A new Texas law passed with bipartisan support aims to prevent Homeowners’ Associations (HOAs) from discriminating against low-income renters.

This legislation comes approximately a year after an HOA in Providence Village, a small community in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, voted to bar landlords from renting to Section 8 voucher holders. Providence HOA has since removed this policy from its leasing rules — but the small town wasn’t the only one trying to push out low-income renters.

At the time of the law’s passing on June 18, several such bans were still in effect around the state. However, under the new legislation, HOAs will be prohibited from discriminating against tenants based on their source of income, a practice that has disproportionately affected Black renters.

Huffines Communities, the developer behind Providence Village, first came under fire for discriminatory policies in 2018 when it was sued by civil rights attorneys Laura Beshara and Mike Daniel on behalf of the Inclusive Communities Project for enforcing Section 8 bans in Heartland, a master-planned community in Kaufman County.

This legal pushback didn’t deter Huffines from invoking a similar Section 8 ban in Providence Village in June 2022, when over 2,300 homeowners — mostly white — voted to bar landlords from renting to voucher holders, punishable by a $300-per-week fine.

Over 95% of the households using vouchers in Providence Village at the time were Black.

“They’re just achieving with this rule what they could have achieved in earlier days with a simple ‘no Black tenant’ rule,” Daniel said in a 2022 interview with CityLab.

Providence Village has ceased its Section 8 ban during the ongoing discrimination investigation by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. At least five of the nine HOAs developed by Huffines Communities have codified Section 8 bans into their leasing rules at some point.

While practices such as these were effectively reversed when the law went into effect statewide on Sept. 1, the effects they’ve had on Black renters can’t be immediately rectified. Removing Section 8 bans won’t help families who have already been pushed out of prime locations, or who never applied to rent in certain neighborhoods in the first place.

The long-term effects of the HOA legislation will depend on state and local efforts to track existing Section 8 bans.

“However many [bans] there are, I hope they have all stopped by now,” said Christ Turner, the Democratic representative who introduced the bill. “And they certainly need to stop it by September the first.”