Albany’s newly staffed Fair Housing Office outlines investigations, outreach and caseload

Amanda Erenss, the City of Albany’s Fair Housing Officer, told the commission she was hired in October 2023 to fill a long-vacant local position created under the city’s fair-housing ordinance. She said she has built intake forms, complaint templates and public-facing materials and has been coordinating with statewide partners including the New York State Division of Human Rights and the Attorney General’s office.

Erens said the office’s role is investigative and conciliatory: staff determine whether complaints fall within the city’s jurisdiction, contact respondents for their side of the story, collect documents and attempt mediation. “I reach out to the respondent, get their side of it, get all the documents, and just go back and forth until hopefully we get to conciliation,” Erens said.

She described the office’s education and outreach work for landlords, real-estate agents and tenants, including monthly outreach events and trainings for housing providers. Erens said the office also enforces compliance with the city’s inclusionary-zoning and affordable-housing ordinances by checking that covered buildings meet program requirements and by confirming tenant-reported conditions.

On legal authority, Erens cited the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, New York State Human Rights Law and state landlord-tenant rules, plus Albany County and the city’s omnibus human-rights law as local additional protections. She emphasized that while the office can investigate and mediate cases locally, it generally cannot bring matters to court; complex or testable cases may be referred to state agencies for enforcement.

Erens provided early caseload figures: in the first year the office received roughly 73 calls, of which 36 were housing claims; she later stated the office had received 91 calls to date. She said the office handled 23 conciliations internally, referred six complaints to the New York State Division of Human Rights and routed three matters to other agencies. Disability-related complaints, especially accommodation requests, were the most common category.

In response to audience questions about redlining and mortgage-denial patterns, Erens said the city’s equity reporting shows overlays between disadvantaged neighborhoods and historically redlined areas. She said the office is working with academic partners to analyze Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data but faces limits because the public dataset does not include ZIP-code-level denial information. “We’re trying to analyze that to see which demographics are being discriminated against,” she said.

The presentation concluded with an invitation to refer housing-discrimination complaints to the Fair Housing Office and a reminder that some matters will be referred to state agencies when testing or legal enforcement is necessary.