here’s the reality. Like I said, it’s a competitive market. If one tenant needs a lead [certification] and the other doesn’t – and they have similar income, credit scores, etc. – the first will out-compete.”
Discrimination against voucher-holders, Quattrochi said, will continue to be a persistent problem until the state and federal government dramatically improve bureaucratic snags that can sometimes keep a landlord waiting for weeks to get their apartment inspected by officials after agreeing to rent it to a voucher-holder.
“There is a problem, Suffolk is not wrong about this. But the way the state administers subsidies, a voucher-holder isn’t competitive with a renter paying cash,” Quattrochi said, even if many voucher-holders wind up being stable, long-term tenants who reliably pay rent on time, typically something many landlords want.
