Laws that ban discrimination against voucher holders can push smaller landlords out of the low-income housing market, decreasing the amount of affordable housing.
More cities and states have become concerned with landlords discriminating against people using government housing vouchers. Today 23 states and more than 100 local governments have “source of income,” or SOI, discrimination laws on their books, which typically allow renters to sue landlords who refuse to accept some types of payments, most especially vouchers. This year, for example, Kansas City, Missouri, passed its own SOI ordinance that bans discrimination against tenants based on the source of their rental income.
The desire to protect poor renters is understandable, but there is little reason to believe that SOI laws help them. The research on the benefits of SOI laws is spotty, and the costs they add to landlords renting to the low-income market are substantial. If politicians want to help low-income renters, they should reduce the burdens in the voucher program rather than force more landlords to shoulder them.
Vouchers were introduced in the 1960s as a substitute for traditional public housing programs, whose problems, including spiraling costs and poor government management, were already well known. Soon after, starting with Massachusetts in 1971, states and cities began banning discrimination against voucher holders. These governments treated discrimination against voucher holders as similar to discrimination against people in other categories, such as race or sex.
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Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
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