New York’s housing laws state pretty clearly that you can’t indicate a preference for what kind of person you want living in your rental property when you advertise it. But a broker who got fined $20,000 for writing one such ad back in 2011 is absolutely incensed that the state would enforce the law against him. Michael Jenkins, then a salesman with Fillmore Real Estate, posted an ad to Craigslist calling for families of two with two incomes to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Canarsie. “That’s not discrimination from my point [of view]. I don’t control who gets an apartment and who doesn’t,” he told the New York Post. Jenkins laid fault with the owner of the apartment, Walcott Romain, whom the Post reports “was also tangled up in the charges at one point, but removed from the case.” So Jenkins gets the fine all to himself.
