OCF Realty wouldn’t accept a woman’s housing voucher, violating city law, complaint says

A Philadelphia woman has sued one of the city’s most prominent real estate companies, alleging that OCF Realty discriminated against her by not accepting her Housing Choice Voucher to rent a property, violating a long-held ban on the practice in the city.

But, OCF Realty owner Ori Feibush told The Inquirer, the company’s landlords were unable to complete trainings allowing them to accept housing vouchers when Jennifer Cooper attempted to rent from OCF, and were therefore not permitted to accept them. Messaging from the Philadelphia Housing Authority, which administers the Housing Choice Voucher program in the city, indicated the programs were indefinitely suspended, Feibush said.

“My staff were trained appropriately to say our property owners are not currently approved for [housing vouchers],” Feibush said. “There was no path to be approved at the time.”

Filed with the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations last week, the lawsuit claims that an OCF employee earlier this year told Cooper that none of the company’s properties accepted housing vouchers. The Public Interest Law Center filed the lawsuit on behalf of Cooper and the Housing Equality Center, and is seeking unspecified damages. The complaint also names several property owners who work with the real estate company as additional defendants.

Formerly known as Section 8, the Housing Choice Voucher program gives federal subsidies to people with low incomes to help them rent homes on the private market. For decades, a city law known as the Fair Practices Ordinance has banned property owners from refusing to rent to potential tenants based on the source of income they use to pay rent. That includes housing vouchers and other forms of public assistance.

“Housing Choice Vouchers are meant to provide low-income families with a fair shot at decent and safe housing on the private rental market,” said Rachel Wentworth, executive director of the Housing Equality Center. “When landlords providing such housing categorically refuse to consider renters who use housing assistance, they push thousands of people closer to housing insecurity and homelessness.”

Cooper, 44, lives with disabilities and receives $914 on Supplemental Security income a month, the lawsuit says. She applied for a housing voucher in 2010, and after 13 years on a waitlist, she was awarded one in April through the Philadelphia Housing Authority.

» READ MORE: How to apply for the newly reopened Housing Choice Voucher program in Philly

After receiving the voucher, Cooper found a number of OCF properties within her price range, and toured several apartments. But in July, an OCF employee told her that the company didn’t accept housing vouchers for any of its properties, the lawsuit alleges.

In a statement, Cooper said that it was “deeply disappointing to be told that I would not be considered as a tenant because of how I pay rent.”

While source-of-income discrimination is illegal in Philadelphia, it happens regularly because housing protection is not broadly enforced, The Inquirer previously reported. According to a 2018 study, more than two-thirds of the city’s landlords refused to accept vouchers, and property owners often reject voucher holders even when they can afford to pay.

According to the lawsuit, OCF agents told Housing Equality Center “testers” several times last year that the company did not accept vouchers. Testers contact real estate companies under the guise of being interested renters, and try to get approved.

» READ MORE: To prevent housing-voucher discrimination, renters, housing advocates, and city agencies want more resources

Feibush said that OCF does not accept the vouchers because its landlords were not able to procure the necessary PHA training. According to Feibush, the PHA website and automated messages from the authority indicated that it was not holding the training sessions required to participate in the program. Currently, the PHA website states that the agency holds the trainings on Tuesdays.

A spokesperson for the PHA, which is not named in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to request for comment. According to WHYY, the PHA previously stopped offering the trainings in 2020 for three months, and that due to an “administrative error,” the website had said until recently that the trainings were canceled “until further notice.”

“We looked online, we called, and it says ‘we’re not open for business,’” Feibush said. “And we’re supposed to know, ‘Hey, just kidding. We didn’t mean it’?”

As a result, Feibush added, the lawsuit is “misguided if the goal here is to help provide housing for folks in need.”

“The program can support property owners that we work with, but it is maddening, and a microcosm of much broader systemic issues over at PHA and [in] the city,” Feibush said.

Kelvin Jeremiah, president and CEO of the PHA, said that the agency stopped offering the courses in mid-March of 2020 at the height of the pandemic, and began offering virtual classes in July that year. In-person classes began again in January, he added.

However, the messaging about cancelations remained up on one page of the PHA website in error after a new version of its website launched earlier this year, Jeremiah said. It has since been removed.

Roughly 5,000 people have attended landlord briefings and certification classes since 2020, Jeremiah said.

“That doesn’t sound like a PHA issue,” Jeremiah said. “That sounds like a policy decision that they have made.”

OCF works with about 1,100 property owners, and none are certified to rent to housing voucher holders, Feibush said. He added that he has now signed up for the voucher training course, and that the company is “thrilled” to participate in the program and support property owners who want to participate.

Earlier this year, the HEC reached a settlement with a Mount Laurel-based landlord it sued in another similar case. In that settlement, Pro-Managed Inc., which owns or manages at least 77 rental properties in the city, admitted its policies discriminated against tenants, and agreed to advertise its acceptance of housing vouchers.

Staff writer Jake Blumgart contributed to this article.