Alameda County Bans Criminal Background Checks on Tenants in Move to Fight Homelessness

Update, March 20: The Alameda County Board of Supervisors reversed course and rejected the Fair Chance ordinance on its second reading on Feb. 28, 2023. Second readings are normally considered a formality, but in this case the makeup of the board changed significantly between the first and second readings because of the deaths of two pro-tenant supervisors: Wilma Chan (replaced by Lena Tam) and Richard Valle. The board voted 2-0-2, with two supervisors voting in favor, none opposed, and Supervisors Tam and David Haubert abstaining, effectively killing the proposal for now.

Board President Nate Wiley told KQED there is a possibility the proposal could come back to the board, though there is no estimation of when that might happen.

Original story, Dec. 23, 2022: Taqwaa Bonner didn’t have a hard time getting a job when he got out of prison in 2016, after serving 30 years. Getting a car and a girlfriend wasn’t a problem either. The challenge was finding a place to live.

He applied for apartment after apartment around the East Bay without success. Property owners asked about his criminal history, and Bonner, 56, suspects that revealing his felony conviction landed his applications in the trash.

He had family in the area, but couldn’t live with any of them because they all had rules in their leases that prohibited someone with a felony from moving in.

“That forced me to be homeless,” he says. For months Bonner slept in his car, sneaking into his girlfriend’s apartment when he could.

“There is a direct pipeline from prison into homelessness,” says Margaretta Lin, executive director of Just Cities, a policy group focused on social justice, and a researcher with UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. She worked on a survey of more than 100 people living in Oakland’s homeless encampments and found that 73% had criminal records. National research has found that formerly incarcerated people are almost 10 times more likely to experience homelessness than the general public.

Formerly incarcerated people face barriers to living in all forms of housing, including private rental housing, nonprofit housing and the Section 8 voucher program, Lin says: "So where can people live?”

In an effort to reduce those barriers, Alameda County has become the first in the country to ban landlords from doing criminal background checks for potential tenants. Lin championed the plan after helping to pass similar “fair chance” housing policies two years ago in Berkeley and Oakland. The three are among the strongest rules in the country because they allow for few exceptions. Seattle, Portland, Detroit, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., Cook County in Illinois and other localities also place some limits on the use of criminal background checks, as does the state of New Jersey. Locally, Richmond and San Francisco also have laws in place, though they’re far more narrow.

Alameda County’s plan (PDF) only applies to unincorporated parts of the county. It doesn’t cover properties of four units or fewer if the landlord lives on site, or tenants who are subletting their space. Landlords will still be able to check sex offender registries and comply with federal laws that bar people convicted of certain drug and sex offenses from publicly funded properties.

“All we're asking for is to judge people based on the merits of who they are today. Period,” Lin says.

Bonner says that’s what it took for him to finally secure an apartment. As a housing advocate for All of Us or None, a project of Legal Services for Prisoners With Children, he became an outspoken champion of these policies locally and says a landlord offered him a spot after recognizing him from the news.

“They took on the moral courage and said, ‘It's OK.’ And so for the first time in my life, 50 years old, I had a lease of my own,” says Bonner, who now lives in Dublin with his wife.

Not all property owners have been as receptive. Many landlords have voiced fears about endangering other tenants.

“We have such a responsibility to maintain the safety, peace and tranquility for the living enjoyment of the people that are paying rents in the Bay Area,” says Elizabeth Moreno, who owns apartment buildings in unincorporated areas of San Leandro and Hayward. She says landlords need every tool at their disposal to ensure a sound community for tenants, including background checks.

In Oakland, where a fair chance ordinance is already in place, property owners have raised concerns about the confluence of the rule with other local laws that make it tough to oust tenants, like the city and county eviction moratoriums and recently strengthened just cause protections.

“If we do make a mistake, we can't just say, OK, we made a mistake, this didn't work out. You can't really get rid of them,” says Carmen Madden, who owns a 30-unit building down the street from where she grew up in East Oakland, near Mills College.

Today, she says, the stakes feel especially high, with six tenants who she says haven’t been paying rent under the moratorium and owe around $100,000. Property owners around the county raised similar concerns. That led supervisors to amend the plan, delaying implementation until the county moratorium expires, which could come at the end of April.

Madden and others have also raised concerns about the law’s unintended consequences. In the absence of background checks, Madden says landlords find other ways to screen tenants, some of which she worries could worsen discrimination. Since Oakland increased protections for renters, she’s stopped looking at criminal records, but now she pays more attention to employment history.

Researcher Lin is currently studying the effects of Oakland and Berkeley’s fair chance policies in what she calls the nation’s first impact evaluation of such a law. Lin says preliminary results from a survey of 41 formerly incarcerated people found that about a third said they’d benefited directly from the ordinances. Final study findings won’t be out for a few years.

Among those eagerly awaiting them is the Alameda County Probation Department, which is helping to fund the work, says Shauna Conner, the department’s community reentry and outreach director.

She says stable housing is essential for the clients she works with. “It’s difficult to get people to participate in other services if they're not housed,” she says. “You're dealing with not only potential recidivism due to homelessness, but also interruption to their ability to adjust to the reentry process.”

For Katie Dixon, finding an apartment after years of homelessness changed everything. “In the two years that I've had stable housing, the whole quality of my life has improved,” says Dixon, who spent more than a decade going in and out of juvenile detention facilities, jails and prisons.

Studies have shown that stable housing reduces the likelihood of recidivism. One of the best regarded among the studies examined the Returning Home–Ohio Pilot Program (PDF), which provided permanent supportive housing to formerly incarcerated people with a history or risk of homelessness. Researchers found that participants were 40% less likely to be rearrested and 61% less likely to be reincarcerated than a comparison group.

To Dixon the reasons are obvious: Without a stable place to live, someone on probation might be forced into destructive choices, like crashing with friends who are involved in criminal activities, which could lead to a probation violation, or staying in an abusive relationship that exacerbates mental health issues just to keep a roof over their head.

Since Dixon got her own place, she’s been able to exercise, eat healthier food and meditate. Having a private space and reliable internet connection also allowed her to complete a virtual policy training program she credits for her current job as an organizer with the ACLU of Northern California.

Oakland property owner Madden has one vacancy to fill at the moment. One potential applicant recently got out of jail, a fact she learned from a local pastor who referred the man. Over the years she’s rented to a few people with criminal records. What the experience has shown her, more than anything, is that people reentering the community don’t get the support they need. If landlords are going to do their part, she says, the government should do its part, too, and make sure people leaving prisons and jails can succeed.

“What I found from those programs is that after they get them in, they leave them. So all their counseling stops, everything stops. And once it all stops, they stop,” she says. “So I get very nervous about that.”

Avoiding this “cliff” is something the probation department’s Conner thinks a lot about. She says the agency has been expanding its transition services, in part by doubling down on case management, life skills training and discharge planning.

None of that solves the biggest problem she sees when it comes to housing: affording it.

Conner sees fair chance ordinances as an important step, but, she says, “Even once we get people access, there's still a limited pool of things that they can actually rent.”

As part of a study set to be released early next year, the Council of State Governments Justice Center asked state departments of correction across the country to identify the biggest barriers to reentry housing success. According to the Center’s Charles Francis, 84% named discrimination and stigma as a top concern, while 74% named restrictive policies on the part of housing providers. The top barrier, identified by 95% of respondents, was a lack of affordable housing.