Seattle City Councilmembers Lisa Herbold, who opened the Seattle ACORN office, and Kshama Sawant, a socialist, have put forward legislation that would limit the use of criminal records in rental housing applications by curtailing the amount of information available through background checks that landlords rely upon to weed out what they consider to be unfit tenants, reports Real Change News.
The bill, called Fair Chance Housing, proposes to help people with criminal records in several ways. First, it wouldn’t allow background checks to include criminal convictions older than two years. Currently background checks can include criminal history dating back seven years (“Washington background checking agencies are flawed and unenforced,” RC, July 26). Second, it requires landlords to offer a business reason for denying an application; simply citing a criminal conviction would not suffice.
-RW
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