Renters face a lot of problems. Keeping their income secret from landlords won’t help | Opinion

Back when payday lenders were the target of the moment for Kansas City activists, a friend who worked for a regional social welfare nonprofit told me the initial approach was to ban any and all installment loans, including car loans and home mortgages.

Their intentions were noble. But their solution? Unwise and unworkable. “They didn’t know what they were doing,” my friend said.

The current policy target seems to be landlords, and the new activists are an organization called KC Tenants.

But new doesn’t mean improved: Their policy prescriptions are much, much worse. Specifically, they back an ordinance to ban what’s known as “source of income” discrimination.

Right now, landlords are not required to participate in federal housing voucher programs such as Section 8. Landlords — or housing providers, as they prefer to be called — may base their renting decisions on prospective tenants’ income and source, credit history, prior evictions, criminal convictions or police arrests.

The ordinance championed by KC Tenants and midwifed by the mayor would bar all of that.

Many people don’t sympathize with landlords, but imagine for a moment that’s your livelihood. Your goal is to find good, long-term tenants who pay rent and who take care of the property. If you have several units, you’re also interested in people who will be good neighbors. Income, credit and criminal background checks help you find desirable tenants. They also keep rents down, because if you can avoid costly repairs, legal expenses and evictions, you can charge less.

Now imagine none of those things are available to you. How would you discern between good tenants and bad? Savvy candidates might provide you those documents on their own. Or maybe you would need to lean more on your uninformed gut feelings about people. Would that yield a better outcome?

What’s more, how would you feel as an apartment building tenant — or a neighbor to a rental property — knowing that there was no way for the owner to avoid renting to someone with a history of property damage or violent criminal convictions?

According to reporting in The Kansas City Star, landlords were not consulted about the proposed rule. Leaders of the Kansas City Regional Housing Alliance, an advocacy group for housing providers, learned of the 19-page ordinance in late November, months after it had been in the works. This was no oversight, as KC Tenants pushes something called co-governance, defined as, “the process of consulting with the people most impacted by the issue at hand, (and) ensuring those people are involved in the process every step of the way.” It’s understandable that KC Tenants would not want housing providers involved in drafting legislation. But do the mayor and his co-sponsors believe landlords are not “most impacted by the issue” of rental regulation? Did they intentionally shut out a large and important constituency?

Such efforts increase costs, pushing out small mom-and-pop housing providers and increasing the share of rental housing owned by the big corporate providers that groups such as KC Tenants rail against.

KC Tenants say the big issue is excluding tenants “on the basis of their race.” But a group of Black landlords in an email to Councilwoman Melissa Patterson-Hazley also opposes the ordinance for the same reason any housing provider would.

None of this is a done deal. Seven council members, including one of the original ordinance cosponsors, voted to hold the ordinance until the city manager reports on ways to encourage voluntary participation by landlords in housing incentive programs. One model: Johnson County’s Landlord Incentive Pilot Program encourages housing providers to accept low-income renters.

The tragedy of the source of income ordinance is that it imagines that tenants are forever trapped at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. The reasoning: Because there is no ability to climb it, the government ought to forever penalize those above them.

A better way to serve tenants would be to give them tools to climb that ladder and to someday become homeowners. Maybe even landlords.

This story was originally published January 19, 2024 at 7:33 AM with the headline "Renters face a lot of problems. Keeping their income secret from landlords won’t help | Opinion."