[Peace] Fwd: to someone who doesn't understand law or has never read the Section 8 contract...

[Stuart Levy]

Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 16:52:29 -0500
From: Stuart Levy <slevy at ncsa.uiuc.edu>  
Subject: Re: [Peace] Fwd: to someone who doesn't understand law or has never	read the Section 8 contract...  
To: Karen Medina <kmedina at uiuc.edu>

> So:
> * Section 8 is voluntary.
> * The City non-discrimination rule has been interpreted as including Section 8 as "income" until recently.
> * There have been very few problems with discrimination under the interpretation that Section 8 is income.
> * If the interpretation is changed to not see Section 8 money as income, then
>    the landlords can and will choose not to participate in the section 8 program. 
> * Part of the advantages of not participating in Section 8 could be the inspection... 

Now -- as usual -- I'm even more confused than before.   All the above *'s
make sense to me except the fourth one.

Why would landlords drop out altogether of section-8 participation if they're
allowed to discriminate against selected section-8 clients?  
I'd think that, being able to be choosy about which low-income people they like
is something that (some) landlords want, and a discrimination-permitted law
would let them do just that, that some landlords who don't want to deal with
section-8ers now might start dealing with them if they could turn a subset of
those away without having to explain why.

With or without an anti-discrimination law, there's no penalty for landlords
to decline to participate in the section 8 program.  So why should they drop out
if they're explicitly allowed to discriminate?

Maybe more generally, how *would* we expect the behavior of the population of
landlords to change, if the law changes?    I'd been assuming that
a few new ones might agree to sec-8 participation, but that the housing
situation for low-income people would likely worsen, since suspicious
landlords (new or old sec-8 participants) could turn them away
(or charge higher deposits, or maybe other more stringent conditions)
without good reason and without fear of complaint.


It makes good sense that some landlords would want to avoid
housing inspection, and would turn down sec-8 participation
because of that.  That could have the effect of discrimination, by
making low-income housing less available, but the impact wouldn't be affected
by the proposed change in Champaign law.  Or am I missing something?

   Stuart