“It’s not fair,” a single father said. “Landlords assume you’re a drug addict or something just because you’re using a housing voucher to pay rent. They treat you like you’re less than human when you mention you have a Section 8 voucher.”

“Even though I had a perfectly legal way to pay my rent,” a mother told the Commission on Human Rights, “I kept getting turned down by landlords which was degrading for me and my daughter. With no place to live, we ended up in the shelter system. It was really depressing and I kept thinking this was a reflection of who I was, even though I knew it wasn’t true.”