Maps Outlining State Fair Housing Laws, State Landlord-Tenant Laws, and City Nuisance Property Laws are Now Available on LawAtlas

Three new datasets covering housing related laws were published today on LawAtlas.org, the Center for Public Health Research website dedicated to empirical legal datasets. The three datasets are:

Each dataset is publicly available. You can explore the data using the site’s mapping tool that allows you to explore the elements of the law across jurisdictions or download the data as an excel spreadsheet without any cost. Each dataset is accompanied by a codebook, a research protocol, and a summary report.

State Fair Housing Protections

The federal Fair Housing Act, passed as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibits discrimination in housing-related transactions for individuals who are members of a protected class — these include race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability. Forty-nine states and D.C. have adopted their own fair housing laws to expand upon these federal protections, such as prohibiting discrimination based on an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or source of income. These laws regulate which protected classes are included, the types of discriminatory actions that are prohibited, and when discrimination is exempt under the law.

City Nuisance Property Ordinances

City nuisance property ordinances require landlords to regulate the conduct of their tenants, through means such as eviction, and often penalize the landlords when they fail to do so effectively. Although these laws were intended to target drug use, many ordinances now include a wide range of actions that the city deems to be a nuisance. Nuisance property ordinances can have consequences that significantly impact public health. For example, some ordinances consider calls to law enforcement to be nuisance activities, thus discouraging tenants from calling the police when necessary. These laws, which may force tenants to choose between calling the police in an emergency and being threatened with eviction, can have a disproportionate effect on domestic violence survivors and people with disabilities, who may have to call the police for help more often than others.

State Landlord-Tenant Laws

Landlord-tenant laws establish basic rights and responsibilities for both landlords and tenants when renting residential property. These laws govern lease agreements, maximum security deposit amounts, property maintenance requirements, and steps landlords and tenants may take if lease agreements are broken, among other elements. Laws addressing landlord and tenant rights exist mostly at the state level, but this area is also governed by federal and common law. Some states have adopted, or based in part, their landlord-tenant law on the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act of 1972 (URLTA), which is a model law that attempts to clarify and standardize landlord-tenant law across the country. To date, all 51 jurisdictions in the United States have state-level landlord-tenant laws.

We hope you explore the datasets and find them useful! If you have any questions, please contact Abraham Gutman via email abraham(dot)gutman(at)temple(dot)edu

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research

Based at the Temple University Beasley School of Law, the Center for Public Health Law Research supports the widespread adoption of scientific tools and methods for mapping and evaluating the impact of law on health. It works by developing and teaching public health law research and legal epidemiology methods (including legal mapping and policy surveillance); researching laws and policies that improve health, increase access to care, and create or remove barriers to health (e.g., laws or policies that create or remove inequity); and communicating and disseminating evidence to facilitate innovation.

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