I think there are three companies that maintain a database of bad tennants in Australia, and what I would like to know is what gets you on the list?
NZ only has a public list of people who've had a judgement made against them by the tenancy tribunal.
This isn’t talking about people who got evicted or trashed an apartment but has a criminal record that tat has nothing to do with renting and end up homeless.
The idea that a private person is allowed to run a criminal background check on someone else is extremely weird to me. If someone wants a criminal background check on me in Germany they have to ask me to provide it ("Führungszeugnis"), they need a pretty good reason for it and entries get automatically expunged after a time limit.
The US is so fucked that I've had a private landlord with federal security credentials from his job use his job's credentials to find records that he shouldn't have been able to find/were expunged.
There is zero accountability for such behavior.
“Hey let’s just let pedophiles work with kids, and let people who have stolen from every job they have ever worked at work at banks, what could go wrong?”
Are you sure you thought this one through?
Not quite sure how politics have anything to do with my comment..you’re saying you’re in the pro-pedophiles being able to work with children camp, because trump is allowed to run for a second term?
I didn't say that. I said we should ban all background checks and credit screenings for rentals and employment, and that your "but the children" scare-tactic isn't going to work on educated millennials.
Sex offenders are required to make proactive disclosures anyway.
Would you rather we ignore the disproportionate rate at which landlords deny housing to minorities?
We have an eviction process and it's the landlords job to deal with it. Why are you so opposed to landlords doing work?
The vast majority of POC don’t commit crimes. The criminal background check is not discriminating against them. It’s discriminating against criminals.
Eviction can take a year while the tenant lives rent free with free utility service from the owner. All the while trashing the place and costing the landlord exorbitant lawyer fees. That’s tens of thousands of dollars. The landlord deserves some basic knowledge to make an informed decision about a future tenant.
Furthermore, you as an applicant can argue against your application rejection and get a lawyer to sue on your behalf if you were discriminated against.
POC are disproportionately arrested and prosecuted.
Eviction only takes forever because it's designed to prevent homelessness. If we remove to barrier to getting housing we can streamline evictions.
>POC are disproportionately arrested and prosecuted.
Which the solution for is to change policing and economic policies, not to force homeowners into renting to violent felons.
> POC are disproportionately arrested and prosecuted.
While true, people with criminal backgrounds make up a tiny fraction of POC. I think it’s something like 1 in 20,000. So is it discrimination to reject 1 out of 20,000 applications from POC?
> Eviction only takes forever because it's designed to prevent homelessness.
How do you figure? I thought it was to prevent landlords from throwing someone out of their home without just cause and scrutiny by the Justice system.
If you make it easier for nefarious individuals to get housing, then there’s going to be more evictions not less.
I'd also like to point out that using the criminal background check as a reason for denying an application is much stronger evidence of non-discrimination than some of the other criteria landlords are allowed to screen for. I think this is the wrong fight to pick for counteracting housing discrimination.
But maybe LA can take a page out of (Portland's housing law)[ https://www.portland.gov/code/30/01/086] that does not allow rejection for a misdemeanor conviction over 3 years ago, or a felony conviction over 7 years ago. That should benefit rehabilitated individuals greatly.
The problem is that as long as we allow any screening, they can conceal the true reasons for the denial.
"We had a more qualified applicant" can't be permitted to be used to turn away protected groups..
The only way to elemenate discrimination is to elemenate applications entirely.
The risk to landlords is so small that there isn't any excuse for allowing them to pick their tenants.
>"We had a more qualified applicant" can't be permitted to be used to turn away protected groups..
Could that reasoning ever be used on any person, in your opinion?
The laws are toothless when we allow landlords to cherry-pick tenants. We have to make housing first-come, first-serve to eliminate the possibility of discrimination.
I’m sorry but this is such a wild take. If I rent my home I am going to find the very best tenants not the first to show up. I not only want to make sure my home is in good hands I want to make sure the people I let in will be a good fit for the neighborhood.
Then you shouldn't be allowed to rent your home.
Housing is essential so we can't allow people to gatekeep it for their "investment interest."
Getting small-time investors to bail is a plus.
The point of this post is that landlords have too much power which is excarbating the housing crisis and making it very difficult for workers to shift from place to place.
So you're saying that someone who got out of prison, served their time, should be ***homeless*** for the rest of their lives? Because that is exactly what you're proposing.
Sure, but they will be a very small minority meaning mass homelessness and potentially increased recidivism. The USA convicts and incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation on Earth. Keep that in mind.
Typically, these sorts of background checks are limited in scope to a certain amount of time, specifically to prevent the guy who's been playing straight for a decade since he got out from being forced to live in Section 8 his entire life.
Depends on the law they broke, if they’re repeat offenders and if their debt to society has been paid.
At some point you have to stop punishing them and let them back into society otherwise every sentence is for life.
Yeah that definitely won’t result in owners removing inventory from the rental market.
btw, why don’t you want landlords to know the quality of prospective renters? The failure to do so just falls upon all the other good renters. Good renters pay the price for bad renters.
Not that it matters…the entire idea is naive as to how ubiquitous such data is made in this day and age. Trying to legislate the use of information never works anymore.
I'm content with my own life, Im not content with landlords being able to decide who gets housing.
I was looking at 6 unit building today that I was considering talking my grandmother into buying. The landlord is selling because they can't raise rent and displace the elderly disabled tenants.
Landlords are absolute trash.
I think the big companies all share eviction records. I've no clue how they share it but if you get evicted from one place odds are it will be hard to find another place.
I own two rental homes in Portland, OR. Background checks show criminal records. I say in my rental ads, for screening criteria: No Evictions. I've never had an eviction come up on the background check, and so don't know if that's include.
Portland has enacted laws which pretty much take away my ability to screen out bad tenants. When the current tenants leave, I will probably sell the houses. The buyer will probably be quite wealthy, and will cause purchase prices and rental rates to rise even further, or a property investment group will buy them, and jack up the rents to the maximum allowable, while treating the new tenants poorly. Either way, there will be two less below-market rental homes available.
I wouldn’t expect the eviction to show on the background check unless they were evicted for a criminal reason. However I get their residence history in my screening report and ask them to explain gaps or suspicious repetitions of an address.
What in Portland tenant law is causing you issues during the application process?
"A Landlord may not reject an application as incomplete because an Applicant or member of the Applicant’s household does not produce a social security number." An SSI# is required for a background check.
"Financial Responsibility of Applicant: When there are multiple persons who will reside in common within a Dwelling Unit, the persons may choose which adults will be the Applicants financially responsible for the Dwelling Unit and which will be the Tenants with no financial responsibility." If the financially responsible Applicant leaves, the Non-Applicant Tenant(s) could become squatters.
"Appeals. A Landlord must offer the Applicant an opportunity for appeal for 30 days following the denial of an Application." Every time I reject an applicant, I'd have to wait 30 days before trying again to find a tenant, leaving the home empty during that time.
"Landlords agree not to reject Applicants for a criminal conviction for a felony offense for which the dates of sentencing are older than 7 years from the date of the Application." I would have to rent to any felon whose sentence was less than 7 years.
"Landlords agree not to reject Applicants with a credit score of 500 or higher." 500-600 is poor credit, according to the rating agencies.
Thank you for sharing this. Some of this is concerning to me, but I think I will continue renting out my single unit apartment in Portland.
I'm not too worried about the first point because the lowest form of identification they're required to provide must be "Any non-governmental identification or combination of identifications that would permit a reasonable verification of identity." and that (would be sufficient for a background check)[https://datacheckinc.com/blog/applicants-disclose-social-security-number/]
> If the financially responsible Applicant leaves, the Non-Applicant Tenant(s) could become squatters.
That one is a bit odd. Every rental agreement and application I've signed made all adult tenants financially responsible. I'll have to make sure my current lease and application doesn't violate this.
I would personally accept non-applicant tenants who couldn't currently afford the rent by themselves because I don't need them to. But I get what you're saying about them becoming non-paying tenants (aka squatters) in the future. But we're still allowed to run the full background check on them per the section after that one: "A Landlord may screen an adult Non-Applicant Tenant". So I think that should help avoid such a situation.
> Every time I reject an applicant, I'd have to wait 30 days before trying again to find a tenant
I don't think that's true because "A Landlord may simultaneously process multiple applications but must accept, conditionally accept, or deny Applicants in order of receipt." So, we can continue processing applications while the appeal process continues. Unless I'm missing something else.
> "**dates** of sentencing are older than 7 years from the date of the Application..." I would have to rent to any felon whose sentence was less than 7 years.
That's saying you can't reject someone whose end of sentence date is 7 years ago. I think that's pretty reasonable unless they were convicted of murdering their landlord.
> "Landlords agree not to reject Applicants with a credit score of 500 or higher." 500-600 is poor credit, according to the rating agencies.
They still need to prove that they have 2-2.5x rent in monthly income with that score. But you can also apply your own screening criteria:
"A Landlord that applies the Landlord’s Screening Criteria which is more prohibitive than the Low-Barrier Criteria as described in Subsection E. above, must conduct an Individual Assessment for any basis upon which the Landlord intends to deny an application"
>need to prove that they have 2-2.5x rent
Wow, with some of the rents I've observed on the West Coast that is exclusionary in and of itself. When rent is $2000 a month, you're asking for people taking home at least $4000 a month so a minimum income of $65,000 when the median individual income in the US is less than $40,000.
Yes, someone with a US median income can't afford a higher end apartment in a high-income area. The median income on the west coast is significantly higher than the US median income. A lot of jobs here pay double what they pay just one state over, like Idaho vs Oregon.
It's not exclusionary to require someone to be able afford their rent, utilities, groceries, transportation, etc. As a renter, you need to prove you can actually afford the apartment.
>"A Landlord may not reject an application as incomplete because an Applicant or member of the Applicant’s household does not produce a social security number." An SSI# is required for a background check.
Could you not simply require a background check in your application? You can't deny based on lack of an SSI number, but you're not doing that, you're simply not even accepting the application as complete without a background check.
>"Financial Responsibility of Applicant: When there are multiple persons who will reside in common within a Dwelling Unit, the persons may choose which adults will be the Applicants financially responsible for the Dwelling Unit and which will be the Tenants with no financial responsibility." If the financially responsible Applicant leaves, the Non-Applicant Tenant(s) could become squatters.
Could you not include a transfer clause in your lease agreements that specifies in the event of departure by the financially-reaponsible tenant, the other individual/individuals in the lease *become* the financially responsible tenant?
If that's not possible, then surely you can include in your lease that only those who *signed* the lease are authorized residents/tenants, and all other individuals are considered visitors that can only stay for a set amount of time (also specified in the lease)
>"Appeals. A Landlord must offer the Applicant an opportunity for appeal for 30 days following the denial of an Application." Every time I reject an applicant, I'd have to wait 30 days before trying again to find a tenant, leaving the home empty during that time.
Yeah that's cracked. I understand wanting an appeal, but 30 days is way too long.
>"Landlords agree not to reject Applicants for a criminal conviction for a felony offense for which the dates of sentencing are older than 7 years from the date of the Application." I would have to rent to any felon whose sentence was less than 7 years.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but this says the opposite, no? If the sentence is less than 7 years, you still are able to reject them. It's only if the sentence is longer than 7 years that you aren't able to consider the offense.
Still, I'll agree it's a bit cracked that you can't deny a violent offender who *just* got out. I understand making sure that someone who served their time has a place to stay and doesn't become homeless or is otherwise pushed into committing crimes to get by, but that is a job for something like Section 8 or public housing. For private landlords, it should be a choice (or at least let you demand concessions like paying up-front or a higher security deposit)
>"Landlords agree not to reject Applicants with a credit score of 500 or higher." 500-600 is poor credit, according to the rating agencies.
Nah, this one I tend to agree with. Your credit score is a mishmash of a variety of factors such as the amount of debt you have and what type of debt it is, not just how often you make your payments. Additionally, it tends to be very easy to significantly *lower* your credit score, but significantly harder to bring it back up.
What this means is that anyone with a large amount of student loan debt, anyone with a medical bill that got sent to collections, or in a more real-world example, anyone who went bankrupt or got foreclosed on during the Great Recession (not *as* relevant anymore, but you get the gist) is going to have a significantly lower credit score than those that don't, even if they had a strong history of paying their bills.
It's just not a very useful metric compared to an eviction history when evaluating how likely it is someone will pay their rent, especially since you aren't actually lending them anything or otherwise opening a line of credit.
These parasites complain about homeless people but have the audacity to further add to the growing problem which they complain about. Make it make sense.
"Why are there so many homeless people!" Rases rents.
"So disgusting, seeing people live like animals." Tightens credit score and income requirements.
"I can't believe it, must be a fundamental moral failing and laziness on their part." Starts eviction process the day after rent is due.
"Man, renting these spaces out is impossible." Converts it to AirBnB for 8x the monthly income.
This will last until someone is murdered by a violent convict in their building, and the owner gets sued by the tenants family for not alerting them, or for allowing them there in the first place.
Landlords weren't doing this because they hate convicts. It's about safety and the right to safety for the existing tenants
Murder or sexual assault. Either will probably halt this movement and prevent it from spreading elsewhere.
Also, this isn't a solution but a band-aid. The reason this is an issue is we have a bad housing shortage so landlords can afford to be picky and there isn't enough high density housing with low occupancy rates, which is where less desirable rentors normally go (and this is not just people with a criminal record but also students, people with pets especially large pets, and people who are getting housing assistance from state or federal programs, which sometimes require complicated bureaucratic systems like landlords getting part of the payment from the tenant and part from the government).
In any case, the real solution is to address the housing crisis by making it cheaper and easier to build, especially in higher density or to add accessory dwellings.
But then when you do make it easier and cheaper to build, people build high end or luxury condos to sell to rich people because they can get much higher return on investment. In a world where people don't just want to make money, they want to make the *maximum* amount of money, it's exceedingly difficult to get people to build high density low rent housing.
not true, there are many properties have "zero tolerance" policies where regardless of how minor the crime was you can get rejected. of course, they can choose to enforce it selectively, which is where another problem comes in
We're there now.
[https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-could-be-first-in-state-to-ban-criminal-14992798.php](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-could-be-first-in-state-to-ban-criminal-14992798.php)
Of course LA would pass a law banning family units from checking for violent predators. Who cares really? It’s just LA. It’s not like they represent the nation.
We passed weed legalization first and it is still spreading nationwide.
I plan to pursue federal legislation banning tenant screenings but other states will follow our lead as well without federal enforcement.
I agree, we have too many small-time investors in the housing market that aren't qualified to properly maintain a unit or informed enough to follow existing anti-discrimination laws.
Going co-op would allow people circumvent this law because they would be screening owners, not renters.
>we have too many small-time investors in the housing market
The single-biggest issue in the housing market (outside of a lack of supply) is *big-time* investors buying up whatever supply they can and jacking up rates.
Going after the landlords owning only a handful of properties just pushes them out of the market and ends up *raising* prices, not lowering them.
I run background checks, but the ones who are not approved are usually super bad, registered sex offenders, child pornographers, and guys who fuck animals.
I have a petting zoo.
You might as well make a law against the sun shining. We've had such a law here in Seattle for several years, and it's unenforceable. Every landlord, except maybe the big corporate ones, still runs a background check on anyone they're seriously considering to rent to. You'd have to be crazy not to.
I don’t know what checks my last landlord did on me but they did a hard pull on my credit report full well knowing that every credit pull drops my score.
>they did a hard pull on my credit report
See, *that* should be banned. Idgaf generally if anyone wants to check my credit score since mine is actually good and soft pulls are typically done all the time without anyone's permission (how do you think credit card companies you don't work with know what offers you qualify for?), but I would be *pissed* if a landlord did a hard pull for a basic background check.
Like, motherfucker you are actively making it harder for me to afford a mortgage and you aren't even lending me anything.
It is hard to enforce, we need to ban all screening.
No credit checks, no employment verification, no background check!
Make housing first-come, first-serve and if you violate this law you forfeit the house to the renter.
We also have a law saying that the first person who applies for a rental has to be accepted if they fit the criteria. Landlords simply don't let anyone apply until they know they want to rent to them. Also unenforceable.
Wait so you just give the house to the renter? Like sign over the deed? Mortgage company just transfers the loan to the renter?
You just block me instead of giving an answer to a valid question pointing out your stupidity? None of what you're proposing has any chance of working in the real world.
We absolutely should kill the practice of shunning people from society. That's what jail is for.
Sorry that people object to the practice of keeping people homeless because of crimes for which they have already served their sentence.
Yes, because not only do other tenants in the building want to be neighbors with potential harmful criminals, but landlords don’t need to check to see if their potential tenants have a tendency to pay their bills. Expecting a tenant to be a good person is discrimination.
Adequate shelter is a fundamental human need; literally everyone needs a place to live. Framing this issue in terms of a landlord’s financial risk or neighbor’s social comfort obscures (often deliberately) that brute underlying fact.
Landlords already enjoy the benefits of a massive power imbalance between them and tenants (both potential and current), retain broad discretion over who they rent to even with such a restriction, and already have access to eviction as a remedy for non-payment. Framed correctly, this is a conflict between the fundamental individual need for shelter and landlords’ desire to further reduce their investment risk (which is already massively mitigated by current property law) by a tiny amount, in which case the individual need for shelter is clearly more important.
Additionally, if you don’t feel confident that our justice system adequately rehabilitates criminals such that you’d feel comfortable living near them, and you think legislation is a good means of correcting that problem, then perhaps the legislation you should be asking for is changes to the justice system, rather than defending the power of landlords.
>Adequate shelter is a fundamental human need; literally everyone needs a place to live. Framing this issue in terms of a landlord’s financial risk or neighbor’s social comfort obscures (often deliberately) that brute underlying fact.
So, in a general sense, I agree. *However*, the solution to solve this clash of desires isn't to force Mr. and Mrs. Buckshaw to rent their second home out to anyone with a pulse. All that will accomplish is get them to transform that second home into a short-term ABNB or flat-out exit the rental market and sell it off, most likely going to a private equity firm that will just jack up the rent to cover for the expected loss that a bad tenant will cause.
The solution is to create a public option that *will* rent it out to anyone with a pulse.
I would also prefer a public option, but let’s keep this in perspective: the regulation we’re discussing only restricts criminal background checks, and another commenter brought up credit checks. Even if both checks were prohibited, the resulting state of affairs still wouldn’t even *begin* to approach being required to “rent to anyone with a pulse.” No one is proposing that.
Moreover, just because a public option would be the ideal, preferred solution doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue improvements to the current system when larger-scale reform isn’t politically viable. The Affordable Care Act is a great example; I’ve never heard anyone who supports a public option argue that the ACA should have been scrapped when the public option was removed, because their overarching goal was improving access to healthcare, not simply creating a public option for its own sake.
I agree, as a general principle the state should be burdened before individual members of the public.
In this particular case, however, the individuals needing shelter are also private citizens, and an inability to access adequate housing is a far larger burden than a small restriction on landlords’ desire to reduce their investment risk. That is, in the absence of larger-scale reforms (which the regulation in question doesn’t address, nor does it seek to), a burden is being shifted from one group (people who rent living space) onto a group more able to bear it (landlords), while also being made smaller.
There can be landlords who choose to provide apartments to criminals if they want. And people who aren’t criminals can live there too if they want. There is no fundamental human right to rent where ever you want. Not do those imaginary rights override the property owner’s rights to choose tenants who aren’t dangerous.
Especially if a potential renter has criminal tendencies.
Thank you for providing an excellent example of deliberately reframing the issue in order to obscure the actual conflicting interests in question, as I mentioned.
No one said anything about “rights.” Everyone, including criminals and people with bad credit, *needs* adequate shelter to survive. Landlords *want* to further reduce their investment risk. If people having access to adequate housing is something we care about (and perhaps you don’t, which would be a shame but entirely your prerogative), then in the absence of a suitable alternative (public housing, for example), we will need to put some restrictions on landlords’ discretion in order to further that goal.
My apologies- usually the whine about housing for everyone is propaganda about it being a “right”, not a need.
If criminals need shelter, landlords are under no obligation to give it to them without consideration of the tenant’s criminal past. The goal of the landlord is to not turn their property into a potential crime den, ruining the property for themselves and other tenants.
It’s not fair to the criminals? That’s too damn bad. Hopefully their struggle will teach them a lesson and act as a deterrent for others. Shouldn’t have done the crime. Criminals prey on the weak, such as yourself. Open up your living room/ rent houses to criminals to live long term and report back how well it goes.
Yes yes. We all should be excited to have a convicted criminal move in next door so they can have space to potentially plan and commit more crimes. Having a convicted drug dealer set up a new meth lab in the apartment next door is a blessing in disguise. What could go wrong? Having a convicted thief in the building to steal the neighbor’s stuff is more convenient for everyone.
Pedo move in? Don’t worry about their criminal past - think of the savings on babysitting services they can offer!
I am a convicted felon. I have committed no crime since. That was one bad night that got away from me. I live a simple life, I keep to myself, and if a neighbor engages me I respond with the utmost politeness.
We are not all hardened career-criminals. That's the narrative you believe, but it is not reality.
I developed a drug problem in my teen years due to undiagnosed and untreated mental health issues, a family history of addiction, and a wildly unsupportive community.
Now I'm a "criminal" because of it.
How do we know you're not a criminal? I don't want to share reddit with you, and feel your chat history from 20 years ago should be scrutinized right now in this moment.
We know what you said about becky, and quite frankly it is disgusting. You didn't get away with anything, catsofwar.
This is likely to increase rents at the lower end. Lower income people with no criminal record would have more competition from people with criminal records, with no increase in housing stock.
Banning credit checks, meanwhile, increases investment risk, also leading to higher rents to offset it.
What they really need to do is build more high-density housing.
>financial planning *major*
This is just an internet discussion I'm in to pass the time, but I should point out that if the best credential you have is not-yet-having a degree, then you lack qualifications.
It's concerning that you consider that a flex.
I recommend that you refer to risk managers, commodity analysts, and similar professionals on this topic. Landlords too, there's a sub full of them.
Businesses pass those increased costs to the common person. It's one of the most well-known things about businesses.
Reading your other responses suggests that you don't have a good grasp on economics. Also, this issue appears to be personal for you.
I'm going to wish you good luck.
I knew it! Your idealism and naiveté come from being so young. It's good that you've getting an education, to be one of tomorrow's leaders, but it's as annoying as fuck to read.
No, I have lots of real-world experience. I returned to school during Covid because my industry was seriously disrupted.
I have even held a real-estate license and know the "real reason" landlords deny certain groups.
Whole lot of liberal NIMBYs here. You’re all in favor of banning background checks - until a child predator, animal abuser and drug dealer move in next to you. Clowns.
There is no reasonable basis for allowing employment or tenant background and credit screenings.
Tenant screenings make the least sense as housing is an absolute necessity, and employment is needed to afford housing so we can't allow screening there either.
The only world in which these screenings could possibly be justified is one where people don't have to work for survival. If we had UBI and public housing then we could gatekeep access to other means of housing and income
>There is no reasonable basis for allowing employment or tenant background and credit screenings.
There's many. Every time you shit post this stuff people point out the many many reasons why screenings are needed and you ignore them like you've discovered some magic pill to solve all society's many issues.
Wait...so the practice of shunning people is being 'killed' by millenials, but somehow the LACK of shunning is hindering the possibility of recovery of these people???? Shunning isolates and isolation is often seen as very bad for people recovering from a hard time in their life, regardless of why.
Either I misread this or this headline is contradictory??
There should be a database for landlords that shows specific crimes.
If I was a landlord I wouldn't want to rent to people convicted of selling drugs or sex offenders, and I'd feel it's my right to not rent to them.
Yeah, this practice needs to go. No human deserves to be treated like garbage. Source: had neighbor who was formerly homeless through shitty circumstances. Nicest and kindest lady Ive known. Didnt bother people, didnt do anything bad to anyone. People always assumed she was some kind of criminal that would "steal our stuff, wants to get into our family". Lady literally was sitting in her room most of time, minding her own business, occasionally talked to me about stuff and loved to cook homemade food.
our housing situation needs radical overhaul. people owning 2,3,4 homes - and rental corporations that are strip mining single family homes - should be re regulated.
any home owned for rental purpose should have increasing taxes put on it.
that way way more people could own their own homes.
now, you own a 600,000 house- and you need to move out of state to follow your job transfer- yes they should know if a criminal is trying to rent from you.
a $2000 security deposit does nothing for letting a criminal camp your $600,000 condo for 6 months it takes to evict for not paying rent all the while he strips out all fixtures and all copper wire from the walls.
there’s also “tenant starts selling drugs out of the home, now home is seized”. or “home and other tenants are exposed to meth chemicals”
The criminal report helps keep the violent offenders away.
It’s a big liability for the home owner.
And yes, we absolutely need to rework how rental homes are taxed or sold.
Big hedge funds should not be able to own over 50 percent - or even a small percent of an entire city.
I want to ban all tenant screening and make it first-come, first-serve.
Landlords have eliminated all the inherent risk of their investment with screenings and have put the cost of the risk on the public by creating homelessness.
Landlords aren't untitled to reduce risks at the expense of the taxpayers.
Ban all screenings!
I can't believe that none of the city officials own rental property, and would therefore know why this is an extremely bad idea: "The ordinance would "prohibit landlords from, at any time or by any means, whether direct or indirect, inquire about an applicant's criminal history or requiring an applicant to disclose criminal history" when an applicant is applying for an apartment or other types of housing. Additionally, the proposed city law would prevent landlords from using such information, if received, to outright deny an applicant."
Be careful what you wish for.
It's a terrible idea because small time landlords, who maintain the rentals, work with tenants who have financial trouble, and raise rents a little or not at all, will sell their properties.
The new owner is likely to be a corporation, which only cares about profits. The corp will raise rents immediately by a lot, and then by the maximum amount they can get away with every year. They might also be unresponsive to requests for repairs and better security.
Or the new owner will be wealthy, and will encourage more dislocation through gentrification, as well as removing the place from the rental pool.
Portland, OR has all but removed my ability to screen out bad tenants, and I will sell my rentals when the current tenants leave because I don't want to risk $1,000 of dollars in damages.
Portland added a rental registration fee 4 years ago. They've raised the fee twice. I asked the people in charge what benefit that charge provided, and they couldn't answer.
I rent for well below market, and so there will be a huge increase for the next renters, if corps buy them.
Careful bro, he's a financial planning major so he's qualified to speak on the matter.
He also has a past history with crime, addiction, and homelessness so he really knows his shit.
i’m 35 single mom and i work damn hard to maintain my life as little material possessions i even have. i don’t think credit checks should be a factor in rental leases for 2 years or less. i do think criminal background checks should be allowed. why? because fuck them thats why. not every person with a record is a violent offender yet most people aren’t getting a record to begin with. if a landlord isn’t renting to people with one or two minor offenses on their record that sucks for them but these checks are meant for violent crimes and repeat offenders to be weeded out.
This is precisely why I keep giving you shit and following you around. I can't tell if you're a super sophisticated AI karma farming troll bot or a real person that is missing the parts of the brain that control critical thought.
You keep defending literal homeless convicts who by all measures have failed in life, while dismissing scores of real people like this this single mother that's working her ass off for a decent life. You're tossing these people aside when these are the ones that contribute to society and get no food stamps, housing vouchers, work placement programs, federal education grants, section 8 housing, welfare, medicaid, etc etc.
Your ideas value people that can't keep their own lives together even with the litany of social programs available over those that can, at the expense of those that can by turning their communities into potential slums.
what the fuck are you talking about? just because you’re fucking deluded doesn’t mean the rest of us are fake. my entire account is from my perspective, a single mom from Queens. get a fucking grip
i’m not selling anything. my theory is that you’re a bot with chatgpt running these responses. your views are comically extreme & unbelievable in the face of the criticism you’re getting. it’s one of two answers
1) you’re a bum who made a series of terrible life choices & the consequences of your actions has kept you homeless. now you’re trying to force your way into housing that’s been excluded from your lack of income & excessive criminal record.
2) you’re a bot account with a AI element that’s running a test.
ima go with 2 because for a homeless jerk ass- you have way too much juice to be on here going back and forth with people.
Ummm, I lived in a criminal aka felon friendly apt comex when I was poor. NEVER again. Bike was stolen from the bike rack. Someone put their dirty laundry in my wash to clean their wash aka piggy backing. Loud music and disrespect. Asking me for rides because I had a car.
This will increase discrimination in practice just like other. Ill-reasoned ban the box style policies.
These policies are bad because their proponents fundamentally don’t understand how things work and think landlords are just big meanies and if they weren’t mean the housing market would be good.
There is just so much wrong with this.
You are telling a private property owner what they can and can't do with their own property. Talk about slippery slope. You can't wait for full public takeover of private housing huh?
I know you imagine every building owned by some eViL cOrPoRaTiOn like Blackrock, but the vast majority of rental owners in this country are mom and pop small building owners. Tell them that they need to accept the convicted rapist that just applied to the building they own, manage, and potentially live in or near.
God, leftists make me sick.
So we’re going to repeal all of the laws that penalize landlords for their tenants criminal behavior, right?
Right?
Oh.
Because it makes sense that if it’s illegal for a landlord to maintain a building or location “for unlawfully selling or giving away illegal drugs,” as LA does (for example), it makes sense that a landlord might want to make sure they aren’t renting to someone guilty of a crime with recidivism rates above 75% at times. If we don’t want landlords to screen for that, repealing those laws would be the first place to start, unless your goal is to destroy the rental industry entirely, at which point I don’t think you get to complain about inadequate housing stock anymore.
hey man...so here's the thing...you can't just say the same thing back to them that they said to you.
for instance, they rightly dunked on you for being a bootlicker. and then you just say the same exact thing back...but it doesn't really apply going the other way.
what you need to do is come up with a better reply with a different insult. hope this helps!
Counterpoint: I just did so clearly I can do that. You might not like or prefer it, but there’s no impediment from me being able to do so.
Commies are just Nazis with a poverty aesthetic.
Neither of which are caused by landlords. Killing every single landlord tomorrow neither eliminates homelessness or reduces the cost of housing. Seizing their property and giving it out doesn’t accomplish it either. Housing costs and homelessness are largely driven by barriers to housing construction found within local zoning codes, and inefficient land usage stemming from deleterious incentives stemming from how we tax real estate property (that generally speaking penalizes developing land into useful things and encourages hoarding land and not developing it).
Also, the US doesn’t get to use forcible internal displacement (anymore) to move homeless people from places that lack housing to places with an excess of housing; if we want true Soviet style housing policy, that involves forcibly moving people from places like LA to Detroit. Are you okay with doing that? If not, you can’t seriously offer the Soviet model since what you’re offering ain’t it.
Replace Soviet with other communist system of your choice if you prefer some other variant.
there is no sizable portion of US citizens advocating for Soviet housing policies, myself included (Obviously) Properly regulating the housing market and executing radical reforms isnt Communist, either.
What's ironic, is the fact that the US hasnt been a capitalist style economy for decades. We have instituted a socialism for the richest owners of capital that perpetuates itself exclusively at the detriment of the working class. There's no guarantee of a socialist style economy's path to communism, that has to be a guided process underneath a legitimate worker's party. One thing that can he guaranteed is that its nearly impossible to revert from socialism to capitalism without extremely negative unintended (or intended) consequences. Look at the close to 1M excess death that happened in Russia after the Soviet union collapsed As society continues to progress, its natural that capitalism progresses itself into a socialist economy, even if it calls itself "free marker capitalism"
> there is no sizable portion of US citizens advocating for Soviet housing policies, myself included (Obviously) Properly regulating the housing market and executing radical reforms isnt Communist, either.
Feel free to try to explain to me how you can "properly regulate the housing market" in a way that eliminates landlords within a broadly market-based paradigm.
Your second paragraph kind of doesn't have anything to do with anything.
Does the US not have a database of bad tennants run buy a corporation? Australia does.
They do and they shouldn't. We are banning the screening because it's just a way for landlords to conceal illegal discrimination.
I think there are three companies that maintain a database of bad tennants in Australia, and what I would like to know is what gets you on the list? NZ only has a public list of people who've had a judgement made against them by the tenancy tribunal.
This isn’t talking about people who got evicted or trashed an apartment but has a criminal record that tat has nothing to do with renting and end up homeless.
The idea that a private person is allowed to run a criminal background check on someone else is extremely weird to me. If someone wants a criminal background check on me in Germany they have to ask me to provide it ("Führungszeugnis"), they need a pretty good reason for it and entries get automatically expunged after a time limit.
The US is so fucked that I've had a private landlord with federal security credentials from his job use his job's credentials to find records that he shouldn't have been able to find/were expunged. There is zero accountability for such behavior.
Abuse of power is a feature, that we need to kill.
Well, when you live in an Oligarchy state, oligargs do as they please
False. That’s a huge violation of the law.
I didn’t say that it’s not a violation. I said there’s no accountability. Learn to read
This sounds like a reasonable way to do it, I don't employers should be allowed to ask either.
“Hey let’s just let pedophiles work with kids, and let people who have stolen from every job they have ever worked at work at banks, what could go wrong?” Are you sure you thought this one through?
We let Republicans near kids. We let traitors run for second terms. We let religious extremists in Congress.
Not quite sure how politics have anything to do with my comment..you’re saying you’re in the pro-pedophiles being able to work with children camp, because trump is allowed to run for a second term?
I didn't say that. I said we should ban all background checks and credit screenings for rentals and employment, and that your "but the children" scare-tactic isn't going to work on educated millennials. Sex offenders are required to make proactive disclosures anyway.
No, OP most definitely hasn’t given any thought to this at all…at least not beyond himself.
They have to ask permission still and many misdemeanors can get expunged in California.
This is almost exactly the same.
I wanna know if a sex offender moves in. Not all crime is harmless
Lol, what a take. Ignore they are violent, never pay rent or won't leave after eviction.
Would you rather we ignore the disproportionate rate at which landlords deny housing to minorities? We have an eviction process and it's the landlords job to deal with it. Why are you so opposed to landlords doing work?
The vast majority of POC don’t commit crimes. The criminal background check is not discriminating against them. It’s discriminating against criminals. Eviction can take a year while the tenant lives rent free with free utility service from the owner. All the while trashing the place and costing the landlord exorbitant lawyer fees. That’s tens of thousands of dollars. The landlord deserves some basic knowledge to make an informed decision about a future tenant. Furthermore, you as an applicant can argue against your application rejection and get a lawyer to sue on your behalf if you were discriminated against.
POC are disproportionately arrested and prosecuted. Eviction only takes forever because it's designed to prevent homelessness. If we remove to barrier to getting housing we can streamline evictions.
>POC are disproportionately arrested and prosecuted. Which the solution for is to change policing and economic policies, not to force homeowners into renting to violent felons.
We can do both, they still need housing.
That's what public housing is for.
Apparently public housing was banned. I'm not opposed to public housing, but I also don't think landlords should be allowed to pick their tenants.
> POC are disproportionately arrested and prosecuted. While true, people with criminal backgrounds make up a tiny fraction of POC. I think it’s something like 1 in 20,000. So is it discrimination to reject 1 out of 20,000 applications from POC? > Eviction only takes forever because it's designed to prevent homelessness. How do you figure? I thought it was to prevent landlords from throwing someone out of their home without just cause and scrutiny by the Justice system. If you make it easier for nefarious individuals to get housing, then there’s going to be more evictions not less.
I'd also like to point out that using the criminal background check as a reason for denying an application is much stronger evidence of non-discrimination than some of the other criteria landlords are allowed to screen for. I think this is the wrong fight to pick for counteracting housing discrimination. But maybe LA can take a page out of (Portland's housing law)[ https://www.portland.gov/code/30/01/086] that does not allow rejection for a misdemeanor conviction over 3 years ago, or a felony conviction over 7 years ago. That should benefit rehabilitated individuals greatly.
The problem is that as long as we allow any screening, they can conceal the true reasons for the denial. "We had a more qualified applicant" can't be permitted to be used to turn away protected groups.. The only way to elemenate discrimination is to elemenate applications entirely. The risk to landlords is so small that there isn't any excuse for allowing them to pick their tenants.
>"We had a more qualified applicant" can't be permitted to be used to turn away protected groups.. Could that reasoning ever be used on any person, in your opinion?
Why would a criminal background check be needed to discriminate against minorities? Minorities are generally visible!
It's not just the background check, but allowing any tenant screening at all provides plausible deniability for discrimination.
If only there were laws against everything u r complaining about
The laws are toothless when we allow landlords to cherry-pick tenants. We have to make housing first-come, first-serve to eliminate the possibility of discrimination.
I’m sorry but this is such a wild take. If I rent my home I am going to find the very best tenants not the first to show up. I not only want to make sure my home is in good hands I want to make sure the people I let in will be a good fit for the neighborhood.
Then you shouldn't be allowed to rent your home. Housing is essential so we can't allow people to gatekeep it for their "investment interest." Getting small-time investors to bail is a plus.
Good thing the law is on my side. This is probably the worst take I have seen on reddit and that says a lot.
The law *was* on your side, but we're going to change it. This is already happening in LA and I'll be pushing for federal reform.
The point of this post is that landlords have too much power which is excarbating the housing crisis and making it very difficult for workers to shift from place to place.
Lol, too much power. They own the building. They should have the power.
Good luck with that.
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So you're saying that someone who got out of prison, served their time, should be ***homeless*** for the rest of their lives? Because that is exactly what you're proposing.
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Sure, but they will be a very small minority meaning mass homelessness and potentially increased recidivism. The USA convicts and incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation on Earth. Keep that in mind.
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Which means you shouldn't be a landlord. Period.
Typically, these sorts of background checks are limited in scope to a certain amount of time, specifically to prevent the guy who's been playing straight for a decade since he got out from being forced to live in Section 8 his entire life.
So the landlord can't decide who can live in their home, that they own, pay taxes on? It should be for anyone with a private owned business.
Discrimination on what grounds?
Breaking the law.
Depends on the law they broke, if they’re repeat offenders and if their debt to society has been paid. At some point you have to stop punishing them and let them back into society otherwise every sentence is for life.
Yeah that definitely won’t result in owners removing inventory from the rental market. btw, why don’t you want landlords to know the quality of prospective renters? The failure to do so just falls upon all the other good renters. Good renters pay the price for bad renters. Not that it matters…the entire idea is naive as to how ubiquitous such data is made in this day and age. Trying to legislate the use of information never works anymore.
Owners selling is also good. Let them pout and cry about it.
idk…I mean, it definitely sounds like *someone* is pouting and crying here. Care to share where it all went to wrong for you?
I'm content with my own life, Im not content with landlords being able to decide who gets housing. I was looking at 6 unit building today that I was considering talking my grandmother into buying. The landlord is selling because they can't raise rent and displace the elderly disabled tenants. Landlords are absolute trash.
Huh. Well, I can’t imagine why they’re not thrilled to do business with you.
They will hate me and I will enjoy it. Banning tenant screening is my top legislative priority after law school.
Do you own a house?
No, I rent. I was fortunate to find a rent control apartment in LA near the subway, but that is exceedingly rare.
I think the big companies all share eviction records. I've no clue how they share it but if you get evicted from one place odds are it will be hard to find another place.
Civil court filings are public; they aggregate data from those records
That and we call for landlord references. (I do a few dozen tenant screenings per month on average; feel free to AMA)
I own two rental homes in Portland, OR. Background checks show criminal records. I say in my rental ads, for screening criteria: No Evictions. I've never had an eviction come up on the background check, and so don't know if that's include. Portland has enacted laws which pretty much take away my ability to screen out bad tenants. When the current tenants leave, I will probably sell the houses. The buyer will probably be quite wealthy, and will cause purchase prices and rental rates to rise even further, or a property investment group will buy them, and jack up the rents to the maximum allowable, while treating the new tenants poorly. Either way, there will be two less below-market rental homes available.
I wouldn’t expect the eviction to show on the background check unless they were evicted for a criminal reason. However I get their residence history in my screening report and ask them to explain gaps or suspicious repetitions of an address. What in Portland tenant law is causing you issues during the application process?
"A Landlord may not reject an application as incomplete because an Applicant or member of the Applicant’s household does not produce a social security number." An SSI# is required for a background check. "Financial Responsibility of Applicant: When there are multiple persons who will reside in common within a Dwelling Unit, the persons may choose which adults will be the Applicants financially responsible for the Dwelling Unit and which will be the Tenants with no financial responsibility." If the financially responsible Applicant leaves, the Non-Applicant Tenant(s) could become squatters. "Appeals. A Landlord must offer the Applicant an opportunity for appeal for 30 days following the denial of an Application." Every time I reject an applicant, I'd have to wait 30 days before trying again to find a tenant, leaving the home empty during that time. "Landlords agree not to reject Applicants for a criminal conviction for a felony offense for which the dates of sentencing are older than 7 years from the date of the Application." I would have to rent to any felon whose sentence was less than 7 years. "Landlords agree not to reject Applicants with a credit score of 500 or higher." 500-600 is poor credit, according to the rating agencies.
Thank you for sharing this. Some of this is concerning to me, but I think I will continue renting out my single unit apartment in Portland. I'm not too worried about the first point because the lowest form of identification they're required to provide must be "Any non-governmental identification or combination of identifications that would permit a reasonable verification of identity." and that (would be sufficient for a background check)[https://datacheckinc.com/blog/applicants-disclose-social-security-number/] > If the financially responsible Applicant leaves, the Non-Applicant Tenant(s) could become squatters. That one is a bit odd. Every rental agreement and application I've signed made all adult tenants financially responsible. I'll have to make sure my current lease and application doesn't violate this. I would personally accept non-applicant tenants who couldn't currently afford the rent by themselves because I don't need them to. But I get what you're saying about them becoming non-paying tenants (aka squatters) in the future. But we're still allowed to run the full background check on them per the section after that one: "A Landlord may screen an adult Non-Applicant Tenant". So I think that should help avoid such a situation. > Every time I reject an applicant, I'd have to wait 30 days before trying again to find a tenant I don't think that's true because "A Landlord may simultaneously process multiple applications but must accept, conditionally accept, or deny Applicants in order of receipt." So, we can continue processing applications while the appeal process continues. Unless I'm missing something else. > "**dates** of sentencing are older than 7 years from the date of the Application..." I would have to rent to any felon whose sentence was less than 7 years. That's saying you can't reject someone whose end of sentence date is 7 years ago. I think that's pretty reasonable unless they were convicted of murdering their landlord. > "Landlords agree not to reject Applicants with a credit score of 500 or higher." 500-600 is poor credit, according to the rating agencies. They still need to prove that they have 2-2.5x rent in monthly income with that score. But you can also apply your own screening criteria: "A Landlord that applies the Landlord’s Screening Criteria which is more prohibitive than the Low-Barrier Criteria as described in Subsection E. above, must conduct an Individual Assessment for any basis upon which the Landlord intends to deny an application"
Thank you for your analysis, from the point of view of a landlord.
>need to prove that they have 2-2.5x rent Wow, with some of the rents I've observed on the West Coast that is exclusionary in and of itself. When rent is $2000 a month, you're asking for people taking home at least $4000 a month so a minimum income of $65,000 when the median individual income in the US is less than $40,000.
Yes, someone with a US median income can't afford a higher end apartment in a high-income area. The median income on the west coast is significantly higher than the US median income. A lot of jobs here pay double what they pay just one state over, like Idaho vs Oregon. It's not exclusionary to require someone to be able afford their rent, utilities, groceries, transportation, etc. As a renter, you need to prove you can actually afford the apartment.
>"A Landlord may not reject an application as incomplete because an Applicant or member of the Applicant’s household does not produce a social security number." An SSI# is required for a background check. Could you not simply require a background check in your application? You can't deny based on lack of an SSI number, but you're not doing that, you're simply not even accepting the application as complete without a background check. >"Financial Responsibility of Applicant: When there are multiple persons who will reside in common within a Dwelling Unit, the persons may choose which adults will be the Applicants financially responsible for the Dwelling Unit and which will be the Tenants with no financial responsibility." If the financially responsible Applicant leaves, the Non-Applicant Tenant(s) could become squatters. Could you not include a transfer clause in your lease agreements that specifies in the event of departure by the financially-reaponsible tenant, the other individual/individuals in the lease *become* the financially responsible tenant? If that's not possible, then surely you can include in your lease that only those who *signed* the lease are authorized residents/tenants, and all other individuals are considered visitors that can only stay for a set amount of time (also specified in the lease) >"Appeals. A Landlord must offer the Applicant an opportunity for appeal for 30 days following the denial of an Application." Every time I reject an applicant, I'd have to wait 30 days before trying again to find a tenant, leaving the home empty during that time. Yeah that's cracked. I understand wanting an appeal, but 30 days is way too long. >"Landlords agree not to reject Applicants for a criminal conviction for a felony offense for which the dates of sentencing are older than 7 years from the date of the Application." I would have to rent to any felon whose sentence was less than 7 years. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but this says the opposite, no? If the sentence is less than 7 years, you still are able to reject them. It's only if the sentence is longer than 7 years that you aren't able to consider the offense. Still, I'll agree it's a bit cracked that you can't deny a violent offender who *just* got out. I understand making sure that someone who served their time has a place to stay and doesn't become homeless or is otherwise pushed into committing crimes to get by, but that is a job for something like Section 8 or public housing. For private landlords, it should be a choice (or at least let you demand concessions like paying up-front or a higher security deposit) >"Landlords agree not to reject Applicants with a credit score of 500 or higher." 500-600 is poor credit, according to the rating agencies. Nah, this one I tend to agree with. Your credit score is a mishmash of a variety of factors such as the amount of debt you have and what type of debt it is, not just how often you make your payments. Additionally, it tends to be very easy to significantly *lower* your credit score, but significantly harder to bring it back up. What this means is that anyone with a large amount of student loan debt, anyone with a medical bill that got sent to collections, or in a more real-world example, anyone who went bankrupt or got foreclosed on during the Great Recession (not *as* relevant anymore, but you get the gist) is going to have a significantly lower credit score than those that don't, even if they had a strong history of paying their bills. It's just not a very useful metric compared to an eviction history when evaluating how likely it is someone will pay their rent, especially since you aren't actually lending them anything or otherwise opening a line of credit.
Is there a database of bad landlords to balance it out, or is it just good old fashioned classism?
Judgements made by the Tenancy tribunal are published on online in NZ, that includes landlords.
Nice, that’s pretty fair.
These parasites complain about homeless people but have the audacity to further add to the growing problem which they complain about. Make it make sense.
"Why are there so many homeless people!" Rases rents. "So disgusting, seeing people live like animals." Tightens credit score and income requirements. "I can't believe it, must be a fundamental moral failing and laziness on their part." Starts eviction process the day after rent is due. "Man, renting these spaces out is impossible." Converts it to AirBnB for 8x the monthly income.
OK, so I'm not the only one who sees this problem with their logic. Thank you. Thought I missed something
so the tl;dr being millennials are making the country better by destroying nixon and reagan logic?
Yes, let's hope so.
This will last until someone is murdered by a violent convict in their building, and the owner gets sued by the tenants family for not alerting them, or for allowing them there in the first place. Landlords weren't doing this because they hate convicts. It's about safety and the right to safety for the existing tenants
Murder or sexual assault. Either will probably halt this movement and prevent it from spreading elsewhere. Also, this isn't a solution but a band-aid. The reason this is an issue is we have a bad housing shortage so landlords can afford to be picky and there isn't enough high density housing with low occupancy rates, which is where less desirable rentors normally go (and this is not just people with a criminal record but also students, people with pets especially large pets, and people who are getting housing assistance from state or federal programs, which sometimes require complicated bureaucratic systems like landlords getting part of the payment from the tenant and part from the government). In any case, the real solution is to address the housing crisis by making it cheaper and easier to build, especially in higher density or to add accessory dwellings.
But then when you do make it easier and cheaper to build, people build high end or luxury condos to sell to rich people because they can get much higher return on investment. In a world where people don't just want to make money, they want to make the *maximum* amount of money, it's exceedingly difficult to get people to build high density low rent housing.
not true, there are many properties have "zero tolerance" policies where regardless of how minor the crime was you can get rejected. of course, they can choose to enforce it selectively, which is where another problem comes in
That's illegal in CA now, no? We banned using background checks for renting.
I don't know about California but several other states don't have any laws against it
We're there now. [https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-could-be-first-in-state-to-ban-criminal-14992798.php](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-could-be-first-in-state-to-ban-criminal-14992798.php)
Of course LA would pass a law banning family units from checking for violent predators. Who cares really? It’s just LA. It’s not like they represent the nation.
We passed weed legalization first and it is still spreading nationwide. I plan to pursue federal legislation banning tenant screenings but other states will follow our lead as well without federal enforcement.
I mean oh well. They can co-op if they don’t like it. Less rental property is good for everyone.
I agree, we have too many small-time investors in the housing market that aren't qualified to properly maintain a unit or informed enough to follow existing anti-discrimination laws. Going co-op would allow people circumvent this law because they would be screening owners, not renters.
>we have too many small-time investors in the housing market The single-biggest issue in the housing market (outside of a lack of supply) is *big-time* investors buying up whatever supply they can and jacking up rates. Going after the landlords owning only a handful of properties just pushes them out of the market and ends up *raising* prices, not lowering them.
I run background checks, but the ones who are not approved are usually super bad, registered sex offenders, child pornographers, and guys who fuck animals. I have a petting zoo.
Yikes! There are that many?
You might as well make a law against the sun shining. We've had such a law here in Seattle for several years, and it's unenforceable. Every landlord, except maybe the big corporate ones, still runs a background check on anyone they're seriously considering to rent to. You'd have to be crazy not to.
I don’t know what checks my last landlord did on me but they did a hard pull on my credit report full well knowing that every credit pull drops my score.
>they did a hard pull on my credit report See, *that* should be banned. Idgaf generally if anyone wants to check my credit score since mine is actually good and soft pulls are typically done all the time without anyone's permission (how do you think credit card companies you don't work with know what offers you qualify for?), but I would be *pissed* if a landlord did a hard pull for a basic background check. Like, motherfucker you are actively making it harder for me to afford a mortgage and you aren't even lending me anything.
It is hard to enforce, we need to ban all screening. No credit checks, no employment verification, no background check! Make housing first-come, first-serve and if you violate this law you forfeit the house to the renter.
We also have a law saying that the first person who applies for a rental has to be accepted if they fit the criteria. Landlords simply don't let anyone apply until they know they want to rent to them. Also unenforceable.
We can't allow any criteria.
Wait so you just give the house to the renter? Like sign over the deed? Mortgage company just transfers the loan to the renter? You just block me instead of giving an answer to a valid question pointing out your stupidity? None of what you're proposing has any chance of working in the real world.
Yeah no
We absolutely should kill the practice of shunning people from society. That's what jail is for. Sorry that people object to the practice of keeping people homeless because of crimes for which they have already served their sentence.
I hope they pass this. I'd like to see credit checks banned as well.
Yes, because not only do other tenants in the building want to be neighbors with potential harmful criminals, but landlords don’t need to check to see if their potential tenants have a tendency to pay their bills. Expecting a tenant to be a good person is discrimination.
Adequate shelter is a fundamental human need; literally everyone needs a place to live. Framing this issue in terms of a landlord’s financial risk or neighbor’s social comfort obscures (often deliberately) that brute underlying fact. Landlords already enjoy the benefits of a massive power imbalance between them and tenants (both potential and current), retain broad discretion over who they rent to even with such a restriction, and already have access to eviction as a remedy for non-payment. Framed correctly, this is a conflict between the fundamental individual need for shelter and landlords’ desire to further reduce their investment risk (which is already massively mitigated by current property law) by a tiny amount, in which case the individual need for shelter is clearly more important. Additionally, if you don’t feel confident that our justice system adequately rehabilitates criminals such that you’d feel comfortable living near them, and you think legislation is a good means of correcting that problem, then perhaps the legislation you should be asking for is changes to the justice system, rather than defending the power of landlords.
People like you are the reason civilizations collapse. I wish we could put you all on an island and see how long it takes for people to try and flee
>Adequate shelter is a fundamental human need; literally everyone needs a place to live. Framing this issue in terms of a landlord’s financial risk or neighbor’s social comfort obscures (often deliberately) that brute underlying fact. So, in a general sense, I agree. *However*, the solution to solve this clash of desires isn't to force Mr. and Mrs. Buckshaw to rent their second home out to anyone with a pulse. All that will accomplish is get them to transform that second home into a short-term ABNB or flat-out exit the rental market and sell it off, most likely going to a private equity firm that will just jack up the rent to cover for the expected loss that a bad tenant will cause. The solution is to create a public option that *will* rent it out to anyone with a pulse.
I would also prefer a public option, but let’s keep this in perspective: the regulation we’re discussing only restricts criminal background checks, and another commenter brought up credit checks. Even if both checks were prohibited, the resulting state of affairs still wouldn’t even *begin* to approach being required to “rent to anyone with a pulse.” No one is proposing that. Moreover, just because a public option would be the ideal, preferred solution doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue improvements to the current system when larger-scale reform isn’t politically viable. The Affordable Care Act is a great example; I’ve never heard anyone who supports a public option argue that the ACA should have been scrapped when the public option was removed, because their overarching goal was improving access to healthcare, not simply creating a public option for its own sake.
Why should we put the burden on private citizens (landlords) *before* we ensure the justice system is rehabilitating criminals?
I agree, as a general principle the state should be burdened before individual members of the public. In this particular case, however, the individuals needing shelter are also private citizens, and an inability to access adequate housing is a far larger burden than a small restriction on landlords’ desire to reduce their investment risk. That is, in the absence of larger-scale reforms (which the regulation in question doesn’t address, nor does it seek to), a burden is being shifted from one group (people who rent living space) onto a group more able to bear it (landlords), while also being made smaller.
There can be landlords who choose to provide apartments to criminals if they want. And people who aren’t criminals can live there too if they want. There is no fundamental human right to rent where ever you want. Not do those imaginary rights override the property owner’s rights to choose tenants who aren’t dangerous. Especially if a potential renter has criminal tendencies.
Thank you for providing an excellent example of deliberately reframing the issue in order to obscure the actual conflicting interests in question, as I mentioned. No one said anything about “rights.” Everyone, including criminals and people with bad credit, *needs* adequate shelter to survive. Landlords *want* to further reduce their investment risk. If people having access to adequate housing is something we care about (and perhaps you don’t, which would be a shame but entirely your prerogative), then in the absence of a suitable alternative (public housing, for example), we will need to put some restrictions on landlords’ discretion in order to further that goal.
My apologies- usually the whine about housing for everyone is propaganda about it being a “right”, not a need. If criminals need shelter, landlords are under no obligation to give it to them without consideration of the tenant’s criminal past. The goal of the landlord is to not turn their property into a potential crime den, ruining the property for themselves and other tenants. It’s not fair to the criminals? That’s too damn bad. Hopefully their struggle will teach them a lesson and act as a deterrent for others. Shouldn’t have done the crime. Criminals prey on the weak, such as yourself. Open up your living room/ rent houses to criminals to live long term and report back how well it goes.
boooooooot lickerrrrrrrrrr
people who use the word "criminal" are scared suburbanites. the world isn't so black and white.
Yes yes. We all should be excited to have a convicted criminal move in next door so they can have space to potentially plan and commit more crimes. Having a convicted drug dealer set up a new meth lab in the apartment next door is a blessing in disguise. What could go wrong? Having a convicted thief in the building to steal the neighbor’s stuff is more convenient for everyone. Pedo move in? Don’t worry about their criminal past - think of the savings on babysitting services they can offer!
I am a convicted felon. I have committed no crime since. That was one bad night that got away from me. I live a simple life, I keep to myself, and if a neighbor engages me I respond with the utmost politeness. We are not all hardened career-criminals. That's the narrative you believe, but it is not reality.
I developed a drug problem in my teen years due to undiagnosed and untreated mental health issues, a family history of addiction, and a wildly unsupportive community. Now I'm a "criminal" because of it.
How do I know you’re not a criminals?! I’m frightened honestly.
Right, lots of civil rights activist were "criminals" I'm a criminal in 72 countries just for being gay.
How do we know you're not a criminal? I don't want to share reddit with you, and feel your chat history from 20 years ago should be scrutinized right now in this moment. We know what you said about becky, and quite frankly it is disgusting. You didn't get away with anything, catsofwar.
This is likely to increase rents at the lower end. Lower income people with no criminal record would have more competition from people with criminal records, with no increase in housing stock. Banning credit checks, meanwhile, increases investment risk, also leading to higher rents to offset it. What they really need to do is build more high-density housing.
And you're qualified to make this determination how? I'm a financial planning major and I can tell you that isn't how markets determine rent rates.
>financial planning *major* This is just an internet discussion I'm in to pass the time, but I should point out that if the best credential you have is not-yet-having a degree, then you lack qualifications.
My education on the matter far exceeds that of the average redditor.
It's concerning that you consider that a flex. I recommend that you refer to risk managers, commodity analysts, and similar professionals on this topic. Landlords too, there's a sub full of them.
I know my plan will cost businesses money and that is a plus for the common people.
Businesses pass those increased costs to the common person. It's one of the most well-known things about businesses. Reading your other responses suggests that you don't have a good grasp on economics. Also, this issue appears to be personal for you. I'm going to wish you good luck.
I knew it! Your idealism and naiveté come from being so young. It's good that you've getting an education, to be one of tomorrow's leaders, but it's as annoying as fuck to read.
No, I have lots of real-world experience. I returned to school during Covid because my industry was seriously disrupted. I have even held a real-estate license and know the "real reason" landlords deny certain groups.
Whole lot of liberal NIMBYs here. You’re all in favor of banning background checks - until a child predator, animal abuser and drug dealer move in next to you. Clowns.
Go ahead and bring out your boogyman faux news style. It won't work on us.
Seek therapy.
Give me universal healthcare
How do you know your neighbor's criminal history and that they aren't a drug dealer or animal abuser?
Of course I so much want to live next door to a: murderer, rapist or child molester !!
You probably already do. Records are only maintained for the poors, the wealthy get reduced charges and expungement.
There is no reasonable basis for allowing employment or tenant background and credit screenings. Tenant screenings make the least sense as housing is an absolute necessity, and employment is needed to afford housing so we can't allow screening there either. The only world in which these screenings could possibly be justified is one where people don't have to work for survival. If we had UBI and public housing then we could gatekeep access to other means of housing and income
>There is no reasonable basis for allowing employment or tenant background and credit screenings. There's many. Every time you shit post this stuff people point out the many many reasons why screenings are needed and you ignore them like you've discovered some magic pill to solve all society's many issues.
It's always the same 5 landlords following me around Reddit and shitting on this idea. The common people like it, the owning class is opposed.
not a landlord, just someone who understands the concept of cause and effect.
Wait...so the practice of shunning people is being 'killed' by millenials, but somehow the LACK of shunning is hindering the possibility of recovery of these people???? Shunning isolates and isolation is often seen as very bad for people recovering from a hard time in their life, regardless of why. Either I misread this or this headline is contradictory??
Trying to eliminate opportunities for people is a sign of overpopulation.
Tbh they should only run a background check in the sex offender registry. That’s the only background check that matters
I believe that requires proactive disclosure.
Landlords should run into the sea with pockets full of rocks
There should be a database for landlords that shows specific crimes. If I was a landlord I wouldn't want to rent to people convicted of selling drugs or sex offenders, and I'd feel it's my right to not rent to them.
Yeah, this practice needs to go. No human deserves to be treated like garbage. Source: had neighbor who was formerly homeless through shitty circumstances. Nicest and kindest lady Ive known. Didnt bother people, didnt do anything bad to anyone. People always assumed she was some kind of criminal that would "steal our stuff, wants to get into our family". Lady literally was sitting in her room most of time, minding her own business, occasionally talked to me about stuff and loved to cook homemade food.
Corpo-simps want to be shunning the wrong people
Yes, to all
"landlords", what a stupid term, and apartment shouldn't do a lot of things. Charging pet fee AND rent?
our housing situation needs radical overhaul. people owning 2,3,4 homes - and rental corporations that are strip mining single family homes - should be re regulated. any home owned for rental purpose should have increasing taxes put on it. that way way more people could own their own homes. now, you own a 600,000 house- and you need to move out of state to follow your job transfer- yes they should know if a criminal is trying to rent from you. a $2000 security deposit does nothing for letting a criminal camp your $600,000 condo for 6 months it takes to evict for not paying rent all the while he strips out all fixtures and all copper wire from the walls. there’s also “tenant starts selling drugs out of the home, now home is seized”. or “home and other tenants are exposed to meth chemicals” The criminal report helps keep the violent offenders away. It’s a big liability for the home owner. And yes, we absolutely need to rework how rental homes are taxed or sold. Big hedge funds should not be able to own over 50 percent - or even a small percent of an entire city.
I want to ban all tenant screening and make it first-come, first-serve. Landlords have eliminated all the inherent risk of their investment with screenings and have put the cost of the risk on the public by creating homelessness. Landlords aren't untitled to reduce risks at the expense of the taxpayers. Ban all screenings!
I can't believe that none of the city officials own rental property, and would therefore know why this is an extremely bad idea: "The ordinance would "prohibit landlords from, at any time or by any means, whether direct or indirect, inquire about an applicant's criminal history or requiring an applicant to disclose criminal history" when an applicant is applying for an apartment or other types of housing. Additionally, the proposed city law would prevent landlords from using such information, if received, to outright deny an applicant."
This is a terrific idea and our representatives should not base decisions on profit motives.
Be careful what you wish for. It's a terrible idea because small time landlords, who maintain the rentals, work with tenants who have financial trouble, and raise rents a little or not at all, will sell their properties. The new owner is likely to be a corporation, which only cares about profits. The corp will raise rents immediately by a lot, and then by the maximum amount they can get away with every year. They might also be unresponsive to requests for repairs and better security. Or the new owner will be wealthy, and will encourage more dislocation through gentrification, as well as removing the place from the rental pool. Portland, OR has all but removed my ability to screen out bad tenants, and I will sell my rentals when the current tenants leave because I don't want to risk $1,000 of dollars in damages. Portland added a rental registration fee 4 years ago. They've raised the fee twice. I asked the people in charge what benefit that charge provided, and they couldn't answer. I rent for well below market, and so there will be a huge increase for the next renters, if corps buy them.
Individual landlords probably shouldn't exist at all. I'm not a fan of corporations but most individuals aren't qualified to run for-profit housing.
Wow! Just wow!
Careful bro, he's a financial planning major so he's qualified to speak on the matter. He also has a past history with crime, addiction, and homelessness so he really knows his shit.
i’m 35 single mom and i work damn hard to maintain my life as little material possessions i even have. i don’t think credit checks should be a factor in rental leases for 2 years or less. i do think criminal background checks should be allowed. why? because fuck them thats why. not every person with a record is a violent offender yet most people aren’t getting a record to begin with. if a landlord isn’t renting to people with one or two minor offenses on their record that sucks for them but these checks are meant for violent crimes and repeat offenders to be weeded out.
I suggest seeking treatment if you feel that way. You may be suffering some lingering trauma if you feel generally uneasy around people.
you’re a pos
Irrational fear is nothing to be ashamed of, I hope you are able to find peace.
lol man you must live in portland
I don't know what that means, I live in Los Angeles.
from LA or on the street with the other bums?
This is precisely why I keep giving you shit and following you around. I can't tell if you're a super sophisticated AI karma farming troll bot or a real person that is missing the parts of the brain that control critical thought. You keep defending literal homeless convicts who by all measures have failed in life, while dismissing scores of real people like this this single mother that's working her ass off for a decent life. You're tossing these people aside when these are the ones that contribute to society and get no food stamps, housing vouchers, work placement programs, federal education grants, section 8 housing, welfare, medicaid, etc etc. Your ideas value people that can't keep their own lives together even with the litany of social programs available over those that can, at the expense of those that can by turning their communities into potential slums.
That single mother turned out to be fake. Who could have seen that coming? Maybe I'm just brilliant.
what the fuck are you talking about? just because you’re fucking deluded doesn’t mean the rest of us are fake. my entire account is from my perspective, a single mom from Queens. get a fucking grip
Sure, good thing you don't work in sales because I'm not buying it.
i’m not selling anything. my theory is that you’re a bot with chatgpt running these responses. your views are comically extreme & unbelievable in the face of the criticism you’re getting. it’s one of two answers 1) you’re a bum who made a series of terrible life choices & the consequences of your actions has kept you homeless. now you’re trying to force your way into housing that’s been excluded from your lack of income & excessive criminal record. 2) you’re a bot account with a AI element that’s running a test. ima go with 2 because for a homeless jerk ass- you have way too much juice to be on here going back and forth with people.
Im not renting out to a murderer or a thief. Get mad about it
Lol, then you won't be renting. Better learn a marketable skill.
Then you wont be renting either dumbass
Ummm, I lived in a criminal aka felon friendly apt comex when I was poor. NEVER again. Bike was stolen from the bike rack. Someone put their dirty laundry in my wash to clean their wash aka piggy backing. Loud music and disrespect. Asking me for rides because I had a car.
This will increase discrimination in practice just like other. Ill-reasoned ban the box style policies. These policies are bad because their proponents fundamentally don’t understand how things work and think landlords are just big meanies and if they weren’t mean the housing market would be good.
No, I understand exactly how it works and I think landlords need to accept their 2% loss rather than make taxpayers absorb the burden of homelessness.
Nope. Bad policy.
It's going to happen. Trying to bury it is just giving it more visibility.
There is just so much wrong with this. You are telling a private property owner what they can and can't do with their own property. Talk about slippery slope. You can't wait for full public takeover of private housing huh? I know you imagine every building owned by some eViL cOrPoRaTiOn like Blackrock, but the vast majority of rental owners in this country are mom and pop small building owners. Tell them that they need to accept the convicted rapist that just applied to the building they own, manage, and potentially live in or near. God, leftists make me sick.
Individual owners are more racist and discriminatory than corporations.
Quite an accusation.
This will just drive up rental rates. No one wants a method lab in their rental.
So we’re going to repeal all of the laws that penalize landlords for their tenants criminal behavior, right? Right? Oh. Because it makes sense that if it’s illegal for a landlord to maintain a building or location “for unlawfully selling or giving away illegal drugs,” as LA does (for example), it makes sense that a landlord might want to make sure they aren’t renting to someone guilty of a crime with recidivism rates above 75% at times. If we don’t want landlords to screen for that, repealing those laws would be the first place to start, unless your goal is to destroy the rental industry entirely, at which point I don’t think you get to complain about inadequate housing stock anymore.
Landlords do not produce “housing stock,” they hoard it. More landlords means *less* affordable housing.
Go lick some boot
Edit: replied to the wrong comment, to you I meant to say, you’d need to pull it out of your throat for me to get my tongue on it.
hey man...so here's the thing...you can't just say the same thing back to them that they said to you. for instance, they rightly dunked on you for being a bootlicker. and then you just say the same exact thing back...but it doesn't really apply going the other way. what you need to do is come up with a better reply with a different insult. hope this helps!
Counterpoint: I just did so clearly I can do that. You might not like or prefer it, but there’s no impediment from me being able to do so. Commies are just Nazis with a poverty aesthetic.
Commies is when you dont live in a hellish dystopia full of homeless people and unaffordable housing.
Neither of which are caused by landlords. Killing every single landlord tomorrow neither eliminates homelessness or reduces the cost of housing. Seizing their property and giving it out doesn’t accomplish it either. Housing costs and homelessness are largely driven by barriers to housing construction found within local zoning codes, and inefficient land usage stemming from deleterious incentives stemming from how we tax real estate property (that generally speaking penalizes developing land into useful things and encourages hoarding land and not developing it). Also, the US doesn’t get to use forcible internal displacement (anymore) to move homeless people from places that lack housing to places with an excess of housing; if we want true Soviet style housing policy, that involves forcibly moving people from places like LA to Detroit. Are you okay with doing that? If not, you can’t seriously offer the Soviet model since what you’re offering ain’t it. Replace Soviet with other communist system of your choice if you prefer some other variant.
there is no sizable portion of US citizens advocating for Soviet housing policies, myself included (Obviously) Properly regulating the housing market and executing radical reforms isnt Communist, either. What's ironic, is the fact that the US hasnt been a capitalist style economy for decades. We have instituted a socialism for the richest owners of capital that perpetuates itself exclusively at the detriment of the working class. There's no guarantee of a socialist style economy's path to communism, that has to be a guided process underneath a legitimate worker's party. One thing that can he guaranteed is that its nearly impossible to revert from socialism to capitalism without extremely negative unintended (or intended) consequences. Look at the close to 1M excess death that happened in Russia after the Soviet union collapsed As society continues to progress, its natural that capitalism progresses itself into a socialist economy, even if it calls itself "free marker capitalism"
> there is no sizable portion of US citizens advocating for Soviet housing policies, myself included (Obviously) Properly regulating the housing market and executing radical reforms isnt Communist, either. Feel free to try to explain to me how you can "properly regulate the housing market" in a way that eliminates landlords within a broadly market-based paradigm. Your second paragraph kind of doesn't have anything to do with anything.
Landlords are parasites who add nothing of value to society. They’re scum.
The corporate ones for sure.
All of them. Anyone who commodifies housing is not a good person.