Article from Reason by Christian Britschgi.
Good intentions often lead to bad policy. Consider a new Seattle law that bars landlords from screening prospective tenants for any criminal history.
Passed Monday, the Fair Chance Housing ordinance prohibits landlords from excluding prospective tenants because of their criminal history, from requiring or conducting criminal background checks of those prospective tenants, or from charging them higher rents and security deposits.
“You’ve paid your debt to society if you’ve served your time,” wrote the bill’s sponsor, Councilmember Lisa Herbold, in an August 11 blog post. “Blocking formerly incarcerated people from accessing stable housing is an extrajudicial punishment not consistent with the rule of law.”
It’s true that our current criminal justice system unnecessarily tars citizens with arrest records and criminal histories, and that those criminal histories make it more difficult to find jobs and housing. But attempting to mitigate the effects of a broken criminal justice system by foisting extra costs onto landlords—who have quite understandable reasons to wants to know about tenants’ criminal histories—is not the answer.
Read the entire article at Reason.
Image Credit: By Daniel Schwen (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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Wow! How nice! Now scofflaws can screw landlords out of rent, destroy the housing, conduct drug businesses and run meth. labs. Ain’t progressivism grand??
Seems you hit the nail on the head. I guess they want to be like California.
Anyone crazy enough (or unlucky) to have rental property in communist Seattle?
Snot me.
Good in a way for they were using this to create more homeless people a man or woman serve time and has a family and connot rent a house or apartment
The problem these idiots have failed to see is that they are usually the Landlords that get screwed over by the criminals they are protecting! Irony!
Seattle, this is your brains on drugs!
Just wait until the child molester moves in and starts playing with the 5 year old next door. If a landlord denies one you can bet he will get fined for denying the guy the right to rent the place.
Its obvious Seattle’s “finest” doesn’t care if a property is destroyed and overrun with drugs and low-lifes !
Every comment made before mine is totally correct! We have nothing but dimwits in charge of our towns and cities!
That shows how stupid some people can get!!! A homeless person, is homeless, because of no job. So what makes them think, by this ban, will cause people to pay a outrageous high rent?????
Just how did they pay their debt to society?
Did they pay back double what they stole? Did they bring the dead back to life? Did they pay for all the expenses of a person they maimed? Did they un-break all the broken hearts of the relatives of their victims? Did they un-rape their victims? Did they un-molest the children they trafficked?
All they’ve done in their lives so far is cost society trouble and the cost of incarceration! Now you say they’ve paid their debt! Can you explain that one to me so I’m clear on this concept you’ve dreamed up just for a vote.
You’ve got to me kidding!!!!!
Time to ABORT these inmates that were given life or the death penalty!
It’s true that our current criminal justice system unnecessarily tars citizens with arrest records and criminal histories, and that those criminal histories make it more difficult to find jobs and housing.
No, our system does not unnecessarily tar citizens with arrest records and criminal histories. I agree arrest records are not convictions so should not be considered in a person’s background but criminal history is something else all together. Property owners have a right to know the kind of person they allow to live in their properties if for no other reason than to protect the safety of their other tenants, they have a right to know if they’re living in an apartment next to a convicted felon and what they’re convicted of. If those with criminal histories don’t like this, I don’t care. I’m not the one committing criminal acts. There is a price to pay and society has a right to charge that price to those who proved they cannot live within the laws of society. “If you can’t do the time then don’t do the crime.” It is our own safety we’re talking about here and I don’t want convicted felons around me and especially not around my family. If one chooses to take a chance on these people that is their choice but government does not have the right to force convicted felons into where we live or into our personal lives.
Police cannot interfere with ANTIFA, landlords cannot do background checks, but these idiotic democrats want more background checks on law abiding citizens buying firearms to protect themselves against the ever growing criminality and communist practices in the state of Washington. How stupid. Lisa Herbold, landlords looking out for their interests and property, has nothing to do with the judicial system.. Let the criminals come live with you and don’t question what they have done or are still doing. Oh, I didn’t think so. That law is just for the hard working American people who own property. Just another example of the government getting involved in something they have no business getting into. the democrats. God Bless America and keep yopur idiotic laws in Seattle.
The Seattle landlords who can afford to will cut their losses and get out of there. They will move to any state or locality that does business based on sanity.
This was proposed by the racist leftists (aka: Keep Seattle White Committee) who knew that this would result in fewer black tenants as landlords found other reasons to exclude blacks (who might be 20-25% ex-cons). If landlords can distinguish between risky & less risky tenants, they do so.