NY City Council Votes to Limit Landlords’ Criminal Background Checks on Tenants

By:  Hellen Zaboulani

The New York City Council passed a bill to limit landlords’ ability to use criminal records to screen tenants.

As reported by the NY Times, the bill passed on Wednesday, is a narrowed version of legislation which had been unsuccessfully introduced in 2020.  The bill proposed three years ago had spurred complaints that residential buildings would be unsafe, due to the lack of information and screening accessible to landlords.  The bill’s new version, which has been approved, allows landlords to look for and reject tenant applications based on misdemeanor convictions within the past three years, and felony convictions within five years.

Proponents for the bill say traditional unlimited background checks lock in the fate for people who already served a sentence, and continually penalize them to be treated unfairly.  Other Democratic-leaning cities including Detroit, MI and Oakland, CA, have passed similar bills to prevent this type of housing discrimination.

Per the NY Times, there are roughly 750,000 people in the Big Apple who have a conviction on their records. These individuals often get barred from renting an apartment or buying a house because of previous convictions, say housing advocates, city officials and landlord groups.  This makes its easy for these people to become homeless, adding more victims to city’s fiercest problem.  There are already over 122,000 homeless people living in NYC shelters,  per the most recent data.  Instead of using background checks to stigmatize, keep down and stimulate more crime, making housing accessible may have the opposite effects including helping to lower crime, some studies suggest. Also, the bill’s proponents say that background checks can inadvertently penalize innocent people by providing inaccurate or incomplete results.

The new bill is the result of years of negotiations between criminal justice reform advocates and landlord groups, City Hall and the City Council.  Per the NY Times, in 2020, similar legislation was introduced in the Council but failed to pass, even though it had the support of most City Council members.  The initial version of the Fair Chance for Housing Act sought to ban nearly all criminal background checks by landlords on prospective tenants.  Several landlord groups and tenants along with NYC Mayor Eric Adams had asked the bill’s language to be altered to make the rules less broad and allow for some oversight.

This new legislation, which will take effect in 2025, was introduced last year by Councilman Keith Powers, a Manhattan Democrat. It takes into account the perspective some landlords and neighboring tenants who consider background checks a matter of safety. “We need to know as much as we can about people whom we are inviting to join our community,” said Mary Ann Rothman, the executive director of the Council of New York Cooperatives and Condominiums.  The new version also allows extended background checks in cases involving one- and two-family homes at which the owner is also a resident. It also allows landlords to screen based on convictions of certain sex crimes.  “We think the bill that we’re bringing for a vote does strike the right balance,” Councilman Powers said.

Andre Ward, associate vice president of policy at the Fortune Society, a nonprofit group which works for the advancement of formerly incarcerated people, said he supported the bill, even though he said it was “not ideal.”