The Urban Institute, in partnership with the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC), released a new legal dataset and accompanying report, “State and Local Voucher Protection Laws.” These resources detail laws enacted to prohibit landlord discrimination against Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) holders. The report finds that about half of all voucher holders in the U.S. are covered by these laws, and both the number and strength of laws have increased over time.
The researchers used PRRAC’s continually updated list of statutes banning source-of-income discrimination as the foundation for their research. They included statutes that included protections for HCV holders, either explicit or implicit, in the analysis. The resulting dataset contains 12 state and 87 local laws passed between 1971 and 2019 prohibiting discrimination against HCV holders. All but one of these laws are still active.
Researchers coded key features of each law across four dimensions: the extent to how explicitly the law protects HCV holders (explicitness); who can bring a discrimination complaint and the relief available (enforcement); available loopholes in the law for landlords to reject voucher holders (exemption); and tax abatement or other incentives for participating landlords (incentive). Once coded, the researchers created a scale to determine the strength of each law, with 0 being the weakest and 4 being the strongest.
Housing Choice Voucher protections have steadily increased over the past several decades, particularly among localities. Between 2001 and 2019, new HCV laws led to increased protections for over 750,000 renter households with vouchers. The strength of these laws has also increased over time. On a scale of 0 to 4, laws in the dataset scored an average strength rating of 1.94. Laws passed prior to 2000 scored an average of 1.71, while laws passed after 2000 scored an average of 2.04.
This report can be found at: https://urbn.is/32ccknS
The dataset can be downloaded from: https://bit.ly/385FrNo