In a rare, friendly move to low-income renters, Texas lawmakers this year outlawed a form of discrimination that allowed homeowners associations to ban some tenants from their neighborhoods.

The move — spearheaded by state Rep. Chris Turner, a Grand Prairie Democrat — was aimed squarely at a North Texas neighborhood that tried to oust poorer tenants who get assistance from the federal housing choice voucher program and keep new ones from taking their place. The voucher program, known as Section 8, pays a portion of a low-income household’s rent.

The Providence Homeowners Association enacted a rule last summer that barred landlords from renting to Section 8 tenants, which would have left the entire town of Providence Village — a town of about 7,700 people about an hour’s drive north of Dallas — off-limits to those renters. Critics saw the rule as blatant racial discrimination given that the overwhelming majority of the neighborhood’s Section 8 renter households were Black.

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