Kansas City’s ban on rejecting housing vouchers — landlords say it’ll shrink options, renters think it’ll help

Michele Williams knows the cruel ups and downs of getting a subsidized apartment in Kansas City.

For a time, she lived in a place that took her Section 8 voucher, which made housing affordable enough for her and three children.

But that lease ran out and, for a time, she’d tuck her children in at her mom’s place every night before sleeping in a car with her fiance.

Even though she qualified for housing subsidies and got a coveted Section 8 voucher, she couldn’t find a landlord willing to take her in — and take on the bureaucratic hassles that can come with government help on the rent.

“I’ve been turned down by a lot of people for vouchers,” she said. “They say that if you can’t pay out of pocket they don’t want to rent to you.”

Williams ultimately found another Section 8 apartment. But like so many people relying on rent vouchers to make ends meet, actually cashing in that help depends on finding someone willing to sign a lease that’s complicated by government rules and paperwork.

Thousands of low-income residents in Kansas City count on vouchers to make their rent affordable. Meanwhile, 285 residents find themselves without housing options amid a shortage of apartments willing to take on tenants who rely on subsidies.

Starting in July, no Kansas City landlord will be able to legally turn away a tenant like Williams.

Landlords fear that may scare property owners out of the rental market — shrinking the availability of affordable housing.

Supporters of the ordinance argue it will open more equal housing opportunities to low-income tenants.

“There are a lot of people who can afford to pay the rent,” said Brandon Henderson, an organizer with KC Tenants, “but are being kicked out of a portion of the housing market because of how they pay that rent.”

An affordable housing shortage

Numbers from a 2023 point-in-time count show that homelessness across the metro runs 10% higher than five years before. Experts cite rising rents and a lack of affordable housing.

“We have had a tremendous increase in the percentage of individuals that are rent-burdened,” said Ulysses Clayborn, the regional director for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “Their situation is precarious and they easily fall into homelessness. Trying to keep people in their homes is one of the most important parts of addressing the issue.”

To qualify for a housing choice voucher in Kansas City, a family of four would have to make no more than 50% of the area median income — meaning $25,625 a year or less.

The Housing Authority of Kansas City runs the Housing Choice Voucher Program and gives preference to veterans and homeless applicants.

Edwin Lowndes, the housing authority’s executive director, said most of the families the authority serves live on $13,000 a year or less.

More than 17,500 people in Kansas City are waiting for housing vouchers. They apply to the housing authority for the help. Then they wait for confirmation that they’re eligible for rent subsidies. Then they wait some more for a voucher to become available.

“If a family were to apply today,” Lowndes said, “it’s typically gonna be three years before they come to the top of the waitlist.”

What happens after you get a housing voucher?

Once given a voucher, a recipient has 90 days to secure housing. They can apply for extensions, and Lowndes said that it takes applicants an average of four months to find a home.

Candace Ladd says it’s common for it to take six months to a year to find housing once chosen from the waitlist. She is the outreach and development coordinator for the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom, a nonprofit that provides no-cost legal services to tenants. She says she’s seen it take longer.

“Even landlords who have historically accepted (housing vouchers) seem to be backing away,” she said.

Nadra Barnes, an organizer with KC Tenants who drives for DoorDash and Lyft, knows the wait time. She has used Section 8 vouchers twice. Her first time applying for a voucher for her and her three children came in the late 1990s. It took two years to get a  voucher.

Barnes said she ended up moving into a run-down apartment infested with drugs.

“I stayed there for nine months and then I moved my children out of there,” she said. “It was too unsafe for us.”

In 2019, it took her six to eight months to be selected from the waiting list, but her voucher expired before she could find someone to accept it.

Why do some landlords practice source of income discrimination ?

Stacey Johnson-Cosby is a Kansas City landlord and Realtor who accepts housing vouchers, but she understands why other landlords don’t.

Though rent payments are subsidized through the federal government, she said they’re not guaranteed because recipients can be kicked out of the voucher program for violating certain rules.

“It’s free,” she said, “until it’s not.”

She recalled a time when two tenants who received vouchers got into a fight at her duplex. One woman ended up in the hospital and both women were dropped from the voucher program.

“We were stuck with two people who had no means of paying their rent,” she said.

But Johnson-Cosby said the main reason landlords turn vouchers away is the agencies behind them. She said the Housing Authority of Kansas City has been routinely slow.

“From the moment someone looks at an apartment, it can take two to three months for the housing authority to get inspections done,” she said. “The unit sits empty, we don’t get any tenants in, and the tenant has nowhere to live while we wait for the housing authority to get it together.”

Johnson-Cosby said applicants who pay out of pocket, by comparison, can be screened and approved in two to three days.

Kansas City bans source of income discrimination

Kansas City’s coming source-of-income discrimination ban also prohibits landlords from rejecting applicants solely based on their credit score, previous evictions older than one year, or prior convictions or arrests.

Landlords say that puts their investments in rental housing at risk.

“If someone doesn’t pay their bills it would be dumb for us to accept them in our property and go through the same problems,” Johnson-Cosby said.

But advocates for the new ordinance say it will give low-income residents access to better living conditions because landlords often exploit the fact that Section 8 tenants have limited options.

“This leads to unsafe conditions, folks having maintenance issues go unaddressed for months, really messed-up personal treatment of tenants, and discriminatory behavior,” Henderson, with KC Tenants, said.

He said that the ordinance will also reduce the clustering of low-income tenants by opening up their options to places they would otherwise be unable to live.

A KC Tenants’ audit on the national resource list shows that people relying on Section 8 vouchers are disproportionately Black and brown and clustered together.

On Dec. 10, almost nine out every 10 rental listings that accepted housing vouchers fell in the city’s predominantly Black and low-income neighborhoods east of Troost Avenue.

“There are two tiers of housing markers in Kansas City. One where folks can afford to go and one where low-income folks are coerced into moving because they couldn’t live somewhere else,” Henderson said.

Landlords argue that the ordinance will have the opposite effect. They contend it doesn’t create affordable housing units. Rather, they see it pushing property owners to find legal ways of renting to their preferred applicants, mainly by raising rents above the threshold that would keep an apartment eligible for the maximum payout of a housing voucher. For a two-bedroom, a landlord would have to raise rent above $1,258.

She said these increases would continue to prevent voucher holders from moving where they want.

“You can’t go to the Plaza or Ward Parkway where rent is so much higher,” Johnson-Cosby said.  “You don’t gain any more neighborhoods. Now rent is higher for everyone. So the renter who doesn’t have a voucher gets hurt and the renter with the voucher isn’t helped.”

A Mid-America Association of Real Estate Investors survey of 275 local landlords showed that 55% said they would sell their properties if the ordinance passed.

In the meantime, landlords are looking for a state ban on the sort of ordinance Kansas City adopted.

Henderson said landlords may still try to find loopholes or discreetly reject applicants with housing vouchers. To combat that, he thinks the city and KC Tenants need to dispatch trained people to test whether the ordinance is being followed.

“The past four years have seen lots of progress for tenants in terms of what has come through City Hall,” he said. “The challenge is making sure this is implemented properly.”

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