KC family had full-time jobs, but no one would rent to them. Can a proposed law help?
Until Tiana Caldwell was diagnosed with a second bout of ovarian cancer last year, her family’s finances and housing were stable. She had no idea they would be homeless within months.
She started treatment, and the bills piled up quickly. She and her husband, Derek, fell behind on their rent, and that summer they were evicted.
“At one point, I did maybe think it would be better if I didn’t make it,” said Caldwell, who is now in remission. “I just couldn’t stop fighting, even when I thought that maybe that was what was best.”
After the eviction, the family was marked. The blemish on their record made landlords wary of renting to them, even though she and her husband held full-time jobs. After months of searching, they found a home and moved in, but on their first night, sewage backed up into the bathtub and toilet. Caldwell said the house was declared uninhabitable. The family was homeless once again.
For about six months, they lived in cheap hotels or stayed with her husband’s relatives. They tried to keep life as normal as possible for their 12-year-old son, AJ, but some things — like having his friends over — weren’t possible.
“He wasn’t able to do any of that, and he couldn’t tell anybody why because he was ashamed,” Caldwell said. “He didn’t want his friends to know.”
Caldwell’s family is just one of 9,000 households who face eviction each year in Jackson County, a rate housing advocates say is a crisis.
She joined KC Tenants, the organization pushing Mayor Quinton Lucas and the City Council to adopt a tenants bill of rights.
“Housing is a human right,” Caldwell said. “Everyone should have somewhere they can be safe and lay their head.”
But landlords and property managers have signaled strong opposition to KC Tenants’ proposals and are pushing instead for legislation addressing rights and responsibilities for both tenants and landlords..
“What we see in the tenant bill of rights — it’s a very one-sided policy,” said Robert Long, president of Landlords Inc. “It’s very punitive toward the housing providers.”
What’s in the tenants bill of rights?
KC Tenants, which formed early this year, last month introduced the proposed bill of rights — drafted along with housing attorneys and Mayor Quinton Lucas’ office. Next month, a City Council committee will head to a community center to host a public hearing for both tenants and landlords.
One of the proposed ordinances includes numerous protections already offered by state and federal law, including bans on discrimination based on race, color, sex, sexual orientation and other protected groups. It also requires that homes be safe and in working order, and it allows tenants to form unions.
Another ordinance would create an office to enforce the rights included in the package. It would also bar landlords from discriminating against tenants based on their lawful source of income, including federal vouchers. Landlords would also be barred from refusing to negotiate with prospective tenants solely on the basis of arrest and conviction history or rental history, including prior evictions.
The proposal, landlords say, would undercut their ability to screen tenants and run stable businesses. Proponents argue landlords would not be required to rent to anyone — only that they would have to give tenants from those backgrounds a chance to negotiate.
Lucas’ office is working toward a third ordinance for the city to provide attorneys for low-income tenants facing eviction. Advocates say the attorneys could negotiate deals to buy tenants more time to make rent and avoid the eviction.
Can landlords still screen tenants?
Caldwell said under the KC Tenants proposals, she might have been provided expert advice or an attorney to fight her eviction. After her eviction, she said, the bill of rights would have afforded her more housing options.
“There are several ways it would have helped and kept me from being homeless while in treatment and maybe saved dignity for my family,” Caldwell.
Landlords have argued that requiring them to negotiate with prospective tenants who may have arrests, convictions or a poor rental track record is tantamount to taking away their right to screen applicants.
Long said he’d prefer a city-led program to make sure tenants pay rent and uphold their responsibilities.
But Lucas said the policy would not require landlords to rent to anyone in particular.
“Let me make this very simple parallel. So we ban racial discrimination in this country,” Lucas said. “What this means is if you see somebody of a different race walk in, you can’t just say, ‘I don’t hire people that look like that.’ What it doesn’t mean is that they automatically get the job, and that’s the same thing that’s happening here.”
“What it says is give everybody a chance.”
Councilman Kevin O’Neill, 1st District at-large, sits on Lucas’ housing committee and said he’d like KC Tenants and landlords to negotiate the policy. Landlords wrongly believe it would bar them from checking credit and rental history, he said.
“I think right now there’s a bad understanding by the landlords that this bill is going to force them to do things that they don’t have to do,” O’Neill said.
Under the proposal, the city would also bar discrimination based on lawful sources of income, meaning a landlord couldn’t refuse otherwise qualified tenants simply because they planned to pay for rent with a federal voucher, known as Section 8.
Jenay Manley, 27, said that would have helped her when she was looking for a new home for herself and her 5-year-old twins. She was on a waiting list for years to receive assistance. When she finally came to the top of the list, she had 30 days to find housing.
For two days, Manley called landlord after landlord, who told her they wouldn’t accept her voucher. On the third day, she had to call in sick and miss a shift at work to continue her search.
“It was embarrassing for people to tell me no, they no longer take vouchers,” Manley said. “It was humiliating for people to say that their place was too nice for my Section 8 voucher, like my kids don’t deserve a nice place to live.”
Finally, she found an apartment and moved in in May.
But she said the proposed bill of rights would allow her to rent from any landlord and prevent people from being “segregated into poor areas.”
Her lack of options “allows my kids to be segregated and red-lined into a certain neighborhood in the Northland,” Manley said.
Long, who said he accepts Section 8 at his properties, said while he understood the challenge renters with vouchers face, he didn’t support the ban on discrimination against recipients. He said landlords often resist accepting Section 8 vouchers because they don’t want to work within the bureaucracy of housing authorities, not to avoid the tenants themselves.
“I think it’s problematic for the city to require everyone to take them,” he said. “Basically, it’s the city requiring people to do business with another entity of the government.”
The previous City Council considered a similar policy earlier this year, but it was stripped from another ordinance and never made it out of committee.
Eviction attorneys
Lucas’ office also plans to introduce an ordinance offering free legal services to low-income tenants facing eviction.
As of now, tenants frequently show up to housing court without attorneys, while landlords have been through the process before and may have their own legal representation.
Several nonprofit legal organizations, including the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom, offer pro bono services for tenants, but they don’t have the staff to represent everyone.
In its rollout, KC Tenants estimated the program would cost $650,000 annually. Lucas’ office supports the proposal, but has not yet identified a source of funds.
Other cities, including New York, have similar programs and say they’ve made the eviction process more equitable. Anthony Cannataro, administrative judge of the New York City Civil Court, said tenants are signing better agreements with their landlords.
Cannataro said tenants who continually fail to pay their rent are “still going to ultimately get an eviction,” but those who might have viable legal arguments against their landlords can get help executing them. For example, he said, a tenant struggling to make rent might be able to pay a smaller amount if the landlord is failing to keep the home in proper condition.
“It’s not that it’s stopped evictions or that it’s really changed the way the process works, but it’s created better and more equitable agreements between the parties,” Cannataro said.
Long said free legal counsel for tenants was the wrong way to spend city money and favored instead an emergency assistance fund for tenants not making rent. If tenants face eviction because they aren’t paying rent, Long said, an attorney may just delay the action or work out a deal with the landlord, which he doesn’t believe to be helpful to either tenant or landlord.
“If we start that working with the member of the community that’s struggling in the beginning, perhaps you avoid winding up in court and all that goes with the eviction,” Long said.
For his part, Long said, if he’s considering evicting a tenant, he’ll have a conversation about possible payment arrangements to avoid an eviction — and going to court.
Home again
Caldwell says it’s been “a big relief” to have a home once again, and she’s been able to invite loved ones and friends to the house.
“It’s those little things that mean the world,” Caldwell said.
Their new home is clean, and any maintenance issues they encounter, which she said have been minor, are fixed right away. She’s grateful her son has stable housing.
“He’s smiling all the time again,” Caldwell said. “He always smiled through it, but this is a different smile.”
Public hearing
Mayor Quinton Lucas’ Special Committee on Housing Policy is expected to hear public testimony on tenants rights proposals at 5 p.m. Dec. 2 at the Mohart Center, near 31st Street and The Paseo.
This story was originally published November 17, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
