Spokane City Council considers outlawing employers discriminating against the homeless

The Spokane City Council is again weighing a law that would make it harder for prospective employers to discriminate against homeless job hunters.

Seven months after Spokane’s controversial “homeless bill of rights” was first deferred and then disappeared ahead of last year’s elections, a much narrower ordinance has finally resurfaced for consideration .

The truncated bill now before the city council, titled “Ban the Address” as a riff on the “ban the box” laws, would outlaw firing or declining to hire someone solely because they are homeless. It would not require an employer to provide accommodations or job modifications to a homeless employee or job applicant.

This law would not apply if someone’s housing status was explicitly relevant to their ability to carry out the duties of the job.

This would also mean employers could not ask about someone’s housing status or require an address in an application until after a job offer has been made.

The ordinance was introduced Monday during the council’s Finance and Administration Committee meeting. It is currently expected to come to the council for a vote in April.

“I feel like this is just kind of a real easy one and pretty low-hanging fruit,” said Councilman Michael Cathcart, who had proposed similarly paring down the “homeless bill of rights” when it was first up for consideration.

The original bill, proposed by Councilwoman Lili Navarrete last year, would have made it illegal to use someone’s lack of a home to not only deny them employment, but also to rent to them or bar their access to public services such as public transit.

Existing civil rights laws already prohibit businesses from rejecting a job applicant or refusing to serve a customer because of their race, religion or other protected class, with some exceptions. The law considered last year would have added homelessness to those protected classes, making it illegal to use the lack of a residence as a reason to not hire someone or serve them.

The original “homeless bill of rights” was first considered by the Spokane City Council last summer and delayed amid fierce pushback from politically active business owners and their local lobbies, including with repeated false claims that the law would protect the homeless from prosecution for committing crimes, force businesses to hire drug users or prevent enforcement of a voter-approved anti-homeless camping law.

The proposed law would have only applied to discrimination solely based on someone being homeless, not on other behaviors, Navarrete said at the time.

“In other words, if the customer is violating any laws or policies of the establishment, the business owner has every right to remove that person,” she wrote to an email server maintained by politically active developer Sheldon Jackson. “However, if a business owner refuses to attend to a prospective customer who is not otherwise disruptive and never has been,” that customer might have a legitimate discrimination complaint.

Amid concerted opposition to the law and demands for stronger enforcement of homelessness laws, the council tabled the ordinance, and the city launched a series of roundtable conversations about its approach to homelessness. A slate of bills stemming from that public feedback are expected to eventually come forward, on top of the “Ban the Address” law.