New York City Council is now considering passing a bill, The Fair Chance Housing Act, which would not allow most landlords or management companies to perform criminal background checks on prospective tenants. One of the bill’s supporters, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, has argued that criminal background checks are a loophole that “consigns people with conviction histories to continued cycles of poverty, homelessness, and potential recidivism”. Once again, New Yorkers are caught between politicians on both sides of the aisle that lazily rely on the law to find solutions to economic problems that they are neither creative nor astute enough to tackle.

 

Time and time again, instead of addressing the root causes of poverty and homelessness, the elites in this city opt for a band-aid approach that will likely never impact their own quality of life. Here’s a startling statistic: in spite of many of the high-profile, Black, elected officials in this City, nearly 60 percent of homeless households are also Black.

 

Homelessness is not a function of housing discrimination, but instead, a lopsided, economic development driven by the high cost of housing in New York City. As of May 2022, Black people in New York City also have an unemployment rate of 10.2 percent, with Latinos, a distant second at 6.2 percent.

 

In the case of The Fair Chance Housing Act, the greater risk of violence will be shouldered in Black and Latino neighborhoods, the very constituency the sponsors of the bill say they’re trying to protect. In fact, the title alone is deceptive as a play on words from the federal
government’s Fair Housing Act of 1968, which was designed to protect individuals from discrimination based on their demographics, and not their own behavior.

 

The answer to homelessness is economic mobility and vitality across all classes of New Yorkers, and especially within the Black community. One way that our elected officials should be tackling poverty is to ensure that homeowners in majority Black and Latino communities have the property values they deserve, equitable access to credit and capital, and are not victims of scams to confiscate their properties – such that they become entrepreneurial, job and housing creating engines within their own communities.

 

Absent a criminal background check, landlords would also be incentivized into a pattern of profiling in order to protect their current tenants and property. The politicians can pretend to be color blind if they want to, but with a majority of Black people being arrested for, and/or suspected of, violent crimes, landlords will easily conflate that with the fallacy that the majority of Black New Yorkers are criminals and, in all likelihood, resort to using race as a de facto criterion for deciding who they rent to.

 

A decrease in safety for the most vulnerable, and an increase in discrimination are the likely results of this ill-conceived policy. This bill, if it becomes law, will have the opposite impact that its proponents are promising us, and will also let the elected officials off the hook for not creating real, economic justice opportunities and mobility for the New Yorkers who need it most.

 

Blandon Casenave is a data scientist, resident and board member of Fordham Hill Owners Corporation, a private housing co-op located in the Fordham Manor section of The Bronx. 

 

Editor’s Note: Regarding the referenced report, “Crime and Enforcement Activity in New York City (Jan. 1 – Dec. 31, 2021),” Norwood News has asked the Bronx District Attorney’s Office if it has a racial breakdown of those eventually convicted of violent crimes in order to compare it to the report compiled by the NYPD on the racial breakdown of those suspected and / or arrested for violent crimes in any one year, to see if the racial breakdown of those eventually convicted for such crimes aligns with the racial breakdown of those arrested/suspected of the violent crimes. We will update this article upon receipt of any information we receive in this regard.