Sorry to hear that. Our freedoms are being eroded daily by folks who use their power to buy votes.

Regardless, it's still your business to find good tenants. So screen in other ways available to you. We both know that folks with limited and/or ungarnisheable incomes often have other issues that (so far) remain legitimate screening tools. Double down and SCREEN, SCREEN, SCREEN.

And ZERO TOLERANCE when they are late or paying partial because you know that if you have to accept ungarnisheable income there's no way you're getting paid.

Ken thanks for the post

As a comparative Oregon has had this for some time

Wow, another one!

Do these legislators seriously not realize that the eventual impact will be LESS affordable housing options for the low income people?! Income requirements will be raised, so Landlords will still be able to screen them out.

Governors and mayors, they are all doing it for votes, so they can keep their jobs.

The government can't force anyone to sign a contract. But they can punish you for discriminating.

If an applicant has the required income, why do you care to discriminate because of the source of that income? For example, if part of an applicant's income comes from a trust fund, why prefer a working applicant. Or, if a divorced woman has income from alimony and/or child support, why discriminate? All sources of income are subject to change and interruption, including wages.

Ken, they are planning enforced vaccine injections as well. They know no boundaries in their insanity. If they drive you out of business, they have money to give their buddies to build great government supported complexes with all types of support.

Be careful, NY and CA audit refugees from their insanity and they want their pound of flesh/loot before they finally let you go.

Search New York exit tax;

What nonsense!

No one here seems to be able to address the actual problem (if there is one) posed by discrimination based on source of income.

If a married man works, gets paid, and uses the money to support his children, is that counted toward qualification to rent?

If a divorced woman works & gets paid, also gets child support, and uses it to support her children, why shouldn't that be counted toward qualification to rent? To discriminate on this basis constitutes discrimination on basis of family status.

A landlord is not required to participate in Section 8 program. If he does, the section 8 program pays an amount which the applicant uses toward his housing expense, just as he would with wages.

Taxes are a matter between citizen and IRS. It has nothing to do with accepting a tenant, except in calculating after-tax available income.

I don't know Moshe, I don't think that's as cut and dry as you think it is. It's a very common line of thinking here to not accept child support as a verifiable source of income due to how unstable it is. Totally different than a w-2 job. W-2 jobs can be unstable, but can be replaced with very little effort. Child support vanishes if the person stops paying, not dependable, not replaceable.

It DOES NOT constitute discrimination based on family status. If a woman comes to rent from me and does not have three times the monthly rent in verifiable income from other sources, but does from child support and I choose to not rent to her based on the child support not being a source of income I use in application approval. How is that familial discrimination? It's not. It's simply good screening. Child-support is a wishy-washy form of income. It's like lottery winnings or gambling proceeds.

Also, taxes absolutely do have something to do with accepting a tenant if you're looking at tax returns as part of the qualification process. Any 1099 employee, that anyone here rents to, needs to present those. What else are you gonna look at? They don't have paystub's.

It IS familial discrimination, and thats why it comes up as a subject for legislation.

ALL income is subject to change and disruption, child support no more or no less than the type of wage that goes with non-university-graduate's jobs (and even university graduates are subject to budget cuts and other disruptions in their lives).

Discrimination because of not including child support in qualification calculation is also gender discrimination. Have you ever heard of the Rule of Disparate Impact? That theory, supported by Housing & Urban Development regulation, is based on the fact that women are more likely than men to be impacted by a landlord's policy to exclude Child Support payments from calculation of income qualification, and it therefore qualifies as discrimination on basis on gender. Better learn about it if you want to stay out of court.

Child support is not income.

Criminal is gone or going, it appears that income is also going. Landlord judgements are also bong dropped from credit reporting.

Thankfully we can always fall back on credit, our last strong hold of sanity. At least for now…

No, I haven't heard of the Rule of Dispate impact. I'm not wasting time with theory.

I'm in the LL and RE game for me and me alone. I'm in it for me to win.

RE: Rule of disparate impact.

If an applicant gets a lawyer and sues you for discrimination based on the Disparate Impact rule, you won't find a way around it. Actually, the applicant doesn't even need a lawyer. A simple complaint will generate a local agency to hire a lawyer AT THEIR EXPENSE (ultimately to be paid by you) who will file a lawsuit (actually 2 lawsuits, both NE state AND Federal) which you will NOT find a way around. Its not just a theory. There's even a Wikipedia entry for it.

So stay ignorant if you like, until a tenant, for whom you were unwilling to count child support in qualification calculation, picks up the telephone, and calls Fair Housing Center of Nebraska, Insurance won't cover you.

I may read it, I may not. But what I'm not going to do is worry about it. All these obscure highly unlikely laws and regulations and things like that, you really really don't have to worry about in every day landlording. It's paranoia.

If you studied every possible scenario about what could happen and worried about every single little thing that could go wrong, you would never even rent your very first tenant.

But you did help me out just now, I'll tell you that. If I ever run into a situation where the income is not enough to qualify for approval without the child support being factored in, now I simply know to disqualify for something else. So thank you for that.

Veering off the subject a little, i have to ask you this, can you list several or any reasons why anyone should even get in this business? Especially with all the potential pitfalls you list? It's impossible to learn them all.

It seems to me that you view this landlord thing as nothing BUT pitfalls and how everybody's doing it wrong and the sky is falling. So I'm just wondering if you can recommend to someone why they should do it and why you're even in it yourself?

Its NOT impossible to learn all the rules.

I studied mathematics for many years. The rules of landlording are simple in comparison.

I sleep very well at night, because I know what I am doing.

NE: You are welcome for my having educated you about Disparate Impact rule.

Reading your other comments made me think about where you are coming from. A rent thread on this site asked about what value there might be to a higher education certificate to someone who wants to be a landlord.

Maybe one good reason is that people with higher education know how to, are willing to, and practice reading, and thinking about what they read in terms of what they do.

I studied mathematics for many years (MANY years), but I also read a lot of other things and think about what I am doing. I do this because I am accustomed to reading and thinking. But I also live in an environment in which everyone else is doing the same, and its part of my life.

Perhaps where you live is different from the rest of America. I note that there is no 1st tier university in NE (U Nebraska is rated #129), I couldn't find another Nebraska university on the list (for whatever the list is worth). I am suggesting that this relates to the level on which your environment may operate. Had you studied in a serious university, you might have come to realize that there are a lot of things in the world that you don't know about and that you should never assert that other claims are false, without investigating them.

Maybe NE is ignorant of the problems that federal initiatives have tried to solve: Civil Right, fair housing, fractured ethnic inequality, inflation, loss of jobs, global competition, and many more issues. Here in CA, we have outstanding universities (Berkeley, Cal Tech, Stanford, UCLA, USC, and many merely excellent ones), with outstanding law schools to boot, in addition to immigration of well-educated lawyers from Yale to Oxford. The practice of law here excels, and CA decision are copied all over the country. What you call obscure highly unlikely laws and regulations are everyday stuff here and in other big cities, and as you yourself suggest, a wise landlord knows to avoid the issue by being aware of its existence.

I happen to love reading. And you are right, a wise landlord is aware of things so they know how to skirt around them. Avoiding by being aware. That's exactly right.

All of those bigger picture things that you listed, personally I don't care about them. I care about my success and I care about skirting around them or finding ways to do so that doesn't compromise my success or set me up for lawsuits, etc. (This does not include the obvious things like race, religion and sexual preference). I'm talking about fringe politics. (Esa's, not screening for criminal, forced Section 8 acceptance) I pay attention to what's going on with it, (so I'm aware enough to avoid) and I'll take my chances on that stuff.

As far as needing to know all the laws, no I don't. I need to read here. I need to have my lawyer or a couple lawyers review my lease and my application and my screening process every few years. I'm probably due for another one of those. It's been about 3 years now. Pay them to make sure that I'm doing this right. Will there be mistakes made along the way, sure. Am I worried? Not really.

I choose my own tenants.

But I choose tenants with whom I can reason, who have adequate means and education, and I find that I have left many, many problems behind, years ago.

I haven't been to court in decades, and for years and years, I haven't found myself in any situation where I didn't know the right thing to do.

How many years did you spend terrified of the phone ringing before you became so knowledgeable of all the laws? It seems you would've had to. For a while at least.

"You choose tenants with who you can reason and have adequate means." Exactly.

So do I.

In doing so, I separate the wheat from the chaff. In doing so, it requires me to skirt around a lot of this stuff. The big word things you post about.

Those big word things you post about support the majority of people I DONT WANT in my units. You know the ones I'm talking about. The ones you can't reason with and that don't have adequate means.

' "You choose tenants with who you can reason and have adequate means." Exactly.

So do I. '

Adequate means includes child support, alimony, trust funds, fellowship stipends, etc.

So you're telling me that if a person (non gender specific) has an "income" of only child support or only alimony that you will rent to them if everything else checks out?

" ... if a person (non gender specific) has an "income" of only child support or only alimony that you will rent to them "

If their only income is alimony and child support, but it adds up to what I consider enough to comfortably pay their bills including rent, then yes, I have done that.

I had a tenant a couple of years ago who had separated from her husband, a surgeon, had $11,000 month spousal support & child support, and no other income. She stayed until she finished her MSW. As good a tenant as I would like.

The point is, that she had sufficient income to cover her expenses, including rent. It doesn't matter what the source of the income is.

By the way, this is NOT a unicorn tenant scenario. With the number of divorces these days, I find that every time I have a vacancy, that I have at least one applicant for whom spousal support and child support is part of their income.

What I look at is character of the applicant plus sufficient means. Source of income is not a barrier.