well me and the missus are looking fr an apartment here in our city of origin and have ran into something that’s left me quite perplexed… on of the apartment complexes had told us that we couldnt make over a certain amount and still live there. This strikes me as kind of odd, and doesnt seem to make any sense to me.
Can anyone elaborate on this practice and why it would be done?
Only thing I can think of is that it would help make sure the housing was available to people with a smaller income than you (since you could presumably afford to live some place more expensive that this hypothetical not-as-well-off-as-you person would be unable to afford)
But then, IANALL. (I Am Not A Land Lord)
Do we happen to have any land lords on the board?
It may have something to do with goverment housing. As Raguleader they might need to insure they have enough room for the less fortunate.
Heh,
I remeber once me and a coworker of mine needed to rent an apartment out of town for business. All we wanted was a six month lease. Me and my coworker decided to get a one bedroom apartment so we couild pocket the extra money the company was giving us for rent.
Well, the lease manager told us flat out: “We don’t rent one bedrooms to two adult males.”
I couldn’t help thinking at the time how the hell do they get away with that? I mean what if we were gay? Wouldn’t that be discriminatory?
I am not a landlord either, but I can say with certainty that there are affordable or low income housing programs which exclude tenants above a certain income. Some have a sliding scale for rent based on the income of the tenants. Such programs probably exist in many parts of the country, but my personal knowledge is of the San Francisco Bay Area. I think that the housing units subject to this program are not always government owned.
Presumably that’s the purpose of what they’re doing. What makes you think that they wouldn’t be able to “get away with that”? Aren’t you aware that most states don’t provide any sort of housing protection for gay people? Employment discrimination against gays isn’t illegal in most places either.
Once when my fiancee and I were looking into renting a 1 bedroom apatment, the manager (older lady) got all shocked and said in her best older lady voice “We don’t RENT single bedrooms to unmarried people.” It was pretty funny, this was 10 years ago too, not 50.
In New York, there are middle-income apartments that fall under Mitchell-Lama Housing. I lived in one for a few years in Manhattan (which subsequently left the M-L program), and there were strict guidelines for who could live in each apartment type.
For example, a studio could be rented to one adult or two adults, but not an adult and a child. A single could be rented to one adult, two adults, one adult with child, or two adults with child. There were also provisions for same-sex children in a single room.
To get an M-L apartment, you had to meet income requirements, both a minimum and maximum, depending on the size of the apartment. Once in an M-L apartment, if you later end up making more than the max, or fall below the minimum amount of people in the apartment of your size, you had to pay a hefty fine.
While I was sharing a studio with my then-GF, we had a married couple as neighbors, living in a three-bedroom! They had been living there since the building was constructed in 1976, were making considerably more money, and their children had long ago moved. Even with the penalties factored in, they were paying one-third of what we were paying. :eek:
So, it’s very likely that your state or municipality has a similar program.
A variety of HUD programs are geared to the income of the tenants; if they were built as “low income housing” they may not be permitted to be rented to people who make above the income ceiling. State and city programs for housing subsidies and such may impose similar rules.