An Ohio woman finds her locks changed after she refuses her landlord’s demands for sex. A Colorado family finds the new landlord gropes children. Paying rent for a Georgia woman becomes a chance for the landlord to forcibly kiss her. Such instances of sexual harassment are among many transgressions the Department of Justice cited in recent cases against landlords as part of its Sexual Harassment in Housing Initiative, a program that prosecutors tout as a groundbreaking effort that's collected $17 million in dozens of cases; the money is paid to victims, USA Today reports. Experts and federal officials say the program, begun in 2017, is barely scraping the surface of a deeply entrenched problem that the law has only just begun to address. "That’s only a tiny drop in the bucket," said University of Missouri School of Law Prof. Rigel Oliveri of the federal government’s settlements. "That’s a vanishingly tiny number of cases where the overall number has to be so many orders of magnitude greater."
Most cases wind up as lawsuits because of the legal mechanics of the Fair Housing Act, Oliveri said, though a few egregious cases have gone to trial. Victims tend to be low-income women renting from private landlords operating free of oversight. Meanwhile, federal officials say the only way to discover unscrupulous landlords is for tenants to come forward. The National Fair Housing Alliance documented 2,490 complaints based on sex in 2022, the highest number since the group of over 200 nationwide housing organizations and civil rights watchdogs began tracking the issue in 2005. The complaints also included discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The Ohio case is among the latest successes of the DOJ initiative. The project, launched in October 2017, is overseen by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and aims to enforce prohibitions against discrimination based on sex in the Fair Housing Act. It addresses sexual harassment related to housing, from property maintenance workers or security guards making lewd comments to loan officers sexually extorting potential homebuyers.