Obama Admin: Landlords who Refuse to Rent to Felons are Racist

In keeping with the left’s affinity for identity politics, the Obama Administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has released new guidelines this week regarding the Fair Housing Act.  The new guidelines pressure landlords into accepting tenants regardless of their criminal background, even discouraging them inquiring about an applicant’s felonious history in the first place.

Despite the fact that it is already illegal to deny a tenant based on their race or ethnicity or even inquire about it, the administration claims that refusing to rent to an ex-con –without even knowing his/her race — is racist because blacks and Hispanics are more likely to have criminal backgrounds.

Breitbart discusses the potential problems with implementing these guidelines — in addition to the fact that law-abiding people do not want to live among felons, and how there is a trend in this type of move by the Obama administration.

One inevitable result is that many law-abiding renters — including many African-Americans — will be forced to unknowingly live alongside felons they wish to avoid.

According to Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the “disparate impact” theory of racism says landlords are racists if they have a color-blind practice of excluding all felons from their buildings. That color-bind practice is racist, say progressives, because it has a greater impact on African-Americans than on whites.

It has a greater impact on African-Americans because blacks tend to commit crimes at a higher rate than whites, according to federal data.

HUD said in its new guidelines released this week:

The Fair Housing Act prohibits both intentional housing discrimination and housing practices that have an unjustified discriminatory effect because of race, national origin, or other protected characteristics. Because of widespread racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, criminal history-based restrictions on access to housing are likely disproportionately to burden African-Americans and Hispanics. While the Act does not prohibit housing providers from appropriately considering criminal history information when making housing decisions, arbitrary and overbroad criminal history-related bans are likely to lack a legally sufficient justification.

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However, the new rules will pressure landlords from even inquiring about a possible renter’s criminal history at all, because any inquiring could lead to an expensive and painful federal lawsuit.

One result will be that many law-abiding renters will find themselves living alongside felons.

Also, landlords will seek new practices — such as raising rents — that indirectly exclude criminals from their rentals.

This sort of high-pressure leverage of obscure rules is nothing new in Obama’s Washington.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare could be used as a basis to bring lawsuits for “housing discrimination” against landlords and state agencies. The court’s decision opened the door to more easily bring “racial discrimination” suits against the states, so the administration is using this permission to pressure wealthier communities across the nation to include Section 8-styled housing vouchers in their areas.

This was all part of an effort to force “affordable housing” schemes and “diversity” on every community in the country, by order of Obama’s ever-evolving housing rules.

Racism is real, and it affects people of every color in every community.  But the Left’s insistence on calling just about anything and everything racist diminishes the victims of true racism.  It is hard for real victims of racial discrimination to be taken seriously while you have the man who holds the most powerful position in the world whining about being a victim of racism himself.

Source: Breitbart