By Carolyn Zezima, Esq.

Since 2009, HUD has strongly encouraged public housing agencies to adopt smoke-free buildings to protect the health of residents, and recently HUD has urged owners of federally assisted multifamily properties to go smoke-free. And you may be considering banning smoking at your site—or in parts of it—to save money and attract responsible residents.

From time to time, you may need to transfer a household to another unit at your site. For example, if a household has lost members, you may have to transfer it to a smaller unit because it’s no longer eligible to occupy the larger unit. Or you may be required by fair housing law to allow a household to transfer to a different unit to reasonably accommodate a disability. Whatever the reason for a transfer, once you’ve decided to do it, we recommend the follow...

Households that skip out without paying rent and don’t let you know where they’ve gone and whether they’re coming back can cause big headaches. When a unit is abandoned you have to deal with problems like frozen pipes and more serious health and safety hazards. And you need to figure out what to do about the household’s assistance.

HUD’s “one-strike” rule sets out specific grounds for denying admission to applicants based on certain drug-related and other criminal activity. It requires you to add certain screening criteria to your resident selection plan and lets you add other optional criteria to screen out applicants with drug-related and criminal backgrounds. And it requires you to determine whether applicants meet these criteria, by performing appropriate criminal background ...

According to HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO), disability-related complaints, including those that involve assistance animals, are the most common discrimination complaint they receive. To help explain reasonable accommodation obligations in housing and HUD-funded programs, on April 25, the FHEO issued Notice 2013-01.

The “sequester,” which has dominated news headlines since the election, is a term used to describe a series of across-the-board federal spending cuts. At the beginning of March, the cuts began to kick in when President Obama and members of Congress were unable to work out a deal. As a result, by the end of the fiscal year, $85 billion in automatic reductions to both defense and domestic spending will take effect.

When applicants apply to your assisted site, you must give them a written application to fill out, which asks for certain required eligibility and income information. If you don’t get this information, you could end up admitting an ineligible or inappropriate household. And that could mean trouble with HUD, including HUD’s refusal to pay the assistance on the household’s unit. Or you could improperly reject an eligible household and risk discrimination...

Some of the most important, and often overlooked, sources of fair housing complaints arise from maintenance operations. Sites may face allegations of discriminatory maintenance policies or procedures—for example, that requests from white members are routinely pushed ahead of those from minority members. Or complaints may stem from accusations of sexual harassment or discrimination by a single individual—a member of your maintenance staff or an outside contra...

The issue of mold cleanup has been on the forefront of state and federal officials’ minds as the Northeast continues to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy. Mold spores can aggravate existing respiratory problems, particularly asthma—and there was an alarming increase in asthma cases after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.