HOME Line’s tenant advocates frequently hear from renters who have difficulty finding, securing, and maintaining descent, safe, affordable housing. In particular, we often hear from tenants who have rental housing subsides such as Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers who are unable to locate a housing unit where the landlord will accept the voucher.
For 15 years, beginning in 1995, HOME Line surveyed suburban rental housing complexes to determine where tenants with Section 8 vouchers can actually use them. These reports are available on our website here. The study consistently demonstrated that landlord non-acceptance of Section 8 vouchers was a significant barrier for low-income renter households finding and maintaining housing.
In 2015, the Minneapolis City Council began discussing an ordinance that would expand local civil rights law to protect renters with housing subsidies such as Housing Choice Vouchers. Because HOME Line had recently expanded it’s tenant hotline to the city (in April of 2014), we had already begun hearing the same message from Minneapolis renters as we had from many others throughout the metro in years prior—that it was difficult to find landlords who’d accept their voucher. We took this opportunity to produce a similar survey within the city of Minneapolis to help demonstrate the experiences that renters face securing housing with a rental subsidy. We were later asked to produce a similar report within St. Paul as well.
In Minneapolis, we found that only 23% of the rental vacancy listings surveyed would accept a Section 8 voucher. In St. Paul, 17.3% of the rental vacancy listings surveyed would accept a Section 8 voucher. The surveys also include a geographic analysis in each city of where rental listings were and were not accessible for households with Section 8. The reports indicate that when landlords are able to discriminate against renters based on the household paying all or a portion of their rent via a public assistance or subsidy program, it greatly reduces access to housing and also limits their choice of neighborhood.
The reports are available for download below:
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