Testimony: In support of the Fair Chance for Housing Act
Paul Keefe
Testimony of Paul Keefe, Vice President of Legal Services[1]
Fair Chance for Housing (Intro. 632) Hearing before the NYC Council Civil Rights Committee
The Community Service Society of New York (“CSS”), a nonprofit organization serving low-income New Yorkers for over 180 years, strongly favors passage of the Fair Chance for Housing Act, Intro. 632. Through our Next Door Project, we help individuals obtain, understand, and fix mistakes on their criminal records. Via this direct-service work and our decades of housing research and advocacy, we are familiar with the struggles faced by people with criminal history to secure affordable housing.
Each year since 2015, more than 40 percent of people released from State prisons to New York City went into the shelter system, where a record number of people are experiencing homelessness.[2] As of October 10th, over 60,000 people were in the city’s shelter system, and thousands more were living on the streets and subways, or were crowded into unsafe and precarious living conditions.[3] Average shelter stays are inordinately long—ranging from 483 days for single adults to 773 days for adult families—and shelter-to-housing moveout rates declined 27 percent in the last fiscal year.[4] New York City can stem the prison-to-shelter pipeline by passing Intro. 632.
In 2015, CSS was the lead legal advocate behind the Fair Chance Act (“FCA”), which prohibited employers from inquiring into an applicant’s criminal history until after a conditional offer of employment and, like Intro. 632, provided a detailed process before a person could be rejected. In the ensuing seven years, we have learned that the sky does not fall when employers hire people with criminal records, and we have seen the law lead to—and preserve— employment for people with criminal records because it forces employers to consider people as individuals, not the coalescence of their worst mistakes.
But the Fair Chance Act was passed to augment protections against employment discrimination based on criminal history that had existed since 1976. There are no comparable legal protections in New York. Even though the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has recognized that flat criminal history barriers are illegal under federal law because they cause a disparate racial impact,[5] proving such a violation is beyond the means of people on their own. And even for government investigators and lawyers, disparate impact cases can involve years of litigation, the retention of experts, and possibly a trial of several days. All to prove the one principal that has been repeated over and over: When you deny someone a home, a job, or any basic right because of their criminal history, you are more likely to deny people of color because of racist enforcement throughout the criminal punishment system.
With that background, Intro. 632 is a bill to both lessen homelessness and boost racial equality, but it is also a public safety bill. Studies of “housing first” programs have found steep drops in rearrest and reincarceration among people who were housed after incarceration. In a study of a Los Angeles, California supportive housing program, for example, only 14 percent of the participants were rearrested in the year after being housed.[6] Milwaukee, Wisconsin reaped a significant reduction in judicial and police costs when this model caused the number of people experiencing homelessness to decline from 1,521 to 900, and the city is “approaching functional zero for chronic homelessness.”[7]
Finally, because passing this bill is meaningless without strong enforcement, the Council should significantly increase funding to the New York City Commission on Human Rights. As the Council has added protections to the New York City Human Rights Law, inquiries to the agency have increased, as have wait times for case resolutions.[8] Yet its budget has stayed relatively flat and the need to robustly staff enforcement of this law is great. The Commission should be given the resources to, when Intro. 632 becomes effective, rapidly address violations and publicize the law. This approach served to quickly curb the number of job advertisements and applications that violated the law.
Ending housing discrimination based on criminal history is one tool of many the City needs to use to reduce our homeless population and increase both racial equity and public safety. The Council should pass this legislation without delay.
Notes
1. Additional research provided by Julia McHale, Brooklyn Law School Class of 2024.
2. Coalition for the Homeless, State of the Homeless 2022, 25 (2022), available at https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/state-of-the-homeless-2022/.
3. Community Service Society of New York, City FHEPS Fact Sheet 1 (2022), available at https://www.cssny.org/publications/entry/campaign-to-improve-and-expand-cityfhepsfact-sheet.
4. Id.
5. U.S. DEP’T OF HOUS. & URBAN DEV., Implementation of the Office of General Counsel’s Guidance on Application of Fair Housing Act Standards to the Use of Criminal Records by Providers of Housing and Real-Estate Related Transactions 2 (June 10, 2022), available at https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/FHEO/documents/Implementation of OGC Guidance on Application of FHA Standards to the Use of Criminal Records - June 10 2022.pdf.
6. Rand Corp., Los Angeles County Office of Diversion and Reentry's Supportive Housing Program: A Study of Participants' Housing Stability and New Felony Convictions, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3232.html.
7 INT’L ASS’N OF CHIEFS OF POLICE, Promoting Public Safety Through Diversion and a Housing-First Approach, 18, 20, available at https://www.theiacp.org.
8 N.Y.C. Council Fin. Div., Report of the Finance Division on the Fiscal 2021 Preliminary Plan and the Fiscal 2020 Preliminary Mayor’s Management Report for the Commission on Human Rights, 5, 8-9 (Mar. 23, 2020), available at https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2020/03/226-CCHR.pdf