New York senators have approved a bill to expand housing protections for registered medical marijuana patients, aiming to prevent evictions based solely on their lawful use of cannabis.
While the state’s marijuana laws already include anti-discrimination protections for legal consumers, the bill from Sen. James Sanders (D) would explicitly codify that landlords cannot evict tenants for using cannabis as registered patients. It cleared the Senate Standing Committee on Housing, Construction and Community Development on Monday.
The legislation states that a “tenant shall not be removed from possession of a residential unit pursuant to this article because of such person’s certified medical use of medical marihuana.”
“It shall be a defense to a proceeding to recover possession of a residential unit that a landlord seeks such recovery because of a person’s certified medical use of medical marihuana, and that, but for such use, the landlord would not seek to recover possession,” it continues. “A landlord may rebut such defense by showing that he or she seeks to recover possession of a residential unit because of any other lawful ground.”
The justification memo attached to the legislation says that while safeguards are “in place to ensure that this person uses it lawfully for medical purposes only,” federal law “has not caught up with this and places medical users in possible jeopardy.”
It further notes the case of a 78-year-old Niagara Falls man who was evicted from federally subsidized housing due to his medical cannabis consumption.
The individual’s housing was restored after a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development official weighed in on social media, asserting that state and federal law should be updated to “require private landlords to legally permit” people to live in their residences even if they’re a medical marijuana patient.
“This legislation would seek to ensure that tenants lawfully using medical marihuana are protected from eviction proceedings,” the justification memo of the bill—an earlier version of which passed the full Senate in 2020—states.
While it was a Trump HUD official during the president’s first term who pledged to resolve conflicting federal and state marijuana laws as it applies to residency in federally-subsidized housing, it’s unclear if the administration will take up the issue this term.
And although the justification section of the New York bill notes the federal-state conflict over marijuana as it concerns housing, it would not impact federal law prohibiting cannabis.
At the congressional level, last year Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-FL) filed a bill to repeal a decades-old federal statute that’s led to the denial of housing for millions of people with prior drug convictions.
Booker and Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) separately reintroduced legislation last year to allow people living in federally assisted housing to use marijuana in compliance with state law without fear of losing their homes.
Norton has filed similar versions of the proposal over recent sessions, but the reform has yet to be enacted.
The congresswoman sent a letter to HUD in 2021 that implored the department to use executive discretion and not punish people over cannabis in legal states. In response, then-President Joe Biden’s HUD secretary told Norton that it is statutorily required to continue denying federally assisted housing to people who use marijuana, even if they’re acting in compliance with state law.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) also raised the issue during a committee hearing in 2019, pressing former HUD Secretary Ben Carson on policies that cause public housing residents and their families to be evicted for committing low-level offenses such as marijuana possession.
Ocasio-Cortez and then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) also filed legislation that year that would protect people with low-level drug convictions from being denied access to or being evicted from public housing.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) also introduced an affordable housing bill in 2020 that included a provision to prevent landlords from evicting people over manufacturing marijuana extracts if they have a license to do so.
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