April 8, 2025
Some corporate landlords are flouting a Maryland law intended to expand access to safe, affordable housing, according to an amicus brief from the PJC and allies filed in the Supreme Court of Maryland. The HOME (Housing Opportunities Made Equal) Act prohibits landlords from refusing to rent to a tenant based on how they pay their rent, such as with a housing voucher. The amicus brief in Hare v. David S. Brown Enterprises, Ltd. focuses on landlords’ discriminatory practice of requiring that tenants with vouchers have income that is 2.5 or 3 times the full market rent instead of assessing whether the tenant can pay their share of the rent, which is usually 30% of their income. The brief calls on the court to clarify that this practice is unlawful.
Discriminatory income criteria frequently lead to landlords refusing to rent to voucher-holding families, undermining the purpose of the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program and the HOME Act. Housing vouchers are meant to provide stable housing and combat economic and racial discrimination by enabling tenants to move to higher opportunity neighborhoods that have higher-performing schools, proximity to jobs, and better transportation. Research has shown that vouchers can help reduce homelessness, provide more choices for places to live, and create pathways to stable housing for people who have disabilities or are elders or military veterans. But when landlords establish minimum income requirements based on the full rent instead of the part for which voucher holders are responsible, it is harder and often impossible for people to find a home before the voucher expires, pushing families into housing in high-poverty, segregated neighborhoods and isolating them from healthcare and other services and support networks. It especially harms children, forcing them to change schools, reducing access to services for students with disabilities, and decreasing opportunities for attending college and having higher future earnings. The use of income criteria ultimately perpetuates patterns of economic, disability, and racial segregation by relying on biased assumptions about voucher-holding families and serving as a proxy for discrimination based on identities like race, gender, and disability.
Minimum income requirements also allow landlords to hold voucher-holding applicants to a higher standard than other potential tenants. The HCV program evaluates tenants’ ability to pay their share of the rent, and the government pays its share of the rent directly to the landlord, making the program a reliable source of rent for landlords. Despite this fact, landlords often require voucher holders to meet unreasonable income criteria that hold them responsible for more than their portion of the rent, while giving non-voucher holders multiple options for showing that they can pay the rent. As a result, income criteria effectively exclude most, if not all, voucher-holding applicants.
Across the country, other jurisdictions with laws that prohibit source-of-income discrimination have made clear that minimum income criteria violate the law. The amicus brief urges the Supreme Court of Maryland to agree and rule that landlords must not undermine the protections of the HOME Act with additional arbitrary barriers to leasing.
Thank you to brief authors Albert Turner and Matt Hill of the Public Justice Center and Rebecca Ojserkis, Brian Corman, Dana Busgang, Alisa Tiwari, and Phoebe Wolfe of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC. Thank you also to the organizations that signed onto the brief: Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, National Housing Law Project, Equal Rights Center, National Fair Housing Alliance, Homeless Persons Representation Project, Fair Housing Justice Center, Disability Rights Maryland, Poverty & Race Research Action Council, Baltimore Regional Housing Partnership, Maryland Legal Aid, and Housing Works.
