Justice is blind, but justice is not deaf, which is to say, some poor judge and jury may actually have to listen to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Hartford against a real estate owner and manager, accused of discrimination against the poor and disabled.
Cases such as this one, filed by the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, have a certain museum quality to them. The process of gathering the damning evidence; posing as being poor or disabled or in some other way undesirable; attempting to rent an apartment — and then making the same offer as a white, middle-class creature with appropriate decorum and checks that don’t bounce — has been around for decades.
The underlying plot line in these cases is that landlords, as a rule, have quite clear preferences as to who they would prefer to rent to — and who might well be nothing but trouble. Much federal, state and local law prohibits property owners from being too damn picky about such things — and thus, the investigations and litigation go on and on.
The cases aren’t pretty. Did the landlords really deny the undesirable folks an apartment, or did it just seem that way? In the Hartford case of the moment, the property owner is accused of turning way folks with Section 8 housing vouchers from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; and being unenthusiastic about folks with disability benefits from Social Security as their main source of income to pay the rent. Whether in fact the owner and property manager in this case were bad, bad boys remains to be seen, but it’s a common enough belief in the low-end real estate business that Section 8, in particular, often suggest tenants aren’t going to pretty up the neighborhood — or the particular piece of property they may be living in.
Beyond the complexities of sorting out the evidence in such cases (did the landlord frown when Section 8 was mentioned?), the more sophisticated philosophical debate emerges outside the courtroom, when some folks suggest that landlords should be free to decide who to welcome and who to turn away. One of the ironies in these cases is that the criticism of Section 8 in years past suggested that property owners were overly eager to welcome Section 8 tenants, as an indirect subsidy of properties that wouldn’t exist at all, without the folks walking in the door with their housing vouchers. The Hartford kind of case is more common today: Property owners (and neighbors) may be unenthusiastic about the voucher folks, if the property is sufficiently pretentious to attract a less risky crowd.
As columnist Tim Roland noted in an essay a few years ago in Regulation magazine, “Section 8 has become a pejorative. Out walking their dog, parents will point to a house and whisper to their kids, ‘That’s a Section 8 family.’”
Of course, as a matter of public policy, Section 8 does have its certain charms. The notion that poor folks can wade into a real estate marketplace, with a voucher, to find appropriate housing, as opposed to being shuffled into dreadful “public housing,” is attractive on the face of it. But, of course, a deal requires a handshake from both sides — and many landlords aren’t enthusiastic, whether or not they are willing to say so out loud.
The law is the law — it is illegal to discriminate against folks staggering in the door with various forms of assistance to pay the rent. But the more important policy debate is still occurring outside the courtrooms.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
