Evora Sykes moved to Providence Village in 2018, but she never felt fully welcome in the Dallas-area suburb. Not when she saw neighbors in the majority-white town make hateful comments on a local Facebook group — which was often, she says — and not in June of this year, when she received a letter from her homeowners association telling her she’d have to move: The neighborhood’s board was banning renters who used federal housing choice vouchers.
A single Black mother of two who relied on housing aid to rent an over-2,000-square foot home in this new master-planned community in fast-growing Denton County, Sykes says that she immediately started looking for a new home after getting the HOA notice. “My focus was getting my children out of the neighborhood, and finding us a suitable home before school started,” she said. “There’s a lot of undercover racism out here.” In July, Sykes moved into a smaller house in another town.
The situation is not unusual for Texas, where state law does not forbid property owners from turning away tenants who participate in the rental assistance program known as Section 8. Federal anti-discrimination law does not recognize voucher users as a protected category, like race or sex. But in this case, it’s not landlords that are turning families away — it’s the neighborhood itself.
Some residents and landlords in Providence Village are fighting the decision of Providence HOA, which encompasses most of the town’s territory: Several have filed fair housing complaints with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. One landlord, who owns 21 properties in the 7,700-resident community and wants to continue renting to Section 8 tenants, is also suing the HOA board directly.
The legal battle to come could be a test case for protecting voucher holders under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the civil rights law that prohibits discrimination in property sales, leasing and lending on the basis of race and other categories. Because more than 90% of the more than 150 households in Providence Village that use Section 8 vouchers are Black, lawyers and housing advocates say the HOA’s plan to push them out will have a severely racially disproportionate impact on Black residents.
It’s a conflict in Dallas that’s been brewing for years.
“They’re achieving with this rule what they could have achieved in earlier days with just a simple ‘no Black tenant’ rule,” said Michael Daniel, who along with fellow civil rights lawyer Laura Beshara has filed fair housing complaints on behalf of Providence tenants.
The property manager of the Providence HOA and the mayor of Providence Village did not respond to multiple requests for comment. HUD also declined to comment on the fair housing complaint, as it is an ongoing investigation.
The conflict over Section 8 tenants had been brewing for months, according to conversations with locals and accounts in the Texas Tribune, but it came to a head in June, when the board of the Providence HOA rewrote its rental and leasing rules to prevent local landlords from renting to anyone using housing vouchers. The board later clarified its rules to say that they would allow current voucher-holders to finish out their leases, and month-to-month Section 8 tenants to stay until September.
The overall restrictions, however, remained. Under the new rules, landlords found to be in violation of the terms would be charged $300 a week.
Tenant displacement was immediate: At least four households, Sykes among them, left the community rather than face forcible ejection later, the Denton Housing Authority said. Another tenant whose lease didn’t expire until next year told Bloomberg CityLab she has been evicted by her landlord preemptively. She has four kids.
Finding new housing on such short notice will be difficult. “It is almost impossible to find somebody willing to take a voucher, particularly for the larger family sizes that are the ones that are being forced to move out of Providence Village,” said Beshara, the other civil rights lawyer filing complaints on behalf of tenants.
Besides coming up with the money for a security deposit — which can be thousands of dollars — they have to find a landlord who is willing to take them in, a particularly high hurdle in a county like Denton. Of more than 1,900 properties surveyed by the Inclusive Communities Project in the Dallas region, only 12% said they would rent to voucher holders. In majority-white non-Hispanic zip codes, that number drops to 4%.
Matthew Berke, a landlord who owns 21 homes in Providence, says he will have to sell all of them if the HOA’s rule isn’t reversed. His company, called High Opportunity Neighborhood Partners, owns about 600 single-family homes in cities across the country, and exclusively provides housing for voucher-holders, who he says are ideal tenants.
When he first heard rumors of the impending vote earlier this year, Berke says he tried to engage with the Providence board to address any specific concerns they may have had about Section 8 renters. In March, he sent them a letter, saying “basically, we appreciate HOAs, we think that an HOA is an important partner in this effort, and if there are any issues with any tenants, we’d love to talk to them and help see if we can help them resolve,” he said. He got no response. In a subsequent conversation with the Providence property manager, Berke says he was made to believe that a vote would never pass.
Now, Berke says, HON Partners has filed a lawsuit against the HOA board, alleging that the process of passing the restrictions was misleading, that their effect will be discriminatory, and that they will cause him economic damage. The suit also says that complying with the rules could could put him in violation of federal law, which mandates that landlords give tenants 90 days notice before terminating a Section 8 lease, even if there is just cause to evict.
“Unfortunately people can hide behind what I call anodyne rules,” Berke said. “But to me, the cumulative evidence as a landlord in Providence Village over those six months was that it was unmistakably racist.”
At least 16 states and over 100 cities and counties have passed local laws to protect voucher holders from discrimination. Still, just over half of tenants with Section 8 support are estimated to live in places where source of income discrimination is prohibited, according to a 2020 analysis by the Urban Institute. The patchwork nature of local and state laws can be confusing for tenants and landlords alike.
“What really strikes me about housing discrimination in this country is that once you get beyond those categories initially outlined in the Fair Housing Act, there’s just a tremendous amount of variation,” says Eva Rosen, associate professor of Georgetown University and the author of The Voucher Promise. “You see the whole spectrum of behaviors.”
Texas passed a law in 2015 preempting local city and county governments from passing their own protections against source of income discrimination. However, the federal government does protect tenants against policies proven to have a disproportionately adverse effect on a particular racial group — a field of jurisprudence known as disparate impact.
The Providence HOA’s actions are consistent with homeowners associations’ historical strategies of keeping themselves bastions of mostly white exclusivity, says Ann Lott, the executive director of the Inclusive Communities Project, an organization that advocates for Section 8 voucher-holders to move into high-opportunity communities in the Dallas area, like Denton. “Basically, [HOAs] didn’t just determine the color of your house, and how you stain your fence. They’ve always tried to say who gets to live next door,” she said. “In the past, they boldly said, ‘no one of African descent can live in this community.’” In effect, that’s what Providence is doing with its Section 8 ban, she says.
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The Inclusive Communities Project was the defendant in a landmark case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015. In a 5-4 decision led by then-Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court ruled that explicitly neutral policies or procedures that resulted in discrimination against a protected category of people were prohibited. The court’s disparate impact decision recognized that by allocating tax credits for low-income housing exclusively to poor minority neighborhoods in the Dallas area, Texas housing authorities had violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
Rosen says that some housing lawyers see Section 8 as the “next frontier” in disparate impact caselaw.
For Beshara and Daniel, it’s an old battleground. The Inclusive Communities Project used a similar disparate impact argument in 2018, when they brought a claim against another Texas HOA that had implemented a policy banning Section 8 renters from its boundaries. They lost the battle in circuit court, because the judge ruled that ICP couldn’t be the one bringing the case. Instead, Daniel said, “an owner who wanted to rent a voucher, or even a tenant who wanted to rent using a voucher, would have standing to bring a claim that the homeowners’ association’s refusal to allow it violated the Fair Housing Act.”
That’s why these cases from Providence Village, which could present both tenants and landlords as defendants, may have more teeth, Daniel said. “This is a homeowners association coming in and telling its members who have bought and paid for their private property that they cannot participate in a national federal program to help low-income people,” he said. “This is basically stripping the property owners of their rights to use their property in an approved, socially responsible way.”
— With assistance by Shelly Hagan, and Patrick Spauster