"D.C. Attorney General Goes After Another Landlord For Discriminating Against Voucher Holders", 27 Jun 2019

D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine is suing a local real estate and property management company over claims that it discriminated against renters with housing vouchers and refused to accept payments from the city’s rapid re-housing program.

Advertisements for Southeast D.C. apartments run by Maryland-based Curtis Investment Group included the language “**NOT ACCEPTING VOUCHERS AT THIS TIME**” and “we are not accepting any vouchers or rapid rehousing” as recently as this month on both its own website and third-party sites like Apartments.com, Racine’s lawsuit alleges. The complaint includes images of the advertisements in question. D.C.’s Human Rights Act prohibits housing discrimination based on a person’s source of income.

The lawsuit calls on the court to stop Curtis from this practice with an injunction, and to impose civil penalties on the company. Curtis has not responded to a request for comment.

About 10,500 D.C. households use housing vouchers, a federally funded program that pays part of a qualifying tenant’s rent to private landlords. Additionally, the city runs a rapid re-housing program for people and families experiencing homelessness, in which the D.C. Department of Human Services pays the rent directly to the landlord for up to a year, with participants then paying a percentage of that rent to the city.

While it’s illegal to discriminate against tenants who refuse to rent to people who use federal rental assistance vouchers or are part of the rapid re-housing program, landlords and rental companies in D.C. continue to do so in plain language in housing advertisements...