Brad Kroner:        Hello and welcome to The County where we examine issues important to Baltimore County, Maryland. I'm your host, Brad Kroner. Today we're discussing the housing opportunities made equal or HOME Act, the history of affordable housing challenges in Baltimore County, and how an agreement with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development continues to impact the county. Earlier this month, county executive Johnny Olszewski introduced the HOME Act which would ban housing discrimination based on a potential renter's source of income.

John Olszewski:     We're here today because we believe that every person, every person deserves the chance to provide their families with a safe and affordable place to call home. I've consistently said that we have both a legal and a moral obligation to expand access to affordable housing here in Baltimore County. Discrimination in any form is simply wrong. That's why today I'm announcing our plans to introduce the Housing Opportunities Made Equal or HOME Act.

Brad Kroner:        This legislation is a core part of an agreement with federal officials to expand access to affordable housing in Baltimore County. The county must also cause the creation of more affordable housing in addition to providing more financial counseling to the low income renters. All of this is mandated by a legal agreement with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Brad Kroner:        So how did we get here? In 2011, affordable housing advocates, re-engaged county officials with renewed concerns about Baltimore County's lack of adequate affordable housing. One of the people in those meetings, county attorney Mike Field reflects on those conversations about how the county could address their concerns.

Mike Field:         We've been hearing for years from people who were connected to the fair housing community that they were looking at the county for some kind of action, concerned about lack of rental housing, affordable rental housing for poor people, things like that. We had a meeting, a very large meeting with members of that community.

Brad Kroner:        Some of the participants in that meeting included the ACLU, the NAACP of Baltimore County, and Baltimore Neighborhoods Incorporated among others. A few months later they filed a formal complaint with HUD alleging that Baltimore County didn't have enough affordable housing and was in violation of fair housing laws.

Mike Field:         These are the allegations, the county policies did not encourage, and to some degree stymied, the creation of affordable housing for families with people with disabilities. Same thing for large families. The allegation and the statistics that they used in their complaints showed that minority families were generally more impacted by this than nonminority families, particularly with regard to the need for rental housing.

Brad Kroner:        In October, 2011 Baltimore County released a report on the barriers to fair housing choice. That report found that the county was segregated along racial and socioeconomic lines creating pockets of poverty. In fact, the report found that Baltimore County was the most segregated county in the state and the Baltimore region was the 16th most segregated region in the country. Advocates described this as a legacy of redlining, a discriminatory practice in which banks would refuse to issue loans to black residents based on community demographics.

Brad Kroner:        Segregation and the concentration of poverty were exacerbated by housing discrimination, by source of income. In some neighborhoods where rental units were available, landlords would refuse to take housing vouchers, forcing participants in the Housing Choice Voucher Program to go elsewhere. The result is increased segregation and a concentration of voucher recipients in the northwest and the southeast. Stefanie DeLuca, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, studies housing policy and outcomes for disadvantaged communities. She says that the legacy of redlining and housing discrimination continues to have a negative impact on communities of color and people in poverty.

Stefanie DeLuca:    Many things are set in motion. Blockbusting and redlining two other things. Real estate actors scaring white families out of neighborhoods for fear that they would never be able to sell their homes once African Americans moved in. And then you have lending institutions using maps that are color coded for areas of high and low risk and the high risk areas were primarily African American neighborhoods. The lending institutions used what they called a residential security map to decide where to invest and then divested in black neighborhoods, which then set in motion decades of wealth stripping in those neighborhoods. You also have a federal government and local government, especially we know locally here, have been implicated in intentional and unintentional policies that have created disparate access to neighborhoods with good schools and low crime rates.

Brad Kroner:        Her research has found that eliminating source of income discrimination does improve neighborhood opportunity. And the benefits that come with that.

Stefanie DeLuca:    It's not just the family a child grows up in, but the neighborhood that a child ... not just a family a child is born into, but the neighborhood that he or she grows up in that has an impact on his or her future. Housing choice vouchers are a rare, precious subsidy that helps families afford housing in far more communities than they would typically be able to without the subsidy. And in theory, families can choose to live anywhere where a landlord is willing to rent to them. And so the second part of that sentence is key because a lot of the neighborhoods that we know are important that promote children's economic mobility and wellbeing, they're off limits. It's easy for landlords in more affluent communities to get tenants, right? And so easy to say no to those with vouchers.

Stefanie DeLuca:    So when that happens, it cuts off the ability for families to effectively use the housing voucher, which we know can help improve children's economic futures. For example, when children moved at young ages to lower poverty neighborhoods, they ended up earning more as adults, more likely to go to college, more likely to get married, more likely to raise their own children in neighborhoods that were nonpoor. And what that means is that they were contributing back to society in terms of their own earnings and the tax revenue. And so the program pays for itself.

Brad Kroner:        This benefit can be seen in other jurisdictions, notably in nearby Montgomery County as well as Mount Laurel in New Jersey.

Stefanie DeLuca:    It looks like there's a slight decrease in the poverty rate and a small reduction in minority concentration. So there's some suggestion that the source of income protection could improve neighborhood quality.

Brad Kroner:        In addition to Montgomery County, a number of other Maryland jurisdictions have banned source of income discrimination, including Baltimore City and Anne Arundel County. Now Baltimore County is taking a look at the same legislation. Following the 2011 complaint over the next several years, the parties negotiated terms and came to a voluntary compliance agreement in March 2016. That agreement requires Baltimore County to introduce the HOME Act every year until it passes. The county must also work with developers to build more affordable housing in areas of opportunity. Marsha Parham-Green, the director of Baltimore County's housing office says the county is about halfway to that goal.

M. Parham-Green:       We do need to add additional affordable units within Baltimore County and we are under a voluntary compliance agreement to add an additional 1000 hard units to areas of opportunity within the county. We're already halfway there, but the challenge is going to be getting that second half of units built.

Brad Kroner:        Unlike some other jurisdictions such as Baltimore City, Baltimore County does not own public housing units. That means the county must work in partnership with developers to get affordable housing units constructed.

M. Parham-Green:       Another big piece to that is going to be the passage of the HOME Act that is going to help us have additional affordable units. They won't build affordable units, but it will make more affordable opportunities within Baltimore County.

Brad Kroner:        In 2016, the first time that the HOME Act came to a vote, the county council voted against it six to one. County Councilman Julian Jones was the lone vote in favor.

Julian Jones:       For me in the beginning it was real simple to me it was just about discrimination. It's wrong to paint with such a broad brush that you would discriminate against a whole group of people. People with vouchers such as veterans, disabled people, and the list goes on. And so in the beginning it was about discrimination or against discrimination.

Brad Kroner:        Indeed, nearly 70% of Marylanders who use vouchers are seniors, people with disabilities, or children. These groups of people are disproportionately impacted by landlords who deny housing vouchers. But as Councilman Jones continued to look at the issue, he saw it as an opportunity to break the cycle of poverty too.

Julian Jones:       When you think about all the things that we have issues with in terms of poverty, here's an opportunity and there's nothing greater than to give the children of these parents an opportunity to break that cycle of poverty. They get them out of the environment from which they are, move them to a better place where they can get better schools, see different role models or maybe even better role models, and have an opportunity to exceed and excel and live the American dream like the rest of us.

Brad Kroner:        Councilman Jones recalls a constituent who grew up in an impoverished area and was able to move out because of a voucher program.

Julian Jones:       He said when his mother received Section 8 and they were moving from the city to the county, he hated it. He thought it was the worst day of his life. And he said he was leaving his cousins, his friends, and everybody, and he absolutely hated it. And he came out here in the county and he eventually got new friends and then one day his new friends were saying, "What college you going to? I'm going to this college ... I'm going to this college ... which college you going to?" And he realized that day that he had to go to college. So today this guy's an engineer working at Fort Meade and he tells a story about how what he thought was the worst day of his life turned out to be the best day of his life.

Brad Kroner:        The councilman said he wants to dispel the stigma that surrounds affordable housing and people who receive vouchers. He says they're just working people who need a place to live just like the rest of us.

Julian Jones:       The fact of the matter is what I tell people all the time, when you go through your day to day life, you're going to meet a lot of people that are struggling. A lot of people that are making moderate incomes. For whatever reason that you can say that they're making those incomes, but there they are and they have to have a place to live and they're not bad people.

Brad Kroner:        In the end, Jones is optimistic that the HOME Act will pass this time around.

Julian Jones:       And sometimes it takes people to come around. Initially they may have one thought, like when I talked about myself, it was real simple for me, it was about discrimination and giving people opportunities. But then the more and more I got into it, I realized it was bigger. It was about breaking the cycle of poverty. It was about all sorts of other ills that we get when we high concentrations of poverty in one location. So I'm hopeful that they'll come around as time moves forward.

Brad Kroner:        Thanks for listening to this episode of The County. This episode was produced by me, Brad Kroner with support from Media Services at the Baltimore County Public Library. Tune in next time.