MD AG’s Civil Rights Division targets housing discrimination

OCEAN CITY — The Civil Rights Division of the Maryland Attorney General‘s Office, which was established only about a year and a half ago, has spent much of its first few months investigating housing discrimination.

Lawyers from the Civil Rights Division and Maryland Legal Aid detailed developments in fair-housing litigation on Wednesday at the Maryland State Bar Association‘s annual Legal Summit in Ocean City.

The panel featured Rashida Ogletree-George, the division’s deputy chief; assistant attorneys general Julie Cozzetto, Marques Banks and Janee Fountain; and Jamie Miliman, supervising attorney for Maryland Legal Aid’s lower shore office.

The Civil Rights Division, created by the General Assembly in 2023 at the request of Attorney General Anthony Brown, has already secured several settlements with landlords across the state and advocated for the Home Act before the Maryland Supreme Court.

In April and May, the office reached settlements in three cases; they involved Baltimore-based American Management, Anne Arundel County-based Maryland Management Company and Habitat America, which operates an apartment complex in Frederick.

“April was actually a very good month for us,” Banks said.

Banks noted that the U.S. Supreme Court recently held that the “disparate impact theory” is viable to use in housing cases, giving the state a way to argue a property manager’s policy that appears racially neutral may have discriminatory consequences.

Ogletree-George said landlords frequently discriminate against renters who pay with housing vouchers, saying it’s “one of the issues that comes up in our work over and over again.”

Two of the cases in which the office reached settlements had to do with government-subsidized rent.

One of the companies, Maryland Management, allegedly denied housing to people who could pay rent with emergency, one-time housing vouchers; the company agreed to a civil penalty and a fund for people evicted due to the policy. In the Frederick case, Habitat America was accused of source-of-income discrimination, charging higher rent to people who paid with government vouchers. A third company, American management, ended a policy denying housing to people with felony convictions.

The Civil Rights Division also filed an amicus brief in defense of the Home Act, a state law intended to protect renters from source-of-income discrimination. In that case, a woman challenged a landlord’s policy requiring renters to make at least two-and-a-half times the rent. The plaintiff’s voucher would have covered all but $126 of her rent. The Maryland Supreme Court has not yet ruled on that case, which was argued in early May.

Cozzetto said in a case in Calvert County, property managers imposed bigger rent increases on people paying with vouchers than people who were not. The Frederick property manager with which the state reached a settlement had used a similar policy. The settlement required it to pay tenants back for the amount they had overpaid.

“I think landlords have gotten a little bit more creative in how they do discrimination” since the Home Act passed, Cozzetto said. “Our division has been seeing different kinds of proxies for that discrimination.”