Apparently, some discrimination is completely legal.
The landlord of a residential rental property in downtown Grand Junction, Colo., is looking for a tenant for a two-bedroom apartment with a hot tub and space for an organic garden. Prospective renters can even have well-behaved dogs.
What they can’t have is any intention of voting for Donald Trump.
Mark Holmes placed an ad in The Nickel, a local classified ads paper, seeking a tenant for the Main Street apartment, with the stipulation that applicants not support Trump, who Holmes accuses of “preaching hate.”
“I live in the top part of the house,” Holmes told the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. “I don’t want anybody that even thinks that Donald Trump can be a good president to live in my home.”
Holmes says he has already received several promising applicants, but that the ad also inspired at least a few people to leave hate mail on his answering machine, including one caller who said Holmes’ rental stipulation was a violation of federal housing regulations that ban discrimination.
Which isn’t, apparently, true.
“That has nothing to do with the Fair Housing Act,” says Housing and Urban Development spokesperson Jerry Brown. He noted that the no-Trump clause “seems to be a first, and it’s original.”
