“Tenants, especially recipients of housing choice vouchers, are finding it increasingly difficult to secure quality housing in the Miami Valley region,” said Marty Gehres, the Dayton Municipal Court clerk who helped draft the proposed ordinance and who chaired a subcommittee that focused on this subject. “This is a big problem.”
But some groups representing landlords, apartment owners and operators and real estate professionals say requiring housing providers to accept Section 8 housing vouchers means they will have to comply with onerous red tape that can hurt their bottom lines.
“The Section 8 housing program is plagued with inefficiencies, burdensome regulatory requirements and a flawed system,” said Jennifer Illanz, president of the Greater Dayton Apartment Association.
The Dayton City Commission on Wednesday had the first reading of an ordinance that would amend city code to try to ensure that people cannot be denied housing because they receive certain types of lawful sources of income.
Some landlords and housing providers refuse to rent their homes and apartments to people who derive income from certain safety-net and government assistance programs or who receive federal housing subsidies, like Section 8 housing choice vouchers.
“This would prevent that kind of discrimination from occurring,” said Gehres, Dayton Municipal Court clerk.
Dayton city code already prohibits housing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, familial status and disability.
Dayton code, Ohio law and federal law currently do not prohibit landlords and housing providers from refusing to rent to potential tenants based on their income sources.
However, about a dozen Ohio cities have passed ordinances with source of income protections, including Columbus, Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron and Yellow Springs.
Jennifer Heapy, CEO of Greater Dayton Premier Management (GDPM), said many families have difficulty finding housing because a small share of rental housing is available to people who have Section 8 housing choice vouchers.
About 488 local families have housing vouchers but have not been able to find places to live, said Heapy, who leads the local public housing authority.
Many voucher-holders are elderly, low-income workers or have disabilities, she said.
The voucher program ensures landlords receive consistent payments, and the federal government recently granted a waiver to allow GDPM to pay landlords 120% of fair market rent, Heapy said.
Heapy said she will work with local landlords to try to identify and address unnecessary red tape and provide them with education and other assistance.
Carol Bowling, a landlord who has been a Section 8 housing-provider for 17 years, said participating in the voucher program is more risky and less profitable than renting housing on the open market.
Bowling said the voucher program requires annual inspections and voucher-holders cannot move into properties right away.
On the open market, landlords can move tenants in immediately and collect the first month’s rent, but Section 8 renters can’t move in until the housing units pass inspections, and payments do not arrive right away, she said.
“Basically, it can take three months to get paid for Section 8 whereas on the open market you can get paid immediately,” she said. “Many housing providers work on very lean margins and this is a huge hardship for us.”
She said landlords can’t set market-rate rents — the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development determines fair-market rents — and it is harder for landlords to terminate the leases of problem tenants.
She also said, “Every day that a home stands vacant is a day that you will never be able to earn income on that unit, unlike selling a manufactured product where if you don’t sell it today you can sell it another time and recap your costs.”
Sham Reddy, past president of Dayton Realtors and a local housing provider for more than 30 years, said he fears the legislation, while well-intentioned, could have harmful unintended consequences.
He said Dayton could lose some of its affordable housing if housing providers decided to stop renting housing in the city to avoid complying with hefty regulatory burdens.
Illanz said the Greater Dayton Apartment Association believes in “housing for all” and supports voluntary participation in the Section 8 housing choice program.
But she said the program has administrative flaws that need to be fixed, such as long wait times for inspections and tedious paperwork.
Cyndi Swafford, domestic violence shelter case manager with the YWCA Dayton, said finding stable, safe housing for its clients is a huge challenge, and some have been in the shelter for 270 days because landlords won’t accept them as tenants even though they have fully funded Section 8 vouchers.
The YWCA shelter served 182 people last year, but it had to turn away many others because it was at full capacity, said Swafford, who attended the city commission meeting Wednesday.
“I will say the primary difficulty we have in finding housing are folks who are dealing with HUD vouchers,” she said.
Supporters say Dayton approving source of income protections is a good start, but more local cities need to pass similar legislation to address what they say is a community-wide problem.
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