Hilton Webb has a lot going for him — a bachelor’s degree in history earned summa cum laude at Canisius College, admission to Lehman College’s selective Masters of Social Work program, and an internship as an addiction recovery coach.
One thing works against him: A 29-year-old murder conviction keeps him from finding an apartment.
“You can’t build a life on air,” said Webb, 64. “I’m too old, I’m Black, and I’m an ex-offender — those are three strikes I can’t get around. All that matters is what happened in 1991. It’s a scarlet letter that never leaves you.”
A bill introduced before the City Council on Aug. 15 would bar landlords and real estate brokers from conducting criminal background checks on housing applicants like Webb — who has done his time and was paroled three years ago.
The bill’s chief sponsor, Council Member Steve Levin, said the “fair chance” housing bill has strong support and that he’s hoping to get it passed as soon as possible.
“I understand that people, their minds very quickly jump to sex offenders or arsonists,” Levin (D-Brooklyn) said. “But we should really look at the reality of who’s coming out of prison or incarceration and what their lives are really like.”
Research shows a criminal conviction reduces a prospective tenant’s chance of even viewing an apartment by 50%, said Alison Wilkey, Director of Public Policy at John Jay College’s Institute for Justice.
“One in three Black males in the U.S. has a felony conviction,” she said. “If you think about the scale of that and what that means in terms of people accessing a basic human need like housing, where background checks are so ubiquitous, there are just huge numbers of Black people — Black men in particular — who are really precluded from getting housing.”
Opponents of Levin’s bill say they are only concerned with safety.
In written testimony to Levin’s City Council committee, building manager Joseph Frucht, whose Brooklyn-based company manages six buildings with a total of 131 apartments, said Levin’s bill was inherently dangerous.
Frucht referred to experiences with four former tenants. One tenant used their apartment as a brothel and drug den; another sold drugs from the apartment; a third was violent toward his neighbors, and a fourth killed his father, the letter states.
“It is impossible to know what someone, even with a clean record, will do in the future but it is possible to mitigate the risks,” Frucht wrote.
Under federal law, landlords and people selling homes can’t have a blanket policy against people with convictions. But loopholes abound.
In the internet era, landlords can easily find out about housing applicants’ records and deny them housing without advertising an anti-criminal conviction policy. Googling an applicant’s criminal history isn’t illegal.
Webb was convicted in 1991 of killing his mother in Bedford-Stuyvesant two years earlier. Though he maintains his innocence, he’s upfront with landlords about his conviction.
“I’m like, ‘Well, I may as well tell you, I spent time in prison,” he said.
But honesty gets him nowhere.
“They tell me, ‘We don’t want your kind here. We don’t want no ex cons.'”
All Webb wants is a place to quietly study his course literature or read. He’s currently living at The Fortune Society’s Upper Manhattan location — known as “The Castle”— which provides reentry services to formerly incarcerated people.
“Education is the only thing that keeps me from going mad,” he said. “The thing that’s keeping me alive and afloat is this building, The Castle. Without this place, and without a place to lay my head, I couldn’t do any other stuff.”
