A Queens, N.Y., landlord will pay $1 million for refusing to rent apartments to applicants who have been incarcerated.
The Fortune Society sued the owners of Sand Castle, a 917-unit apartment complex, in 2014. They charged that the building had a policy of automatically refusing to rent an apartment to a person with a criminal record. They alleged that the policy did not take into account the nature of conviction or the amount of time that had passed since the person’s conviction. The group accused the firm of violating the Fair Housing Act through its ban on renting to ex-convicts.
