With Mayor Eric Adams expressing support, a ban on criminal background checks of rental applicants seemed on a fast track to pass the City Council.
But this week his administration pushed for carve-outs in the measure.
During a press conference Thursday, Adams reiterated his support for the bill’s concept but voiced concerns about public safety. He said he supports allowing landlords to review criminal history for specific types of offenses committed during a limited range of years.
“No one should be denied housing based on their records, but I want to make sure residents in … small [buildings] get the protection that they deserve,” Adams said.
During a City Council hearing the same day, representatives of the city’s Commission on Human Rights indicated that the Adams administration wants to make sure the bill’s concept is implemented correctly. They did not specify what that would entail.
The city has various models to choose from and the benefit of seeing how they are working in other cities.
Last year, New Jersey banned criminal background checks on prospective tenants. Property owners can only consider sex-offender registries and convictions for making meth in federally assisted housing, according to NJ Advance Media. After conditionally offering an applicant housing, the landlord can factor in certain crimes within a limited timeframe before finalizing the offer.
In Detroit, property owners can’t screen a prospective tenant’s criminal history until offering a conditional lease agreement. At that point, the landlord can check sex-offender registries and for certain criminal offenses, including violent crimes and arson.
If denied a lease after this review, the tenant can show evidence of rehabilitation. The Real Estate Board of New York has pointed to this model and others as guides to help New York craft its policy. It also wants landlords protected from lawsuits related to housing people with criminal histories.
Read more
Commercial
New York
Council strikes deal on Two Trees’ River Ring in Williamsburg
Commercial
New York
City Council to raise J-51 from the dead
“While REBNY agrees on advancing fair housing, any proposal must clearly address the need for building safety and security for existing tenants,” Ryan Monell, vice president of government affairs at REBNY, said in a statement. “We hope the Council will modify this bill to explicitly define certain criminal conviction history that can be considered by property owners and strengthen language in the bill to indemnify owners and other parties against liability.”
Council member Keith Powers, the bill’s sponsor, agreed that New Yorkers are entitled to safe living conditions but that blocking formerly incarcerated individuals from securing housing is not a solution.
“Denying people housing does not make us any safer,” he said.
Incarcerated individuals are between 7.5 and 11.3 times more likely to be homeless than those who have not been jailed, according to a report by the Urban Land Institute. In New York City, nearly 750,000 people have a conviction on their record, according to the Fortune Society.
About one-tenth as many New Yorkers are homeless, so the vast majority of the formerly convicted have housing. But finding a rental can be especially difficult for people with criminal records, and often they end up in undesirable buildings and areas, further stacking the deck against them.
“Fear mongering makes it easy for people to be distracted from the humanity of this actual crisis,” Tabber Benedict, a housing advocate with the Fortune Society, said in a blog post. “We can’t forget about the reality of someone who has really turned their life around needing housing and having families that they want to support through that access.”
Proponents of the bill argue that housing stability is key to reducing recidivism, and would prevent landlords for using criminal history as a proxy for racially based housing discrimination, which is illegal.
But opponents accused Council members of prioritizing criminals over the safety of other New Yorkers — an argument that helped the real estate industry defeat the bill last year.
Yiatin Chu, president of the Asian Wave Alliance, presenting a hypothetical, asked why a Chinese landlord on the Lower East Side, whose residents are primarily Chinese, should not be allowed to know a prospective tenant has been convicted of anti-Asian hate crimes.
“This bill addresses sex offenders, that’s great,” she said during Thursday’s hearing. “But what about everything else that people living in that building will be concerned about?”
As written, the bill permits property owners to consult sexual offender registries, though they must notify potential tenants that they are doing so. There are also exceptions granted for owner-occupied, two-family housing.
The measure also applies to home sales, which has drawn the ire of condo and co-op groups concerned about the prospect of, for example, someone with a fraud or embezzlement conviction serving on a building’s board.
Some studies have shown that when landlords or employers cannot check someone’s background for criminal history, they are more likely to discriminate against people who they think might have one. That is, ban-the-box laws have led to fewer call-backs for young men of color seeking jobs. But supporters of the laws have pushed back against those findings.