Charlotte Davis didn’t expect to be living with her adult children at 48, sharing a two-bedroom apartment in Orlando’s Parramore Oaks neighborhood.
“My son has his room, and my daughter and I share a room,” she said.
The apartment is in her daughter’s name. Davis has a felony conviction from passing a bad check in 1999 in North Carolina, a crime she spent three years in prison for. She says even after being out for nearly 20 years, her past continues to be the reason her apartment applications get rejected.
Tenant screening services for landlords are a growing industry, providing background checks on potential renters that show credit scores, past evictions and criminal history. But housing advocates say they can pose a barrier to finding a place to live, especially for felons who have done their time and been released.
“We have many returning citizens who have no problem with affordability,” said Katherine Williams, legislative and policy manager for the Florida Rights Restoration Council. “They can certainly pay for it, but it’s their record that is the barrier.”
Screening services have exploded since the Recession of 2007-2008, with companies this year expected to earn a combined $4 billion. According to a survey by TransUnion, nine in 10 landlords say they run a background check on all their residents, and 82% say they plan to increase their use of screening technologies.
Screening agencies struggled somewhat during the height of the pandemic when eviction moratoriums were in place, but they have since come back with demand for rentals skyrocketing around the country.
Davis, who has lived in Orlando since the mid-2000s, says she never used to have a problem finding independent landlords who would let her rent without a background check.
“When I first moved here, you could ride around and find signs in the yard to contact,” she said. “Now you have to go on the computer, you have to go through these different websites.”
Jennifer King, owner of Citron Property Management in College Park, says tenant screening is absolutely essential for landlords to feel comfortable with their tenants. Her company handles the applications, including the screening process, for 70 properties around the city.
For background checks, she uses an online service that processes her applications. Applicants pay a $75 fee per person.
“It has gotten much easier and faster,” King said. “We used to sit by our fax machines and wait for reports … Now the tenant inputs all of their data, uploads their driver’s license and we will have a full report in under a minute.”
(Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel)
While landlords make the ultimate decision on who gets in, King says they often ask her company to vet and approve the applicants.
King says she tries to be more compassionate than just looking at a report. “It’s not always the credit score,” she said. “It’s really why the credit score is the way it is.”
But King emphasizes that with criminal history, landlords have an obligation to be cautious. A minor drug offense might be forgivable.
“A history of writing bad checks is fraud, and there’s a difference,” King said, unaware of Davis’ situation. “One has a history of defrauding someone.”
Getting a nuanced picture from a report can be difficult, especially when it comes to criminal background checks.
“Criminal records are not the easiest thing [for a landlord] to understand,” Williams said. “Most don’t have any kind of parameters limiting or guiding the way they should look at those records.”
Background checks will often turn up records that were supposed to be sealed or expunged. And almost all of them will go back farther than seven years, even though the Fair Credit Report Act says that arrest records are not to be considered after that point.
“It is extremely hard, even if you have your record cleared, to completely scrub it from the internet,” Williams said.
It can also be hard for a landlord to tell the difference between an arrest and a conviction. Worse, screening agencies will sometimes include inaccurate information, such as convictions for people with the same name.
A report in the New York Times in 2020 found hundreds of federal lawsuits against screening agencies for inaccurate reports.
As Orlando continues to experience unprecedented demand for rentals, the pressure on the market has made it harder for people with blemishes on their records to press their cases.
Nearly every available unit over the past year has received multiple applications, King said.
“We look at it like getting multiple offers on a house,” King said, meaning if a pool of people are applying and one has a spotless record, that one’s going to leap in front of anyone with issues.
The upshot, according to Williams, is that returning citizens who struggle to find housing often wind up on the street. A study by the Prison Policy Initiative found that formerly incarcerated people were nearly 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public.
Williams says the FRRC is working on solutions to help returning citizens have a more equitable chance at housing. The organization was instrumental in getting Orange County and Orlando to drop their Crime Free Multi-Housing program last year.
Under that program, which started in 2011, people could be evicted for arrests without conviction. Tenants could face eviction just for having the police come to their apartment, even if the tenant called them to deal with someone else.
Another policy that Williams said would help would be releasing landlords from legal liability for criminal acts by tenants. In 2016, Texas passed a law that said landlords could not be sued by tenants for leasing apartments to other tenants with criminal backgrounds.
A quality control manager with Florida Rising, a nonprofit community organization, Davis said she would like to see some change that might allow her to get through the application process.
Right now, she says, her only options are bunking with family, or living in hotels or properties that she finds less than savory.
“You can’t escape it because those are the only places that will accept you,” she said. “You can’t find anywhere nice.”
Want to reach out? Email tfraser@orlandosentinel.com. Follow TIFraserOS on Twitter.
