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HUD’s Office of General Counsel (OGC) recently issued guidance addressing how refusing to rent or renew a lease based on an individual’s criminal history could violate the Fair Housing Act (FHA). Last year, in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court upheld “disparate impact” liability under the FHA.

Disability discrimination claims, which account for more than half of all fair housing complaints, are often based on disputes over requests by applicants or residents with disabilities to have assistance animals.

The reasonable accommodation provisions of the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA), which bans housing discrimination against individuals with disabilities, come into play whenever an individual with a disability wants to use an assistance animal in sites that either prohibit or impose restrictions or conditions on pets at the site.

The Fair Housing Act (FHA) prohibits housing discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability, or familial status. In the most basic terms, the familial status provisions ban sites from denying housing to families with children. But you’ll have to do more than that to avoid fair housing trouble based on familial status, since discrimination claims may arise from the way you advertise vacancies, show apartments, apply occupancy standards, and enforce house rules, to name a few aspects of day-to-day management.

If your site was inspected recently, you may have lost points for a condition that violates HUD inspection standards, but that a local law permits or even requires. For example, you may have lost points for having window guards on your site’s windows, even though your local law requires window guards. Fortunately, HUD gives you a way to challenge a Real Estate Assessment Center (REAC) inspection score that was lowered because of circumstances that are out of the ordinary, reflect an inconsistency with ownership, or are allowed by local codes.

A definite plan to deal with major emergencies at your site is an important element of providing a safe environment for your staff and residents. An emergency—such as a fire, flood, act of violence, earthquake, hurricane, or environmental disaster—can occur at your site at any time. Whatever the cause of the emergency, it’s important that your staff members be prepared and know what to do when one occurs.

Congress and HUD have established various types of preferences in an effort to provide housing to those most in need. HUD rules currently include four different kinds of preferences that apply to various programs [HUD Handbook 4350.3, par. 4-6(B)]. Of these four preferences, three of them apply only to certain applicants and are mandatory. These preferences are:

Sloppy resident files are a headache you can do without during your annual audit or management and occupancy review. Auditors routinely review resident files to see how well your company complies with HUD rules. If a file is missing important documents, it may act as a signal to an auditor that your staff may be cutting corners on rule compliance. But often a document is simply missing because your staff doesn’t know which documents belong in the resident files.

HUD requires many owners of nonprofit and limited-dividend sites with HUD-insured and HUD-held mortgages, including Section 202 program sites, to set up residual receipts accounts. Generally, all sites owned by nonprofit mortgagors and all Section 236 and 221(d)(3) projects owned by limited distribution (LD) mortgagors as well as Section 8 New Construction/Substantial Rehabilitation projects subject to the 1979/80 revised Section 8 regulations are required to establish a residual receipts account.

If you own or manage an assisted site, you must have a written resident selection plan that incorporates the policies and procedures covering each step of the selection process. It’s important to have a well-written resident selection plan because it can show HUD you’re complying with its rules. Among the first things HUD staffers look for when conducting a management review of your site is that you have a written resident selection plan. Not having a written plan violates HUD rules and lowers your review score.

Everyone agrees that federal fair housing law covers intentional discrimination, but there were lingering questions about whether it also applies to what’s known as “disparate impact” discrimination—housing practices that appear to be neutral, but have an unfair effect on members of protected classes. In late June, the Supreme Court resolved the question once and for all by ruling that the law does indeed cover such claims.