When Madeline Familia’s mother first told her that her search for an apartment was going nowhere, she did not suspect housing discrimination. Her first thought was that her mom was looking in the wrong places.
After all, she had just finished searching for an apartment herself in Harlem and had no problem finding options. Brokers immediately called her back. "They were, like, calling me, trying to make me their customer,” she said.
All told, it had been 20 years since the last time her mother, Irma Troche, had to hunt for an apartment. At 68, she was being forced to move out of her sunny one-bedroom apartment in the Castle Hill section of the Bronx because her landlord wanted the apartment for his daughter. Troche worked in a jewelry factory for 15 years. She retired early five years ago after the factory moved to Mexico and New Jersey.
“I loved that job,” she said in Spanish. “It was like an art.”
A single mom to two daughters, Roche qualified for Section 8 years ago and the voucher kept her family stable and housed.
But during her apartment search, she discovered that the voucher is now much harder to use. She searched for apartments the old fashioned way, by walking around and talking to supers. Troche said one told her flat out, “People on Section 8 aren’t accepted here.”
What she experienced was source-of-income discrimination, a form of housing discrimination that only became illegal in the past decade.
Under city and state law, a person can’t be denied an apartment based on the way they pay the rent.
It’s designed to protect people who receive housing assistance such as Section 8. New York City passed a law to protect them in 2008, and the state followed suit earlier this year.
But housing advocates say source of income discrimination is widespread and endemic in low-income communities where people who are often homeless, disabled and marginalized don’t realize it’s illegal and don’t report it.
For Troche, the rejection has been painful. She must be out of her apartment by the end of the month and she can’t understand how she’s on the verge of being homeless because she feels like she’s done all the right things.
The government programs were supposed to be her safety net.
“I’m someone who has worked," she said. "I have my social security and my Section 8."
Troche’s housing voucher is worth about $1,550 a month. A quick search on Craigslist for a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx shows plenty of options.
At one point, Familia decided to help her mom with her search. But she ran into the same roadblocks.
“The way I went out looking for apartments in 2018 is the same kind of way I went out looking for apartments when it came to my mom,” Familia said. “Completely different response. I even reached out to the same broker who actually found this apartment.”
That broker never got back to her. Familia said once brokers found out her mother would be paying the rent with a government-subsidized-housing voucher, all communication stopped. Out of desperation she started telling brokers she would guarantee the rent herself.
But that didn’t work either.
Familia documented everything on her laptop: emails and notes about calls and visits she made. “‘If she meets the requirements can we view the apartment as soon as possible?’” she said, reading one exchange aloud. “No response.”
Source of income discrimination is hard to prove unless it’s blatant. Katherine Carroll, an assistant commissioner in the enforcement bureau at the city Commission on Human Rights, said the agency wants to get at the more insidious ways landlords engage in this type of discrimination.
“Where people aren’t saying, ‘No, we’re not going to take Section 8’, for example, they’re saying ‘You have to have forty times the rent in your annual income in order to qualify for these apartments’,” Carroll said.
But anyone with a voucher won’t make forty times the rent. If they did, they wouldn’t qualify for Section 8.
WNYC/Gothamist contacted ten of the brokers and management companies that either rejected or ignored Familia’s inquiries. None responded, except one—Goldfarb Properties. They’re a large landlord with buildings in the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens. They’ve already been charged with source of income discrimination once, in 2017. The case is still pending. The Fair Housing Justice Center, a non-profit civil rights group, is also suing the company for source of income discrimination in federal court.
Goldfarb Properties’s lawyer, Michael Koenig, said Familia’s mom was denied an apartment because her credit score was too low. However, Familia said her mom’s credit score was in the fair range and went down as more companies checked it.
The Commission on Human Rights said a credit score can be another pretext for rejecting applicants because with a voucher, it’s the government covering the bulk of the rent.
A landlord group said there must be some standards.
“To suggest that these sorts of objective standards are pretext for discrimination is … totally offensive,” said Mitch Posilkin, general counsel at the Rent Stabilization Association. “Owners are entitled, to the extent allowed by law, to maximize the certainty that they are going to receive the rent each and every month.”
Posilkin argued that the average landlord is small and unsophisticated and if there is discrimination, it is unintended.
“In particular cases I think there are certainly situations where owners simply do not know specifically what this law requires,” he said.
But the law is 10 years old.
At first, the Commission on Human Rights filed cases mostly based on individual complaints. Then the city passed a law that gave the agency more funding to do more testing and to proactively go out and find discrimination. As a result, the agency has initiated hundreds of cases on its own. But cases take a long time to resolve, and individuals need relief fast. So instead of filing a lengthy case, Carroll said staff are intervening as soon as someone calls.
“If someone gets a denial and then immediately contacts our office, there’s a good chance that when we reach out to the landlord or broker that the apartment will still be open and we have a better chance of negotiating for them to get into that particular apartment,” she said.
Diane Houk, an attorney who specializes in housing discrimination at the law firm of Emery Celli Brinkerhofff and Abady, is concerned that the reason it takes so long to resolve cases is because the Commission lacks enough staff.
“Meaning it’s not a lack of the Commission not taking this seriously,” she said. “But [it’s] the resources they have to hire investigators and attorneys to do the work needed for this enormous problem.”
According to the Commission, they were successful in getting people into apartments 206 times this year. In the last five years, 874 cases have been filed; 219 cases were settled and the commission has issued $630,000 in civil penalties and damages. The largest fine was for $100,000, but three years later, the company still hasn’t paid.
Housing advocates believe the problem is a serious crisis that is much larger than what these numbers suggest.
Armen Merjian, an attorney at Housing Works who represents people living with HIV, said he believes tens of thousands of people experience this form of housing discrimination, but don’t report it because they don’t realize it’s illegal.
“People who are often disabled, who are homeless, who have very few resources are being turned away left and right and discrimination is brutal,” he said. “But also the logistical nightmare of beating the streets and pavements and doing everything they can to find a place only to be told that your kind is not accepted here. It’s an awful, awful predicament.”
His organization has sued brokers and landlords in state and federal court. Merjian said in one case, a company called Manhattan Apartments went out of business as a result of losing the case and having to pay legal fees. He believes the punishment must be serious or else the real estate industry will write it off as the cost of doing business.
For Familia, the Commission’s performance reveals a weakness in the mayor’s affordable housing plan.
“You’re building, which is great,” she said. “But there are apartments right now vacant that people can move into, so why aren’t you enforcing the law?”
Familia’s mom did finally find a landlord willing to accept her voucher. Now she’s waiting for it to pass a government-required safety inspection.
UPDATE: The original version of this story incorrectly stated that the Commission on Human Rights initially only investigated individual complaints. The CCHR says they investigated discrimination proactively from the start but legislation passed later on gave them more funding to beef up testing and agency generated complaints.
