Novato Park Apartments at 1725 Novato Blvd. in Novato.
Fair housing advocates are using a recent settlement with a Novato housing complex as a teaching moment about housing discrimination.
The Novato Park Apartments, located at 1725 Novato Blvd., settled a complaint to the tune of $35,000 this week with Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California (FHANC) which alleged the company’s policy of refusing to rent to people with Section 8 housing vouchers was a violation of state fair housing law.
Awareness of the policy came to light in May 2021 when the manager of the Novato Park Apartments penned a letter to the editor in the Marin Independent Journal explaining that the company no longer accepted tenants with Section 8 vouchers because of a bad experience with a previous Section 8 tenant. The letter spurred FHANC to respond with their own letter to the editor, describing why the manager’s conduct was discriminatory. Later, the nonprofit conducted three fair-housing test investigations at the apartment complex, which all confirmed it was still not accepting Section 8 tenants. According to FHANC, people posing as Section 8-qualified rental seekers were told, “We don’t take those, sorry” and “we’ve had trouble in the past.”
In March of 2023, FHANC filed a discrimination complaint over the policy with the California Civil Rights Department, alleging source-of-income discrimination against the owner and manager of the Novato Park Apartments. The settlement reached last week included the $35,000 as well as a promise of policy changes, training and the posting of unit vacancies to sites serving people with Section 8 vouchers.
Caroline Peattie, executive director of FHANC, stressed the importance of landlords not basing rental decisions for an entire group on anecdotal bad experiences—especially when it involves people protected under fair housing law. “The best way of gauging whether or not someone will be a good tenant is to contact previous landlords, rather than making assumptions about an applicant based solely on unrelated characteristics,” Peattie wrote in an announcement of the settlement.
Because voucher holders are more likely to be members of certain protected classes—people of color, women, people with children and people with disabilities—excluding all voucher holders from rental properties will have a discriminatory effect, even if the reason for the denial is not based on animus toward protected groups, FHANC said in the release.
Peattie said she’s pleased with the settlement. “We believe strongly in educating the community about both well-established and new fair housing laws,” she said.
