(The following letter was sent to the Kirkland City Council from various members of the Eastside Homelessness Advisory Committee).

As members of EHAC and as the homeless housing and service providers of your community, we urge you to adopt Ordinance 0-4384 to prohibit the refusal to rent available housing based solely on a tenant’s use of a Section 8 voucher to pay a portion of their rent.

The Section 8 program plays a vital role in giving low-income families access to safe, healthy, market-rate housing they can afford. If enacted, Kirkland would join 13 states and 38 local jurisdictions that have enacted source of income discrimination laws to ensure that vulnerable populations, such as veterans, families fleeing domestic violence, children, seniors, and people with disabilities, have an equal chance of renting a home.

This ordinance supports one of the main ways to prevent homelessness and keep housing available to vulnerable populations in the city since Section 8 vouchers make housing affordable to residents who would normally be priced out of the private housing market. Specifically, this ordinance would:

1. Protect the 400 households in Kirkland currently using Section 8 vouchers from the disruption of moving, should the landlord discriminate against them based on their use of a voucher.

2. Protect Kirkland households who will be issued a Section 8 voucher from discrimination and from possibly having to leave the city in order to find safe, healthy, affordable housing.

3. Close a loophole for landlords who use the Section 8 program as a proxy for discriminating against other protected classes, such as race or family status.

The Section 8 program cannot be fully effective so long as landlords are allowed to refuse to rent to people solely because they are using a Section 8 voucher to pay part of their rent. In communities where rents are low and vacancies are high, private landlords are more than willing to accept vouchers and even lobby for new public funding for vouchers.

But in communities like Kirkland, where vacancy rates are low and rents are highest, landlords are suddenly quick to judge voucher programs and reticent to accept the vouchers they so strongly supported for other markets.

As our programs continue the hard fight to end homelessness, we find this unacceptable. People at-risk of homelessness should not depend on a weak rental market to find housing. Low-income people in strong rental markets rely even more so on programs like Section 8 to access safe, healthy, affordable housing.

We understand that landlords have concerns about the Section 8 program. Given that many of our organizations are landlords who rent to households with Section 8 vouchers, we can say with certainty that these concerns are unfounded.

Landlords would not be unduly burdened by this ordinance. Over the past 22 years, landlords in the cities of Seattle and Bellevue have operated under a similar ordinance with minimal disruption, despite initial widespread concern. Local landlords have voiced similar fears, but they rest on inaccurate information. Here are the facts:

• Great benefits to landlords: Under the Section 8 program, the King County Housing Authority pays their share of the rent on time every month. KCHA adjusts payments to compensate for changes in tenants’ incomes, so tenants can stay in units, creating longer and more successful tenancies for all parties.

• Ability to charge market rent: KCHA looks at whether rent is reasonable and whether the tenant will have to pay more than 40 percent of income toward rent. If the rent is unreasonable or too high for that tenant, that apartment is simply not rented under the voucher program. The landlord is not forced to lower the rent or alter their terms.

• Effective screening for tenants who can afford to pay the rent each month: This ordinance does not alter landlords’ ability to use legitimate screening criteria to find good tenants.

Landlords may still choose non-Section 8 tenants over Section 8 tenants for many reasons, including having a criminal record, the lack of a security deposit, or a questionable rental history.

Under the proposed ordinance, a landlord may also rent to a non-Section 8 tenant over a Section 8 tenant because they are ready to move in (and pay rent) sooner than the Section 8 tenant is. In these cases, the choice is made not solely because the tenant proposes to use a Section 8 voucher but because of other factors landlords use to run their businesses.

Ultimately, the proposed ordinance merely levels the playing field for the vulnerable populations that rely on Section 8 vouchers to pay a portion of their rent. These households have waited for years for waiting lists to open, and then have waited for many more years to actually receive their vouchers.

As your Eastside partners in the fight to end homelessness, we applaud you for your diligent work to ensure all people have access to safe, healthy, affordable housing. Through your support of the ARCH Housing Trust Fund, the Eastside winter shelters, and many human services programs, we have worked together to prevent and end homelessness for countless families on the Eastside, but we cannot solve the problem alone.

This year’s One Night Count of homeless individuals identified 197 unsheltered people on the Eastside, a 42 percent increase from 2012.

Please ensure Section 8 participants have the opportunity to find a safe, healthy, affordable home in Kirkland. Vote to approve Ordinance 0-4384.

Eastside Homelessness Advisory Committee