Two hours after she toured a one-bedroom apartment at a New York City Housing Authority (Nycha) development in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Christina Johnson returned to the building’s management office with $1,861 – exactly one month’s rent plus a security deposit. It was the last week of September 2020, and years of careful saving for an apartment of her own were finally over.
After returning the requisite paperwork, she waited for a follow-up call from the management and daydreamed about her new home – how she’d set the bedroom furniture up, what she’d put in its five closets. Johnson, a single mom with one son, rewatched the video she’d made of the apartment and talked to everyone about it. She refreshed the Nycha portal regularly, scanning for updates.
Six days after touring the apartment, Johnson saw on the portal that her application status had changed from certified to “pending ineligibility”. Puzzled, she went back to the management office and found her money had been returned.
“I was told to call the Nycha hotline and I left the office with absolutely no explanation,” said Johnson, now 25. “It didn’t seem right to me, but humbly I called. And the call was what broke me.” The supervisor told her she and her son were ineligible for housing through Nycha – the nation’s largest public housing agency – because her criminal record surfaced through a background check.
Depending on the severity of the crime, Nycha bars potential tenants with criminal records for various lengths of time starting with three years for misdemeanors. Johnson says she was told she was ineligible until 2027.
A misstep as a teenager – one, she emphasized, she has never repeated – landed Johnson in prison at 17. She served three years for the felony and was released in 2016. Afterward, she started a job as a case manager at the Fortune Society, a New York City non-profit that works for and with those who are incarcerated or returning home from prison. Despite years of stable employment and enough savings to cover her moving costs, Johnson’s criminal history repeatedly resurfaced during her years-long apartment hunt, prompting a flurry of rejections. (She estimates that between 2016 and 2020 she applied for 30 to 40 apartments.) Getting the September 2020 call from Nycha for an apartment that fit her needs and budget represented progress, she said, making the agency’s apparent reversal that much more gutting.
“Everything that I worked so hard for, it was just taken away from me,” she said. “This is something that I’ve wanted all my life. I literally only have had my own bedroom when I was in prison.”
Johnson is one of roughly 750,000 New York City residents with criminal convictions in their history, advocates for the incarcerated estimate. Though several other US cities – including Detroit; San Francisco, Los Angeles, Berkeley and Oakland, California; and the states of Oregon and New Jersey – have enacted “fair chance for housing” laws, New York City, perhaps the most competitive arena for renters in the nation, never has. These laws – which prohibit treating rental applicants or tenants differently based on this history – could smooth some of the obstacles keeping New Yorkers out of housing and contributing to homelessness, and they could stem recidivism.
“Landlords have the ability to scrutinize your background – to a certain extent that’s totally, totally fair,” said Wendell Walters, a policy advocate at the Osborne Association, which provides treatment and vocational and educational services for New Yorkers whose lives intersect with the legal system. “But in New York City, you have three-quarters of a million people who have a conviction history and they’re effectively shut out of the housing market.”
Some of these New Yorkers – who are predominantly Black and Latino – first try the usual routes to housing, such as relying on brokers and online searches. Some spoken to for this story detailed discriminatory treatment during their searches – even before their conviction histories were revealed – including markedly different treatment from agents and potential landlords when they met in person. Racial discrimination in rentals and sales has contributed to New York City’s rank as the third-most-segregated city for Black Americans in the US and second-most-segregated for Latinos and Asian Americans, says the Fair Housing Justice Center.
Some give up on the search altogether, at this point, and move in with family and friends, advocates said. Others end up in transitional or supportive housing programs. Some enter the city’s overwhelmed shelter system.
Securing housing is additionally complicated for some of those who have been paroled and need to have their home address approved by the state, said Robert Blocker, director of re-entry services at Project Renewal, a New York City non-profit that operates employment and healthcare programs, homeless shelters and supportive housing.
“If the parole officer doesn’t approve your address, then your next address will be one of the New York City shelters,” said Blocker, whose team works with those slated to be released from nearby prisons including Sing-Sing and Bedford Hills correctional facility.
Even a certain breed of dog can cause a housing option not to be approved, he added. “If there’s a dog, in particular, a pitbull, living in the unit, [a parolee] will not be allowed to return to the unit – no, really.”
‘I paid my debt to society’
“At this age, most people are preparing for retirement and I’m just acclimating myself to society again,” said Roslyn Smith, a Queens native who went to prison at 17, in 1979, and was released from Bedford Hills correctional facility in Westchester county in early 2018.
She planned first to get a job, and then an apartment. “I had all these dreams,” said Smith, the Beyond Incarceration project manager at V-Day, an organization that works to end violence against women.
She searched for an apartment for months.
“But I’d never put in the factor that I’m formerly incarcerated and I have a criminal background,” she said. “I thought freedom entailed me doing my time. I paid my debt to society. I knew that I had to have a job. I knew that I had to be a good citizen. So all these things that I hoped for didn’t pan out the way that I hoped they’d pan.”
More than once, she said, she found a place she liked and applied, paid the background and credit check fee, and then was completely ghosted. Johnson and other formerly incarcerated New Yorkers interviewed for this story described this seemingly discriminatory treatment in the hunt for housing in the five boroughs, from dozens of denied and unsuccessful applications to frosty unexplained silence from brokers and landlords after a background check.
Once, in early 2020, she contacted the realtor after applying for a one-bedroom in Central Harlem. “I was like, ‘I put my paperwork in two weeks ago. What’s happening?’”
The broker blamed “some technical thing”, she said, and assured Smith she would hear back.
“Three weeks later, I get a denial because of my criminal background,” she said. “It was devastating. I’m able to pay the rent, I met all the criteria for the apartment – they want 40 times the rent and your salary [information]. I had a 730 credit score at the time. I did everything that I needed to do, and they denied me because of my criminal background.”
Seeking a solution
In her January state of the state address, New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, proposed plans to “improve housing access for renters with justice involvement”.
One of these new proposals would “eliminate a private landlord’s ability to automatically reject individuals with justice involvement and will require housing providers to conduct individualized assessments that account for the circumstances of a conviction and evidence of rehabilitation while still ensuring the safety and welfare of existing residents”, Hochul’s office stated.
In 2020, the New York City council member Stephen Levin sponsored fair chance for housing legislation that would prohibit discrimination in housing rentals and sales because of an applicant or tenant’s arrest record or criminal history.
The draft law, which was not heard by the council before Levin’s term ended, would bar landlords, owners, agents, employees and brokers from obtaining arrest or criminal record information during the rental process, though landlords could take select actions to comply with laws safeguarding victims of domestic violence, sexual offenses or stalking.
The bill also wouldn’t prevent landlords from making inquiries into the state sex offender registry, but it would require them to provide the applicant with written notice about the inquiry and time to withdraw the application. It would also create a procedure for applicants to dispute an “adverse action” – such as a landlord denying a rental application, hiking application fees or offering unfair lease terms – based on an arrest record or criminal history. (Levin’s bill wouldn’t apply to Nycha because the agency receives federal funding.)
Officials at the New York City commission on human rights, which enforces the city’s anti-discrimination laws, have testified in support of similar laws, pointing to policies elsewhere in the US.
“Cities recognize that given the long history of racial discrimination in the criminal legal system, arrest or conviction histories ought not to bar people from accessing stable housing for themselves and their families,” said Zoey Chenitz, former senior policy counsel at the commission, in written testimony supporting the proposed legislation in September 2020. “Policies like this one represent a step toward ensuring that – whether they are recently returning to their communities from custody or if their records are older – New Yorkers with arrest and conviction histories and their families are given the best possible opportunity to thrive.”
Advocates are optimistic that the new city council, which was sworn in at the beginning of this year and is seen as more progressive and racially and ethnically diverse than in the past, will consider passing fair chance for housing legislation like that proposed by Levin. Its protections would be some of the strongest in the country for apartment-hunters with criminal histories.
Changes ahead
Colleagues at the Fortune Society assisted Christina Johnson in appealing Nycha’s decision, and at the end of 2021 she moved into an apartment in the same Bed-Stuy complex she toured in September 2020.
“With the help of the Fortune Society and some cool Nycha leaders that saw that I did rehabilitate and I would be no threat, I now have a home for my son,” Johnson said. “But that is the story for Christina Johnson and her son.”
She understands her situation is unique – she had the advantage of working alongside advocates who are well-versed in the Nycha appeal process, which is notoriously difficult with a low rate of success. Many people don’t even know an appeal is an option. “What about those that aren’t as lucky as me? What about those that took the no and ran with the no?” Johnson asked.
While Johnson was in the process of appealing, Nycha was embarking on a review of policies to make the agency’s housing more accessible for people like her in the future. In March 2021, Nycha finalized a series of criminal justice policy reforms, including an individualized screening process and panel review to determine eligibility. These reforms are expected to be in place by the end of 2022, according to a Nycha spokesperson.
Nycha’s new housing admissions criteria will evaluate conviction histories with a focus on “risk and prevention of harm”, the spokesperson said, “not on being an extension of the criminal justice system”. In September, Nycha lessened the number of offenses, primarily felonies, that would deem potential tenants ineligible from 397 to 160, and the number of misdemeanors from 117 to 12.
Johnson and her son celebrated Christmas and the new year in their new place. “We have a beautiful one-bedroom apartment,” Johnson said. “It’s nice, it’s spacious and it’s just enough space for me and him and we are making it work.”
She is focused on moving forward, she said, and on helping others through her work at the Fortune Society. A support system that can help navigate the inevitable rejections during the housing search is critical, she advises others with conviction histories.
“Prepare yourself to hear more ‘no’ than ‘yes’,” she cautioned, “but never give up because we all deserve housing.
“All of us have had several chances in life in different ways,” she added. “It just so happens getting a second chance for housing is the hardest.”
• This article was amended on 10 and 13 February 2022. Roslyn Smith was released from prison in early 2018, not 2020 as stated in an earlier version.
