FAB Testifies Before Boston City Council on Pervasive Housing Discrimination Against Homeless Families

FAMILYAID BOSTON CITY COUNCIL TESTIMONY
Section 8, Racial and Familial Housing Discrimination
October 13, 2020
Larry Seamans, President, FamilyAid Boston

Thank you, Madame Chair, and members of the City Council and sponsors, for the time to speak to the persistent housing discrimination faced by some of our cities’ most vulnerable residents

For more than 100 years, our agency has been one of the city’s largest providers of services – including housing search, placement and stabilization – for children and parents experiencing housing instability and homelessness. Currently our agency is supporting 2,600 Boston Residents in prevention, shelter and housing programs.  Recently, we have taken on the assessment, housing search and placement for more than 500 Boston families, with Boston Public School children, who have recently obtained housing vouchers from the Boston Housing Authority. Additionally, we are piloting parallel homeless prevention programs for an additional 150 families who are ineligible for state shelter and seeking it instead at Boston Children Hospital’s Martha Eliot Health Center in Jamaica Plain and at Boston Medical Center.

Over the last ten years, FamilyAid Boston staff have placed more than 2,000 children and parents into affordable housing, many through Section 8 or Mass Rental Voucher Program vouchers, HomeBASE and RAFT. The vast majority of our families are of color, and most often headed by single mothers.

Records from our agency confirm the results of the Suffolk Law School study: Pervasive housing discrimination against people of color, familial status and affordable housing vouchers. That discrimination most often comes from smaller landlords who -according to the Boston Foundation’s most recent Housing Report Card – make up 68% of the city’s rental market and who may be unaware – or escape the scrutiny  – of  fair housing compliance.

Seven out of 10 times, FamilyAid Boston clients have experienced some form of discrimination – from implicit bias to outright racism and fair housing violations.

Three out of ten times, our families have experienced outright discrimination as they seek a safe and affordable home for their children: advertising that “prohibits” use of Section 8 vouchers; requiring rent to be fully covered by earned income; mandating additional application documentation and credit scores; jacking up the rent from the original advertised rate upon meeting our clients, and repeatedly not showing up for inspections.

Most other times, the discrimination is more subtle:

• No response to phone or email inquiries from our agency or families;
• Advertising rents that greatly exceed the Small Area Fair Market Rate found in other nearby properties.
• Using the lack of a lead certificate or other alleged property issues to dissuade a family from renting a unit.

While our colleagues at the BHA, Metro Housing, Greater Boston Legal Services, and the Boston Housing Fair Commission all have programs to help families address these wrongs and others after they have found a home, all but one of our  client families who have experienced discrimination have not been willing to file a complaint.

The reason is timing and trust:  Our families know that the housing system has not often been on their side, and they simply do not have the time or wherewithal to engage in a legal process as they struggle to move out of homelessness as quickly as possible. It has been far easier for them to move on to another housing opportunity the to fight the injustice before them.

And so, FamilyAid has had to pivot, to work around small landlords’ biases and discriminatory practices.

It doesn’t take much for landlords to realize who may be calling or emailing to inquire about a unit, when the applicant uses their real name, or when an housing search professional mentions their organization’s name in a call, or sends an email from our internet address. All you need to do is up look FamilyAid Boston on the web to see what we do and who we help.  And so, our staff often call on our client’s behalf using Anglicized names and non-descript, generic emails to gain a visit to the unit.

Once in a unit, our staff come armed with additional information to show the benefit of a guaranteed rent: a positive, in these uncertain economic times.

We offer privately funded incentives to landlords, like an extra month’s rent, to encourage them to consider our clients.

And, we offer to help landlords get the inspection they need, on our dime.

We jump though many hoops to get our families into housing and have been successful, placing more than 60% of our families into housing within one year of their homelessness. While that is among the best rates in the country, it is simply not good enough for our families, whose children experience negative impacts within one month of arrival to shelter.

As a major provider of housing placement services for low-income residents, FamilyAid Boston today asks three things of the council: 1) to establish a municipal fair housing testing program for new developments per today’s hearing, 2) to further advance the development of  low-income and extremely low-income housing and 3) to develop a more effective program to educate and hold small landlords and brokers accountable to meet non-discriminatory, fair housing regulations.

We believe there are many, many good landlords out there. We also believe those that are not, could be better with more awareness, education and greater accountability. We believe requiring purchasers of multi-family units to complete a brief educational session on fair housing; and a public awareness and education campaign about the economic value of Section 8 vouchers, especially in these uncertain times, could go a long way to help our families find a home.

Thank you.