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LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to ban landlords from discriminating against would-be tenants with government-issued housing vouchers or other rental subsidies.<\/p>\nLOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to ban landlords from discriminating against would-be tenants with government-issued housing vouchers or other rental subsidies.<\/p>\n
The vote to introduce an anti-discrimination ordinance was 4-1, with Supervisor Kathryn Barger abstaining. Barger has been critical of measures favoring rent controls.<\/p>\n
Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Mark Ridley-Thomas co-authored a January motion asking county lawyers to draft the ordinance, which is scheduled to come back to the board next week for a final vote, which is typically an administrative formality. The measure would take effect 30 days after that second vote.<\/p>\n
As the county struggles to find housing for the nearly 60,000 residents without a permanent roof over their heads, policymakers are butting heads with landlords who don’t want to take Section 8 vouchers.<\/p>\n
“Discrimination in housing is exacerbating our housing and homelessness crisis by allowing landlords to discriminate and deny leases to families who want and can pay for housing,” Kuehl said.<\/p>\n
The federal housing vouchers are provided to low-income tenants and pay a rental subsidy to landlords to make up for the difference between what the tenant can afford and market rates.<\/p>\n
“The ordinance will not force landlords to rent to a voucher holder, but simply prevent ruling them out as a tenant based solely on their source of income,” Ridley-Thomas said.<\/p>\n
Despite the prohibitions against discrimination laid out in the 1968 Fair Housing Act, the vouchers are denied by Los Angeles County landlords 76% of the time, according to a 2018 survey by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.<\/p>\n
“Implementation of the nation’s Fair Housing Act is 50 years overdue,” Kuehl said. “L.A. County is saying we will wait no longer.”<\/p>\n
In a letter to the board, Los Angeles County Development Authority Executive Director Monique King-Viehland said options were already limited, given a 3% vacancy rate and about 38,000 people on the waiting list for Section 8 housing. The average wait time is two to four years, according to the LACDA website.<\/p>\n
“This form of discrimination further limits the rental inventory for rental subsidy assisted families and is thereby effectively eliminating housing choice options,” King-Viehland said.<\/p>\n
Overall, the county has a shortage of roughly 517,000 affordable housing units, according to a report by the California Housing Partnership Corporation.<\/p>\n
The ordinance is not limited to Section 8 vouchers, but includes other federally funded rental assistance, the county’s Flexible Housing Subsidy Pool — designed for homeless individuals with complex health issues — and rapid re-housing rental assistance.<\/p>\n
County legislative advocates are also pressing for a similar statewide policy as proposed by Senate Bill 329, along with bans at the state level on rental rate gouging and evictions without cause.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to ban landlords from discriminating against would-be tenants with government-issued housing vouchers or other rental subsidies. The vote to introduce an anti-discrimination ordinance was 4-1, with Supervisor Kathryn Barger abstaining. Barger has been critical of measures favoring rent controls. Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":30184,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1499,1496,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88085"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theavtimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}