Not everyone is protected under fair housing laws

By JOHN McCALLUM

Editor

When it comes to housing, being or not being a college student doesn't matter – landlords can rent to whomever they want to.

Such was the verdict former lawyer and current executive director of the Northwest Fair Housing Alliance, Marty Eichstaedt, gave at a public meeting held July 23 at Cheney's City Hall.

The sparsely attended meeting was organized by Cheney Community Development director Tom Richardson to answer Planning Commission questions stemming from a proposed student-only housing complex being planned for the Terra Vista subdivision east of the city.

Campus Crest, developers of The Grove at Terra Vista, a 192-unit complex to be built along Cheney-Spangle Road, had previously indicated that the complex would be available only to students, mostly from Eastern Washington University.

Campus Crest representatives had also said that not only would non-students be discouraged from applying for units, but students living at the complex would be made to find new quarters upon leaving school for any reason – a statement Planning Commissioner Tillman Carr believed was discriminatory and violated fair housing statutes.

Federal fair housing laws prevent discriminating against person based upon their race, color, national origin, religion, gender, disability or family status. Washington state law goes even further by providing protections for marital status, sexual orientation and veteran status.

Presented with the Campus Crest statements, Eichstaedt said she didn't know on what basis the owners would have to “terminate” residents because they were no longer students, but added that the law wouldn't prevent them from doing so either.

“Let me take it to the other extreme,” Carr said. “What if 25 Afro-American, non-students wanted to rent?”

Eichstaedt said on the surface it would appear to be race based, but it would also depend on whether or not students of other protected classes were also denied rentals.

“As far as renting to non-college students, I'm not hearing anything that's against fair housing,” she said.

There are exemptions to the act, Eichstaedt said, such as for dorms to segregate based upon gender, and for allowing the number of unrelated people to occupy a residence. Most of those exemptions are narrow, and targeted at specific circumstances.

Eichstaedt also said courts have ruled that density regulations are also in conflict with fair housing laws, and ordinances limiting the number of unrelated persons in a residence can have a negative impact on group homes, precluding their location within municipalities and should be addressed in order to allow a “reasonable accommodation process” that is not discriminatory.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected]