Nationwide, people with criminal records are facing unnecessary discrimination by public housing authorities, limiting their access to housing assistance, according to a release by the Prison Policy Initiative.
Public housing is one resource that should offer some protection against housing insecurity, rather than adding to the challenges of transitioning to the community after incarceration, the PPI reported. Instead, discriminatory housing policies, combined with previous involvement in the criminal justice system, inflict collateral damage on families already suffering poverty and systemic racism.
“[W]e know that in the U.S., hundreds of thousands of people face homelessness,” said the report, “and there are particularly high rates of homelessness and housing insecurity among formerly incarcerated people across the country.”
Housing is recognized as a human right, upheld by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibits discrimination in renting or purchasing a home based on a person’s race, religion, sex or disability.
Safe and affordable housing is critical for any person’s health and wellbeing, and especially so for a formerly incarcerated person’s success upon reentry. However, ex-prisoners are not a protected class under the Fair Housing Act.
Roughly 80 million Americans have criminal records, PPI reported. Their research found a person who has been incarcerated is seven times more likely to experience homelessness than someone who has not. That number nearly doubles if a person has been incarcerated more than once.
But the Department of Housing and Urban Development has granted the country’s 3,000-plus local housing authorities broad discretionary powers to deny access to nearly a million public housing units.
Established by HUD, housing authorities use two types of denial for housing relief: mandatory and permissive. Mandatory prohibitions involve drug-related and sex offender criminal activity; permissive prohibitions include drug-related or violent criminal activity, or any activity that may threaten the health and safety of fellow residents, the property owner, or others.
This trend has shown signs of change in recent years.
In 2016, for example, HUD provided direction to the nation’s PHAs, clarifying that denying an applicant housing based on criminal records alone amounted to race-based discrimination, due to the practice’s disproportionate impact on people of color. HUD went even further with its 2023 policy revisions, instructing local PHAs to be as inclusive as possible for people with criminal histories.
