In a pre-emptive strike against the Trump Administration potentially depriving New Yorkers of fair housing, a group of state lawmakers is working to enshrine existing federal protections into state law before those protections are taken away.
Given all the administration’s recent focus on eliminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) from government programs, the proposed legislation is a necessary step to give the state the continued authority to protect vulnerable people from losing access to housing due to discrimination.
The legislation doesn’t add any new protections that don’t already exist in the federal Fair Housing Act. It just preserves those protections in state law in the event that they are removed from federal law.
The bill (A4040/S4067) focuses on a standard called “disparate impact.”
Disparate impact is where someone — a landlord, insurance company, municipality, housing developer — targets people using a seemingly innocuous, factual standard. The standard doesn’t appear on its surface to be discriminatory, and there is no obvious intent to be discriminatory. But it is, in actual practice, discriminatory.
The Alliance for Housing Justice, a coalition of fair housing advocacy groups, offered this example to show how it can be used to discriminate against women and domestic violence victims:
“Take for example a landlord that institutes a new rule that any tenant that calls 911 for emergency services more than twice in 6 months can be evicted; as a result, several women and their children are evicted from their homes after calling the police or an ambulance as a result of domestic violence,” the alliance explains on its website.
“This policy has had a ‘disparate impact’ on women, since 95% of domestic violence victims are women — although anyone can be a victim of domestic violence. While the landlord’s policy doesn’t explicitly state they will evict women, the impact of the policy puts up barriers to women renting.”
Another example of the standard would be municipal zoning laws and other housing restrictions, such as restrictions on multi-family housing, that unfairly exclude minorities from neighborhoods.
The policies in these cases seem reasonable, fair and justifiable — until one recognizes the actual negative impact they’ll have. Without the disparate impact standard, it’s virtually impossible to win a legal argument of discrimination in cases where intent can’t be proven.
Incorporating this important legal standard into state law is vital to protect vulnerable New Yorkers from discrimination in housing.
State lawmakers should pass this bill before it’s too late.
