Courtney Crowder, and Kevin Hardy

Des Moines Register

MARION, Ia. — On a tree-lined thruway, veteran Joe Stutler spends his days doing his best to maintain the squat reddish-brown ranch house he shares with his wife, tending to its aging plumbing and electrical wiring

The Stutlers render this upkeep and other services in lieu of rent to the homeowner, a friend who suffered a stroke a few years ago and lives in the home's basement apartment.

For Stutler, 53, an Army veteran who is unable to work because of concussive head trauma he sustained in Desert Storm, the arrangement is perfect but precarious. Stutler doesn't have a formal lease, meaning his friend would be within his rights to evict the couple at any time. And if anything grave should befall his ailing friend, Stutler would have no claim on the house.

In all that uncertainty, there is one thing Stutler doesn't have to worry about: A landlord refusing to rent to him because his entire income comes from his Veterans Administration disability checks. A statute in the Marion Civil Rights Code bars landlords from discriminating against someone based on their source of income.

But a bill moving though the Iowa House of Representatives threatens to roll back that protection.

House File 295, authored by Rep. Jake Highfill, R-Johnston, proposes sweeping changes to local government's authority. In addition to stopping cities and counties from setting minimum wages, requiring paid family leave, implementing a soda tax or banning the use of plastic bags, the bill as originally authored also sought to rescind local governments' ability to pass stricter protections than laid out in the Iowa Civil Rights Act.

After getting pushback, legislators proposed an amendment last week to strike the broader civil rights restrictions, zeroing in instead on the source-of-income protections Marion and Iowa City approved for renters.

Highfill said the amendment is targeted at those using housing vouchers, such as participants in the federal Section 8 program that helps the poor. Republicans and business leaders argue landlords shouldn't be forced to do business with the government.

But advocates say that's just an excuse, that landlords really want to avoid renting to low-income people who receive disability payments, Social Security, child support or even alimony, advocates said.

And Stutler said those receiving veterans' benefits like him would be caught up in that mix.

"They didn't think their net was going to snag me," Stutler said. "This bites off way more than they think."

Landlords: We shouldn't be forced

Stutler defines himself as a "service-connected" disabled vet with health issues that stretch from his "head to his toes."

"I had an accident in the Gulf that rattled my brain pretty good, bounced off the steering wheel, the whole bit, so I was knocked out, unconsciousness," he said. "I didn't face any IEDs or anything, thank goodness, but if you come home broken, you come home broken."

He hasn't had a full-time job for almost a decade, but he sits on all the community boards he can. Volunteering makes him feel like he is giving back to society, that he "isn't a sponge," he said.

He and his wife live a "meager lifestyle," but with his disability check and her earnings as a cheese specialist at Hy-Vee, they survive.

He doesn't participate in the federal housing choice vouchers program, but he has qualified for it, and if anything were to happen with his current living arrangement, he would look into it again.

Andrew Lietzow said he encourages landlords to participate in the vouchers program. But the executive director of the Iowa Landlords Association and the Iowa Real Estate Investors Association said landlords shouldn't be forced to accept renters who pay with vouchers.

Landlords should be able to screen prospective tenants by considering a variety of factors, including where they get their rent money, he said.

"We have some members that do like the voucher program and we have some others that choose not to participate because they've had some bad experiences," Lietzow said. "In a free enterprise world, we tend to resist anything that would be mandatory."

Devin Kelly, the Marion attorney, said his city's income protection ordinance is being misrepresented. Landlords can't discriminate against those using entitlements, he said, but they don't have to give those renters preference.

"Our city code allows for a potential landlord or seller to look at a totality of factors and to evaluate renters on their security, credit, stability and a whole host of other concerns," he said. "They just can't say they absolutely won't take subsidies or vouchers."

Funding for the vouchers comes from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, but local agencies, such as the Des Moines Public Housing Authority, distribute them.

The program pays market rate according to a federal formula that calculates the average local rental price. To qualify, families must earn less than half the median income of their county or metropolitan area.

But Lietzow said tenants using federal housing funds may struggle to pay rent on time. Plus, landlords face more regulatory red tape when accepting housing vouchers, including additional inspections of rental units.

The voucher program often requires the renter to pay a small portion of the monthly rent, while the federal government picks up the lion's share. Lietzow gave an example of a $650-per-month apartment: The voucher may cover $600 of the rent, with the tenant responsible for the remaining $50.

"It's harder to collect that $50 than it is to collect the $650 from another tenant," he said. "They think they don't have to pay the $50."

Money is money

To Stutler, protecting prospective renters from being discriminated against because of their source of income is a needed solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. Money is money, he said.

At a recent Marion city council meeting, Stutler said he took two dollar bills out of his wallet. Holding them up, he asked if there was an inherent difference between those dollars.

The difference, he said, was the first dollar came from the bank account of his wife, a W2 wage earner. The second came from his bank account, from his VA disability check.

"There are people in Marion that don't want to take the second dollar, they'd rather take the first dollar," he said. "I don't understand that because they look the same to me. How I got my dollar, if I did it legally, why is that a problem?"

Eric Burmeister, executive director of the Polk County Housing Trust Fund, an affordable housing agency, said housing voucher recipients often have trouble finding willing landlords. He said he has lamented with other housing advocates about the need locally for source-of-income protection, although no such effort has formally materialized.

He said that without such protections, landlords are, in essence, entitled to discriminate against the poor. That also has implications for racial minorities and refugees who use the voucher program, he said.

"It's a way to weed out folks that are perceived to be potentially problem tenants," Burmeister said. "I don't know how else you would justify it because frankly, the rent itself is guaranteed. And the check doesn't come from the tenant."

Nationwide trend against local control

The civil rights rollback in Rep. Highfill's initial bill was even greater.

As originally authored, the bill would have barred any city and county civil and human rights protections greater than spelled out in the Iowa Civil Rights Act of 1965.

"In a colloquial sense, the Iowa Civil Rights Act had been viewed by the state legislature as a floor, as a bare minimum," Keenan Crow, deputy director of One Iowa, said about the bill's original wording. "Iowa communities could look at that and add what they needed to in order to protect those citizens. With this bill, it would (have) become the ceiling."

The pending legislation mirrors a nationwide trend of lawmakers scaling back local control through pre-emption bills.

In all, 24 states have pre-empted local minimum wage ordinances, 17 states pre-empted local paid leave ordinances and 3 states pre-empted local anti-discrimination ordinances, according to the National League of Cities.

Highfill's bill would leave Iowa's minimum wage capped at $7.25 an hour, where it has been for years.

Iowa Republicans pushing the bill have said it doesn't seek to scale back local authority, but rather define it more clearly: They believe the regulation of employment and rental issues never belonged to cities and county — only to state government.

Stutler disagrees.

He said the people of Marion felt it was important to protect renters like him, and the will of the community should be honored.He summed up his argument by referring to the text on the Iowa state flag: "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain."

"I was willing to die to preserve these rights, so legislators should ask themselves if they are willing to die to take them away," Stutler said. "I don't mean that as a threat, but that's how valuable those rights are to me."