Five years after California lawmakers banned landlords from refusing to rent to tenants who use housing vouchers, new undercover tests show most Southern California landlords are still discriminating against voucher holders.
The California Civil Rights Department sponsored the testing, which was carried out last year by the L.A.-based Housing Rights Center. Results announced Thursday showed that 54% of rental properties tested in L.A. and Ventura counties discriminated against tenants using federal housing assistance vouchers, commonly referred to as Section 8.
“There are some instances where people say openly discriminatory things, like, ‘No, we don’t accept Section 8,’” said Kevin Kish, director of the California Civil Rights Department.
The results from tests of 54 different properties showed that landlords outright refused to accept vouchers in 45% of the instances where voucher holders faced discrimination.
In the other 55% of cases, discrimination was more subtle. Landlords steered voucher holders toward less desirable apartments, or gave them less favorable lease terms compared with tenants not using a voucher.
Landlord advocates said the results were too limited to fully capture what’s happening in the region’s rental housing market. But fair housing advocates said the testing clearly shows discrimination is not a thing of the past.
“These barriers are often invisible to individuals who are looking for housing,” Kish said. “If we aren’t testing for them, then we don’t know that they’re there.”
How fair housing tests work
Fair housing groups across the country carry out these tests by deploying pairs of people posing as prospective tenants. These testers share many similarities, but differ according to legally protected…
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