Fair Housing Act Prohibitions
July 1, 2007
Protected Classes Under Federal Fair Housing Act
• Race
• Color
• Religion
• Sex (including sexual harassment)
• National origin
• Disability
• Familial status (children under the age of 18)
Protected Classes either in local or state laws
• Ancestry
• Age (40+)
• Marital status
• Unfavorable military discharge
• Military status
• Sexual orientation
• Source of income (but not Section 8)
• Source of income (including Section 8)
• Victims of domestic abuse or other crimes
• Veteran status
The federal Fair Housing Act prohibits several types of discriminatory behavior if they are based solely on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status or disability:
1. Refusing to sell to, rent to or otherwise deal with an interested tenant or buyer. This includes not returning calls or ignoring firm sales offers.
2. Applying different sale, rental, or occupancy terms for different people. This includes asking people of color to pay higher security deposits.
3. The refusal by real estate professionals or companies to serve minority customers, steering customers to certain neighborhoods or making claims about the racial makeup of an area. This includes a real estate agent who tells clients interested in a certain home that a minority family lives next door or companies that purposely place ads where they are not likely to be seen by minorities.
4. Lying about the availability of housing. This includes telling people of color, families or a disabled person that an apartment is already taken, when it is not.
5. Frightening people into renting or selling their property by manipulating their prejudices. Called blockbusting, this includes efforts to buy property at below fair market value by telling people that members of a minority group are moving into the area.
6. Discrimination in financing housing by a bank, savings and loan association, or other business. This includes charging creditworthy minority customers higher interest rates than other customers.
7. Harassment. Tenants and homeowners have the right not to be harassed or frightened into abandoning their leases or leaving their homes. This includes racial and sexual harassment, such as slurs and threats of violence and sexual advances and innuendoes.
8.Local zoning laws that have an unfair effect on minorities and are discriminatory in nature. In some communities, laws that restrict the size or number of occupants in a home have been used to target Latino and Asian households who live with several generations under the same roof.
9. Attempts to threaten or intimidate people so that they will not exercise their rights or file complaints under the Fair Housing Act.
Discrimination in renting
The following practices by landlords or their agents (brokers and property managers) are prohibited:
1. Falsely stating that an available unit has been rented.
2. Setting higher or lower rents, security deposit requirements or credit criteria for applicants in a protected class.
3. Failure to respond to inquiries by prospective tenants of a protected class.
4. Failure to provide prospective tenants in a protected class with rental applications.
5. Encouraging long-term tenants to leave their apartments by making false allegations about property values, an increase in criminal or antisocial behavior, or a decline in the quality of schools or other services or facilities. This is usually done so that rents can be increased or so the units can be converted into condominiums or cooperatives and sold. (This is a form of the illegal practice called blockbusting.)
6. Applying house rules differently to tenants who are members of a protected class.
7. Evicting a member of a protected class when a tenant who is not a member of a protected class is not evicted for the same reason.
About the Author: Bob Cain
Some 30 years ago Bob Cain went to a no-money-down seminar and got the notion that owning rental property would be just the best idea there is for making money. He bought some. Trouble was, what he learned at the seminar didn’t tell him how to make money on his rental property. He went looking for help in the form of a magazine or newsletter about the business. He couldn't find any.
Always ready to jump at a great idea, he decided he could put his speaking and writing skills to work and perform a valuable service for other investors who needed more information about property management. So Bob ferreted out the secrets, tricks and techniques of property management wherever he found them; then he passed them along to other landlords.
For over 25 years now, Bob has been publishing information, giving speeches, putting on seminars and workshops, and consulting for landlords on how to buy, rent and manage property more effectively.
