MO House votes to expand KC domestic violence rental protections statewide

Holly Bickmeyer was just there to take notes, but she decided that she couldn’t stay quiet.

She spoke up last month at a hearing for House Bill 243, which would allow tenants who are victims of domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking to be released from their leases. It would also bar discrimination against rental applicants for past instances of victimization.

Bickmeyer, a legislative aide, testified that she had painfully personal reasons for supporting the bill.

“I’m someone that grew up in a home with domestic violence and I lost my mother at 14 to domestic violence,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “I feel like if something like this had been in place to where we had been able to leave, it’s entirely possible that I would still have my mother today.”

“I’m speaking as someone who has lived through that,” she said. “I can tell you how much of a help something like this would have been. So, it has my support.”

The bill passed the lower chamber Monday by a vote of 151 to 3. It now goes to the Senate.

The measure adopts in part an ordinance enacted by the Kansas City Council last year that allows a tenant to exit a lease by producing a protective order or other legal or medical documents showing that he or she had been a victim of domestic violence or sexual assault.

Unlike the council measure, the House version would allow landlords to include in leases a “reasonable termination fee” for victims to pay. The state law would also set requirements for evidence needed to allow someone out of their lease.

The bill has broad bipartisan support — the House version was introduced by a Republican and the Senate’s by a Democrat — as well as backing from both victim advocacy groups and the associations representing realtors and landlords.

Katie Heinen, a community engagement coordinator for a rape crisis center in Kansas City, said at the hearing that for victims of domestic or sexual violence, the damage can be compounded by the way the system is currently set up. Victims can be tagged as “troubled” tenants and denied housing because of a past history of victimization, she said.

Survivors are frequently shut out of overcrowded emergency shelters and forced into homelessness. Those who find space in shelters stay far longer than they should, or even to return to unsafe homes, Heinen said.

More than half of sexual assaults occur in or near a person’s home, Heinen said, so it’s with “extreme frequency” that women in Missouri right now find themselves trapped by leases in homes they don’t feel safe in.

Many victims who reach out for help mistakenly believe that they are already able to legally exit their leases, said Jennifer Carter-Dochler from the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

The federal Violence Against Women Act allows domestic violence victims to terminate their leases from public housing that receives federal funding, Dochler said, so the Missouri bill would expand that protection for those in private housing.

As of 2016, 24 other states had passed anti-discrimination protections for survivors and 27 had passed the lease-termination piece, Dochler said.

“Why in the hell would you force someone to stay in a bad situation or attempt to force them?” said Sam Licklider, lobbyist for the Missouri REALTORS.

This story was originally published February 19, 2019 at 4:34 PM.