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ACCESS AND OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL >> Fair Chance Housing
Campaign Brief:
Advancing Fair Chance Housing Legislation
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Background
Shelter is one of our most basic necessities, and for most people is a precondition to obtaining other opportunities such as employment. But for justice-impacted people, securing safe and affordable housing can be one of the most difficult things to do.
Many landlords institute a blanket policy against anyone with a criminal record. On a rental application, they ask a potential tenant to “check the box” to indicate if they have been convicted of a crime. If they do check the box, they are typically denied. In most places in Michigan, this kind of discrimination is routine and quietly tolerated. This is particularly concerning for justice-impacted families, as people who have been incarcerated are 10 times more likely to experience homelessness than the overall population. However, a handful of cities around Michigan have addressed this challenge by passing local Fair Housing ordinances against the practice.
This is crucially important, because research has shown that being able to secure a place to live is one of the key indicators of a person’s success after returning home from prison. For instance, in 2023, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development said that about 1 in 500 people — or 0.2 percent — had experienced homelessness in the previous year. Comparatively, a 2018 study found that up to 15 percent of people in prison and jail had been homeless in the year leading up to their incarceration.
If we do nothing, the challenges justice-impacted people face when they look for safe and affordable places to live will only grow. As of January 2024, the Michigan State Housing Development Authority estimated the state was short nearly 200,000 housing units, and the cost of housing is only going up.
Vision
Check the box policies are unfair and fail to protect either landlords or the public. Everyone wants the chance to compete fairly for a safe and affordable place to live, but you can’t do that when you are branded a criminal and danger to society by an old criminal conviction. When people are allowed to apply for housing without the stigma of an old criminal record, their merits can be weighed against anything that may turn up on a background check.
A 2022 Housing and Urban Development publication reiterated that “criminal history is not a good predictor of housing success.” It cited studies that found renters with a criminal history have as good a track record being tenants as those with no criminal record. As for protecting other renters, the publication said that “There are currently no empirically validated tools predicting the risk of harm a rental applicant might present to other tenants and property.”
Excluding people with a record from renting a home simply harms the person with a record; it does not help anyone else.
Solution
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