With an Increase in Voucher Discrimination, Cambridge Looks to Train Housing Professionals in Prevention

Cambridge human rights officials urged professionals in the real estate industry to avoid disadvantaging rental applicants with government vouchers in a webinar Tuesday, telling The Crimson in interviews after the event that the city is seeing “a rise in complaints” of voucher discrimination.

Vanessa Lawrence, an official from the city’s Human Rights Commission said the problem was perhaps the number one form of housing discrimination the city sees in complaints.

“Historically, I would say source of income has been probably in our top three types of discrimination complaints that we’ve received in the commission,” Carolina Almonte said, “followed probably by race, national origin based discrimination, and maybe family status.”

In Cambridge, a city where two-thirds of all housing units are rented, and at a far higher cost than the national average, the demand for vouchers is high. Yet, in the webinar, officials seemed to say that earning a voucher is now only half the battle: for many recipients, actually finding a landlord who will accept it can prove a challenge — even if landlords are legally required to consider them equally to any applicants without a voucher.

During the meeting, Kelly F. Vieira, who works at the Center for Housing Justice & Policy at Suffolk University Law School, said the center found in a 2020 study that an overwhelming majority of people using housing vouchers to apply for rental units have experienced discrimination from landlords or real estate professionals.

“Up to 86 percent of the folks who disclosed that they would be using a housing voucher experience discrimination,” Vieira said.

Voucher users “would need to contact 10 housing providers to have the chance to tour one,” Vieira continued. The need to then reach out to more housing providers puts pressure on the voucher user, whose “search period” to find a suitable unit is just 120 days.

“It's a ‘use it or lose it’ type situation,” Vieira said.

Source income discrimination occurs when landlords treat voucher holders differently than they would other tenants – including by refusing to accept vouchers, imposing additional screening criteria, or requiring a larger security deposit. Such prejudice usually stems from “bad tenant” stereotypes about voucher holders, who are by definition low-income.

“But, we know through working with voucher holders as our clients that often voucher holders are actually very stable, good tenants.”

Plus, organizers added, vouchers may in some ways be a more reliable form of rental income than any other: “The purpose of the voucher program is to have that government guarantee that the rent will be paid,” Vieira said.

A lack of awareness, by both applicants and landlords, that voucher users are a legally protected class is also contributing to the problem, according to the webinar’s organizers.

“In Cambridge, to be a landlord, it's not like you have to go through a class to really know what our local laws are,” said Carolina Almonte.

—Staff writer Summer E. Rose can be reached at summer.rose@thecrimson.com.