SJC Exchange Library

The Prison Policy Initiative published a two-part explainer and policy guide about the ways public housing authorities deny people with criminal records critical housing assistance: How your local public housing authority can reduce barriers for people with criminal records.

This piece is designed to help advocates like yourselves read your local public housing authority's policies for clauses that may be enabling the exclusion of people with criminal records. 

The explainer:

• Estimates how many formerly incarcerated people nationally may qualify for public housing, based on their income.
• Describes what public housing authorities do.
• Lists circumstances in which the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires authorities to deny people based on criminal history, as well as the longer list of circumstances in which public housing authorities may issue denials if they wish.

The policy guide:

•        Lists ways in which local public housing authorities can (and often do) make their policies more exclusionary than HUD requires - for example, looking at someone's drug or alcohol use in the past year (whereas HUD only requires that authorities look at applicants' current drug use)
•       Explains how people can be denied public housing based largely on an arrest, or an eviction that led to an arrest - even though arrests are not a good indicator of actual criminal offenses.

 We call out particularly egregious policies that we have seen from specific public housing authorities, including:

•         Denying applicants based on their marijuana use in states where marijuana is legal, because marijuana is still illegal at the federal level;
•         Denying applicants who have been evicted from federally-assisted housing for "drug-related criminal activity," even when that activity was over five years ago;
•          Counting someone's criminal activity as "recent" even if it happened decades ago simply because a person only finished serving a criminal sentence recently.