A Milwaukee County ordinance makes discrimination against housing voucher holders illegal, but enforcement is essentially nonexistent. A City of Milwaukee agency is now looking at the issue.
In 2018, then-Milwaukee County Supervisor Marina Dimitrijevec sponsored and helped pass the county ordinance that made discrimination against housing voucher holders illegal.
But the county failed to develop a serious enforcement mechanism and has never litigated a complaint, says Stefanie Ebbens, senior administrator of the Inclusive Communities Program at Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council (FHC). FHC is a local non-profit that operates a full-service fair housing program.
Private landlords are not required to opt into the subsidized housing voucher (known as section 8) program, but if they do, they cannot then discriminate against those who use them.
Discrimination against voucher holders isn’t just illegal at the local level. Wisconsin’s fair housing law also prohibits landlords from discriminating based on a person’s “lawful source of income,” which includes vouchers with monetary value.
Nevertheless, in a decision from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Wisconsin, the judges questioned whether federal rent vouchers fit within the meaning of “lawful source of income.”
The City of Milwaukee’s Equal Rights Commission is now taking a closer look at the county ordinance and others around the state that are designed to protect individuals who have managed to obtain a subsidized housing (known as section 8) voucher to help cover the cost of rent.
At a commission meeting In February, Ebbens told the commission about the frustration she and her clients experience when trying to secure housing. She said Milwaukee landlords have become “more bold because they know no one is coming after them.”
FHC’s Megan Wanke presented problematic trends and discrimination in the acceptance of vouchers in Milwaukee.
Maps in the presentation showed a disproportionate concentration of households using federally subsidized vouchers in Milwaukee’s highest poverty areas, which remain consistent with historical racial segregation and Milwaukee’s long history of redlining.
The problem is a mismatch of available properties and people receiving housing vouchers.
FHC shared data from a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities think tank study conducted between 2017 and 2021, which showed that while only 20% of the city’s voucher affordable properties are located high-poverty census tracts, 32% of voucher holders reside in them.
Meanwhile 34% of the city’s voucher affordable housing properties are in low-poverty census tracts, and only 17% of the city’s voucher holders live there.
FHC recently conducted its own testing investigation, which showed that 45% of major property owners in Milwaukee prohibit or restrict the use of section 8 vouchers, some with policies that are exclusive to Milwaukee. Wanke told the commission that about three-fourths of those property owners refuse to accept vouchers at all, while the others disqualify voucher holders with targeted restrictions that effectively cut them out of the market. One company in fact accepts voucher renters, just not in Milwaukee. Wanke shared that the investigation involved more than 7,000 residential units.
Wanke said the difference in where voucher holders are concentrated cannot be explained by housing stock or average cost of rent, and it has “despicable racial discrimination implications.”
Section 8 vouchers belong to a rental assistance program managed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. They are supposed to ensure that low-income families, seniors with fixed incomes, and disabled individuals have access to private-market housing.
Participants pay roughly 30% of their income toward rent and utilities. A local public housing agency pays the remainder directly to landlords. The public housing agencies act as a conduit for the federal funding and ensure that rent makes it directly into landlords’ hands. The agencies have broad discretion in running their programs, which impose strict income requirements.
The waitlist to receive benefits is often years long.
In Milwaukee, the program is administered by the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee. Its waitlist is so long that it is currently closed.
Participants are subject to criminal background checks that can be disqualifying. The local program must “accurately distinguish between criminal conduct that indicates a demonstrable risk to resident safety and property and criminal conduct that does not,” according to the Milwaukee housing authority’s Admissions and Continued Occupancy Policy.
Despite these protections, many still have trouble finding landlords willing to take their vouchers.
Members of the public who testified at the commission’s meeting shared stories of landlords “ghosting” them at showings or failing to return calls.
One woman, Katrativa Lee, shared her struggles in attempting to find a landlord willing to accept her voucher in time for her to use it, after she had waited years to receive the voucher at all. Lee also expressed frustration at paying as much as $75 to fill out an application, just to have a landlord decline her without providing a reason.
According to Wanke, the pressure to find housing reduces a renter’s desire to file a complaint to enforce the anti-discrimination laws. Complaints would take months to resolve, which they don’t have.
Also, many who feel or know they have been wrongfully discriminated against also do not want to risk being seen as problematic.
And despite the 2018 enactment of the county ordinance, there is no clear path to file a complaint with the county, Ebbens told the city commission.
Milwaukee County’s corporation counsel could not be reached for comment on this issue.
The issue is not as pronounced in Madison. Wanke and Ebbens said that Madison has a more comprehensive and structured administrative process under a city antidiscrimination ordinance.
Commission chair Tony Snell assured community speakers that the commission would take action, ordering a comparative analysis of the Wisconsin county and municipal fair housing law from the city’s Legislative Reference Bureau and creating a subcommittee to evaluate whether the commission can enact more robust protections.