Mary Louis had a rental voucher covering roughly 69 percent of her rent, a steady income, and references from two previous landlords ready to vouch for her. None of it mattered once a company called SafeRent Solutions ran her name through its system. The rejection letter she received from the management company at a Malden, Massachusetts, apartment complex didn’t cite a missed payment, a noise complaint, or anything a landlord had ever said about her as a tenant. It cited a number: a “SafeRent tenancy score” that fell below what the property allowed, produced by a third-party algorithm she had never heard of and could not see inside, according to the federal court’s own summary of her case. When she tried to appeal with documents showing her actual rental history, the property manager told her flatly that appeals weren’t accepted and the score could not be overridden.
A Score, Not a Record
Louis applied to rent at Granada Highlands, a complex managed by Metropolitan Management Group, in the spring of 2021. Metropolitan’s own rejection letter, quoted in the court’s opinion, explained that “the third-party service utilize[d] to screen all prospective tenants has denied [her] tenancy” because “the service’s SafeRent tenancy score was lower than is permissible” under the property’s standards. The algorithm behind that score weighs credit history, bankruptcy records, and past-due accounts, including debt that has nothing to do with paying rent, while it does not factor in that a housing voucher was already covering most of her monthly cost, according to case documents filed by her attorneys. Nobody at the leasing office reviewed her file. Nobody looked at whether she had ever actually missed a payment. A number came back low, and that was the entire basis for the denial.
Louis wasn’t alone. Monica Douglas, a second named plaintiff who applied at a Canton, Massachusetts, property, was also rejected over her SafeRent score. Douglas eventually got approved, but only after a local housing advocacy group intervened on her behalf, according to the same case record. Whether a flagged applicant ends up housed, in other words, came down to whether she happened to find an advocate willing to fight the algorithm, not to anything true or untrue about her as a renter.
“We Do Not Accept Appeals”
What happened next is the part that tends to stop people cold. Louis appealed the decision and offered landlord and employment references to prove the algorithm had gotten it wrong. Metropolitan’s response, again quoted directly in the court opinion, was that the company “do[es] not accept appeals and cannot override the outcome of the Tenant Screening.” There was no human being at the leasing office with the authority to look at her references and say yes. The system had spoken, and the office’s role was simply to relay its verdict. Louis ended up signing a lease elsewhere — an apartment that cost about $200 more a month, with fewer amenities, in a location she had not chosen and would not have picked if the first denial had come with an actual explanation.
The Justice Department Weighed In
Louis and Douglas sued SafeRent and the property managers in May 2022, alleging the scoring system violated the Fair Housing Act by disproportionately locking out Black and Hispanic applicants and voucher holders. The case drew the attention of federal regulators. In a statement of interest filed in the case, then-U.S. Attorney Rachael S. Rollins put it directly: “Algorithms are written by people. As such, they are susceptible to all of the biases, implicit or explicit, of the people that create them.” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke added that “housing providers and tenant screening companies that use algorithms and data to screen tenants are not absolved from liability,” and HUD General Counsel Damon Smith noted that “tenant screening policies are not exempt from the Fair Housing Act’s protections just because decisions are made by algorithm.”
A $2.275 Million Settlement, and a Narrower Fix
SafeRent settled the case for $2,275,000, with final court approval landing on November 20, 2024, according to the official settlement site. Of that, up to $1,175,000 is earmarked for class members who were denied housing based on a SafeRent score while using a voucher between 2020 and 2024, with Louis and Douglas each eligible for up to $10,000 for having brought the case in the first place. Going forward, SafeRent agreed to stop generating a tenancy score at all for applicants that a housing provider identifies as voucher holders, pulling the number out of the process rather than trying to fix how it’s calculated, per the settlement announcement from the plaintiffs’ law firm. Christine Webber, who co-chairs Cohen Milstein’s civil rights practice and represented the plaintiffs, said the underlying problem extends well past one company: “Decision-making algorithms, such as the ones at issue here, are often opaque. Vendors who develop these algorithms are not willing to disclose all the data they consider or how the data is weighted in score modeling.”
That opacity is the part the settlement doesn’t touch nationwide. The fix applies to SafeRent’s handling of voucher holders in Massachusetts specifically. It does nothing for a renter in another state, denied by SafeRent or one of its many competitors, who gets a low score for a reason that has nothing to do with how she has ever actually treated an apartment. She still won’t be told what the number was measuring, and the leasing office on the other end of her application still won’t have the authority to say otherwise.
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