September 2, 2025
Landlords may not implement practices that have a disparate impact on renters who use a housing voucher to pay part of the rent, according to a July 28 decision from the Supreme Court of Maryland in Katrina Hare v. David S. Brown Enterprises. The Public Justice Center filed an amicus brief in the case on behalf of eleven other civil rights organizations urging the Court to protect the fair housing rights of Maryland residents under the 2020 HOME (Housing Opportunities Made Equal) Act. The HOME Act, which the PJC strongly advocated to pass, prohibits landlords from refusing to rent to a tenant based on how they pay their rent, such as with a housing voucher.
Plaintiff Katrina Hare is one of more than 200,000 Marylanders who use a Housing Choice Voucher or similar subsidy to pay part of their rent each month. Ms. Hare, who has a disability and a fixed income, pays 30% of her income toward rent as required by the voucher program, with the rest of the rent paid with her voucher from the Baltimore County Office of Housing. The landlord denied Ms. Hare’s rental housing application because her income did not equal 2.5 times the full market rent for the unit – despite Ms. Hare’s income being more than 2.5 times her share of the rent. The amicus brief co-authored by PJC attorneys Albert Turner and Matt Hill and Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll argued that these kinds of landlord policies are designed to exclude voucher holders from housing, have no legitimate business rationale since the landlord policy is linked to the tenant’s income relative to the full market rent instead of their share of the rent (ignoring the portion of the rent that the voucher covers), and thus undermines the law’s purpose of opening up opportunities for voucher holders to live in neighborhoods throughout Maryland. The use of this type of income criteria ultimately perpetuates patterns of economic, disability, and racial segregation by relying on biased assumptions about voucher-holding families and serves as a proxy for discrimination based on identities like race, gender, and disability.
The Supreme Court of Maryland reversed the lower court’s decision and sent the case back to the trial court to consider whether this egregious landlord policy has a disparate impact on residents like Ms. Hare, who rely on a voucher to pay part of their rent. Unfortunately, the Court did not find that the particular landlord policy in this case was discriminatory on its face without the need for further proceedings. We disagree with this interpretation and side with Judge Watts’ concurring opinion which argues that, because of the intent of the HOME Act, a landlord may only consider whether the tenant can pay their share of the rent. In fact, not long after this ruling came out, the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights issued guidance affirming our position, stating that landlords who require voucher tenants to show income that is three times the full market rent violate the Maryland Fair Housing Act. We remain committed to advocating for expansive enforcement of fair housing laws that hold landlords accountable for policies that discriminate.
Thank you to Ms. Hare for her persistence, Lauren DiMartino and Andy Freeman of Brown, Goldstein & Levy, LLP, and James Ray for representing Ms. Hare, and our fellow brief authors Rebecca Ojserkis, Brian Corman, Dana Busgang, Alisa Tiwari, and Phoebe Wolfe of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC. Thank you also to the organizations that signed onto the brief: Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, National Housing Law Project, Equal Rights Center, National Fair Housing Alliance, the former Homeless Persons Representation Project, Fair Housing Justice Center, Disability Rights Maryland, Poverty & Race Research Action Council, Baltimore Regional Housing Partnership, Maryland Legal Aid, and Housing Works.
