If you own rental property, getting good, responsible tenants is high up on your to do list. Sorry, folks, but that may be illegal now. The Daily Caller reports:
The Fair Housing Act doesn’t include criminals as a protected class, but the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) says refusing to rent based on a criminal record is a form of racial discrimination, due to racial imbalances in the U.S. justice system.
This is wrong in so many ways–it's an attack on property rights, commonsense, and decent law-abiding citizens. It also has a view of people who go to prison for serious offenses as victims. These people are not victims but victimizers. If they are there because of "racial imbalances," these imbalances are not in the justice system but rather in a welfare system that has eaten at the heart of minority families for generations.
Yes, we hope people convicted of serious crimes pay their debt to society and come out of prison with the ambition to do better. But many won't and I actually don't see anything unjust in having a serious crime trail the perpetrator through life. Likely, it will be with the victims forever if the offense is serious enough.
The Daily Caller goes on:
The Fair Housing Act prohibits both intentional housing discrimination and housing practices that have an unjustified discriminatory effect because of race, national origin, or other protected characteristics,” say HUD’s newly-released guidelines. “Because of widespread racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, criminal history-based restrictions on access to housing are likely disproportionately to burden African-Americans and Hispanics. While the Act does not prohibit housing providers from appropriately considering criminal history information when making housing decisions, arbitrary and overbroad criminal history-related bans are likely to lack a legally sufficient justification.”
This looks like a property owner can face a costly suit for refusing to rent to a litigious ex-con with a scary criminal history. Even if the property owner wins the suit, the outlay in legal costs can be crippling. Congratulations, the Obama administration may have made it that much harder for a little old lady to live on the property she has acquired over a lifetime of thrift.