TOPEKA — Kansas renters would be allowed to pay their landlords in increments under a proposal that tackles housing affordability and access issues.
Rep. Leah Howell, a Derby Republican, said the bill was rooted in “principles of individual liberty, contractual fairness and equal treatment under the law.” She was one of four Republican lawmakers who sponsored House Bill 2768, which was discussed at a Feb. 24 hearing.
The bill is a modernization effort, Howell said, and allows renters to pay their monthly rent in multiple payments so long as all is paid in full and on time. Howell said it reflects current economic realities, promotes housing stability and preserves landlord protections.
Rep. Ken Corbet, a Topeka Republican, questioned the logistics.
“It might be tough for the landlords to meet their financial obligations if they’ve got 20 or 30 people or 100 people strung out here trying to get the rent paid to maintain the apartments he might have,” Corbet said.
Rep. Barb Wasinger, a Hays Republican, owns rental units near Fort Hays State University that she said are often occupied by college students.
“It would scare me to death if they were making payments every day for 30, 31, 28 days,” she said. “That just can’t happen.”
Howell said renters should have the same flexibility offered to homeowners, who can pay mortgages in multiple payments, as required by federal law.
The bill contains a requirement that landlords must consider income when determining a renter’s qualification. It also defines what can be classified as income and explicitly excludes federal low-income housing assistance vouchers in that definition.
Howell said the provision in HB 2768 helps people whose main income sources come from veteran disability or retirement benefits.
The automated online systems that landlords, often corporate landlords, use to screen rental applications and payments don’t recognize lawful forms of income, such as veterans’ benefits, Social Security disability benefits, supplemental security income, pensions, child support and alimony. The bill attempts to fix that.
But the income provision also jives with a pair of bills legislators heard in February that tried to forbid laws that discriminate against renters based on income source from being implemented in cities across the state. Those bills, House Bill 2504 and Senate Bill 391, targeted Lawrence, the only city in Kansas that has passed an ordinance barring landlords from disqualifying a renter solely based on their source of income.
“It’s hard not to see a connection,” said Kristy Baughman, executive director for the human services nonprofit United Community Services of Johnson County.
Baughman opposed the Lawrence income bills but supported HB 2768. It’s about compromises, she said. Despite the bill’s exclusion of federal housing assistance from its definition of income, Baughman decided to support it, weighing the good parts and the bad, she said.
“I do think it’s important to point out we have almost 400,000 rental properties across Kansas, and only 3% of those are paid with housing vouchers,” she said when reached by phone Thursday.
The bill supports housing stability and ensures renters can be judged by the full scope of their lawful income, Baughman told lawmakers on Feb. 24.
More than 15 people wrote in to support the bill, and two representing the Associated Landlords of Kansas and the Kansas Manufactured Housing Association opposed it.
The affordable housing problemMany housing access issues in the Legislature return to an inadequate supply of affordable housing across Kansas.
Steve Feilmeier, a former chief financial officer of Koch Industries, told the committee that construction prices have doubled in the last seven years and tripled in the last 15, contributing to a shortage of affordable and attainable housing.
With little prior knowledge about the topic, Feilmeier said he spent his final years at Koch learning about affordable housing.
“What I learned is that it is a significant problem,” he said.
Of 157,000 households in Wichita, most estimates say the city is short 25,000 homes, he said.
Feilmeier identified what he saw as the main issues preventing affordable single-family homes from being built in the Wichita area — unwilling developers and expensive materials among them — and he got to work. He opened in 2024 Wichita Affordable Housing, an LLC that seeks to channel investments into housing for people earning 80% or less of the area median income. That amounts to a household of five earning $65,550 or less annually in Sedgwick County, according to data from the Kansas Housing Resources Corporation.
He began a social impact fund that gave developers building low- and moderate-income housing construction loans. Some cost and supply challenges persisted, so Feilmeier is trying something new.
The organization has raised $15 million to start a modular home factory, Prime Craftsman Homes-Wichita, and production is slated to begin in May.
“Our goal is to build 300 a year in the first year,” Feilmeier said.
The company plans to take the mobile home blueprint and rejig it to produce single family homes that can be built in one month instead of one year.
It is a risk, Feilmeier acknowledged.
“My wife thinks we’re crazy because we’ve taken on a second job, but it’s a passion,” Feilmeier said. “It’s a passion to try to create a new business model that hopefully could become a replica in every major city across the country.”
This story previously appeared in the Kansas Reflector.
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