Obama Admin Tells Landlords They Can’t Refuse To House Criminals

[Geee]

Daily Caller:

The Obama administration released a warning Monday telling the nation’s landlords that it may be discriminatory for them to refuse to rent to those with criminal records.

 

The Fair Housing Act doesn’t include criminals as a protected class, but the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) says refusing to rent based on a criminal record is a form of racial discrimination, due to racial imbalances in the U.S. justice system.

 

“The Fair Housing Act prohibits both intentional housing discrimination and housing practices that have an unjustified discriminatory effect because of race, national origin, or other protected characteristics,” say HUD’s newly-released guidelines. “Because of widespread racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, criminal history-based restrictions on access to housing are likely disproportionately to burden African-Americans and Hispanics. While the Act does not prohibit housing providers from appropriately considering criminal history information when making housing decisions, arbitrary and overbroad criminal history-related bans are likely to lack a legally sufficient justification.”

 

[Geee]

SEN. COTTON RESPONDS TO LATEST HUD OVERREACH

 

We’ve discussed how the Obama administration, through disparate impact theory, seeks to coerce employers into the assuming the risk of hiring criminals. It does so by arguing that African-Americans are overrepresented among ex-cons, and thus that excluding applicants based on criminal records has a disparate impact on this group.

 

So far, to my knowledge, this approach has yielded little if any success in court. However, it may well be that some employers have hired criminals it otherwise would have rejected in order to avoid being dragged into court.

 

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/04/sen-cotton-responds-to-latest-hud-overreach.php