Messenger: 100-year rental ban for felons causes St. Louis social justice advocate to speak up | Tony Messenger

It’s a difficult job because Reid’s clients are mostly coming out of prison after felony convictions. He works at Criminal Justice Ministry, a nonprofit that helps folks reintegrate into life in St. Louis once they leave prison.

Reid is good at what he does in part because he understands what his clients have been through. Reid, who is 35, has a couple of drug-possession felonies on his record. He served a few years in prison, and turned his life around after he got out. He’s been off parole since 2014.

This fall, he’s going to work on a graduate degree in social work at Washington University. He’s received a scholarship that covers most of his tuition. Reid decided that he wanted to find a new apartment, closer to the university. He found a place off Hampton Avenue, just north of Tilles Park, that looked like a good option. That is, until he walked into the office at Hampton Gardens Apartments, and looked at the requirements for rental, which include this paragraph, under “automatic rejection:”

“Applicant has been convicted of a felony in the past 100 years.”

It’s something Reid has never seen before.

“I felt completely shamed,” Reid told me. “I haven’t felt that level of shame in more than a decade.” Wanting to make sure he didn’t misunderstand, Reid took a video of him going back to the leasing office to verify the policy. Then he wrote a Facebook message about it.

“The fact that we still live in a society that deems me a threat to the public is ridiculous,” he wrote, tagging the Hampton Gardens Apartments in his post. The management company didn’t take too kindly to it. They sent him a text later that day.

“We could not help but notice your mention on your social media page as it pertains to our rules and guidelines,” the text message read. “You are in no way a threat, but our rules are our rules and unfortunately every action whether it was 10 years ago or 10 minutes ago has its consequences.”

10 minutes. 10 years. But 100 years?

“Once they sent me the text message it was almost like kicking a dog while I was down,” Reid says.

He understands the right private landlords have to choose their tenants, but a 100-year denial for any felony is extreme.

That’s a blanket denial for anybody with a felony conviction — and some “serious” misdemeanors, according to the policy — and that, he believes, might be illegal.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a guidance memo for landlords that explained that while landlords can exclude felons in many situations, the Fair Housing Act still requires that policies aren’t discriminatory in nature. Blanket bans — as a 100-year exclusion would be — are not acceptable, the HUD guidance says.

“Housing providers that apply a policy or practice that excludes persons with prior convictions must still be able to prove that such policy or practice is necessary to achieve a substantial, legitimate, nondiscriminatory interest,” says the guidance memo signed by then-HUD general counsel Helen Kanovsky. “A housing provider that imposes a blanket prohibition on any person with any conviction record — no matter when the conviction occurred, what the underlying conduct entailed, or what the convicted person has done since then — will be unable to meet this burden.”

Lee Camp, a senior staff attorney with ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit law firm, says the 100-year language looks like a blanket ban to him, and that could be legally problematic.

“A blanket ban like this to me screams as a potential violation of the Fair Housing Act,” says Camp, who specializes in housing law. Part of the reason is that the criminal justice system has historically had a disparate impact on people of color, meaning the effect of the policy, whether intended or not, likely is discriminatory based on race. Reid is Black.

In the past few years, Reid’s employer, CJM, got into the landlord business precisely because so many landlords in St. Louis make it difficult to find rentals for people with felony convictions. The nonprofit has bought its own buildings to help men and women leaving state prisons find stable housing. The apartments are subsidized early on, giving people time to get on their feet.

Reid has been on his feet for many years. He has good credit, stable income and excellent rental history. He’s well known in the St. Louis community for his work in the social justice field, including as the president of PrideSTL, an organization that seeks to raise awareness of LGBTQ issues. He sees progress in erasing the stigma of going to prison. “Ban-the-box” philosophies have been adopted by both St. Louis and St. Louis County governments, encouraging people with felonies to seek employment without discrimination.

But even with stable employment, those folks — people like Reid — still need stable housing, and they can’t wait 100 years for their felony records to magically disappear.

Reid has filed a complaint with HUD and plans to try to get the policy changed, even though he will find an apartment somewhere else. An employee at Hampton Gardens said her boss was on vacation and couldn’t be reached for comment.

“I want them to feel as ashamed as they made me feel,” Reid says. “What they’re doing is not right.”