Presented as the most restrictive in the country and as being written 100% by KC Tenants, 231019 was initially a few lines in the Tenant’s Bill of Rights several years ago. Back then, the concept of forcing a US Citizen to take part in a Voluntary Government Subsidy Program like Section 8 was objectionable to the several 100 housing providers in the room, and Mayor Lucas lined it out. Based on his statements in the video above from the 25th, it seems that he has been working since that time with KC Tenants to bring this ordinance to the table.
Since the introduction in December, housing providers have been working hard to defeat the ordinance but learned that we were not going to have much luck defeating it completely. But with all the emails, phone calls, and meetings held, we were able to get a lot of the more objectionable items removed or changed, and now we have a repair fund that they are working on.
There is a lot in this ordinance, and many of the original aspects of the ordinance have changed in almost two months of intense negotiations since it passed the committee in early December. Those changes are reflected in the ordinance that passed today. Councilmembers representing both sides worked very hard to coalesce around common goals shared, with many of us offering support, assistance, and guidance along the way.
- Created a $1 million Landlord Risk Mitigation Program to provide landlords money offsetting costs associated with accepting voucher tenants.
- Created a landlord liaison position in the City’s Housing Department
- Clarified that landlords can deny rental applications based on individualized factors about criminal convictions, credit score, evictions, alleged damages, rent-to-income ratio, , and clarified that violent and sexual offenses are grounds for denying an application.
- Permitted consideration of recent evictions and alleged damages within a Older evictions and alleged damages may be considered holistically.
- Prevented publication of landlord names if landlords were the subject of disciplinary action or conciliation
- Publication of names is allowed only if a permit is
- Excluded property sales from source-of-income discrimination
- Removed the ability of the CREO director to conduct audits with testers.
- Limited systematic investigations to only landlords who have been investigated and found to have committed discrimination and failed to reach a conciliation agreement.
- A delayed effective date of the policy until 6 months after
- Clarified that investigations can end without prosecution of a
- Clarified that all consideration of a prospective tenant’s application must be consistent with fair housing laws and all other state and federal laws.
- Created exceptions for old houses with architecture that cannot be easily brought into compliance with code, which is not required to abide by source-of-income rules.