L.A. City Council moves to outlaw discrimination against Section 8 tenants

Janet Knoy, 85, with her cat, Crinkles, had to move from this apartment in Anaheim to Desert Hot Springs to find a landlord who would accept her Section 8 voucher. The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday moved forward with a law that would bar landlords from refusing to consider tenants with Section 8 vouchers. The city’s housing authority said it’s working to reduce wait times to two days and Krekorian promised to work with landlords and the bureaucracy to “streamline the process to the greatest degree possible.” Section 8, which gets its name from a section of the federal Housing Act, was launched in the 1970s as an alternative to costly public housing projects, which were criticized for segregating poor families in neighborhoods with low-quality schools. In addition to banning source-of-income discrimination against Section 8 tenants, Los Angeles’ proposed ordinance would stop landlords from rejecting tenants outright who pay through other subsidy programs, including those specifically designed to house homeless individuals. If the ordinance becomes law, Los Angeles would join 11 states and nine cities with policies in place to outlaw blanket Section 8 bans, according to a city report.