Tenant Information in San Francisco: Collection, Sharing and Retention

3. AB-1418: the statewide rule that actually reaches every landlord

This is the rule most likely to be missed precisely because it doesn't carry a local name. Effective January 1, 2024, AB-1418 eliminated Crime-Free Multi-Housing Program-style policies statewide and prohibits using criminal history alone as grounds for denying an application or evicting a tenant. It also bars local governments from penalizing a landlord for choosing not to screen or evict on a criminal-history basis, effectively overriding any municipal program that had required that kind of screening.

It's worth being precise about what this law doesn't do: it doesn't prohibit a landlord from running a criminal background check at all; it removes any requirement to run one and removes criminal history alone as sufficient grounds for a denial or eviction decision. That's a meaningfully different scope than a rule banning background checks outright.

4. The statewide fair housing framework: disparate impact, not just intent

Separate from AB-1418, California's Civil Rights Department treats a blanket criminal-history exclusion policy as a potential fair housing violation under a disparate-impact theory, meaning intent to discriminate isn't required for a policy to be unlawful if it has an unjustified discriminatory effect. The reasoning is specific: criminal justice system involvement disproportionately affects certain protected groups, so a blanket screening criterion can produce a discriminatory effect even without discriminatory intent behind it.

What's actually permitted is narrower than a blanket policy: a conviction has to be directly related to the housing decision, meaning it has a specific and direct bearing on a legitimate interest like resident or property safety, and even then, timing, accuracy, and mitigating circumstances need genuine consideration rather than an automatic disqualification.

5. Application fees and consumer reports: the statewide numbers that actually apply

Civil Code § 1950.6 caps the application screening fee at $30 per applicant statewide, a figure adjusted annually for inflation since 1998. The fee can only cover actual out-of-pocket costs, the expense of a tenant screening or credit reporting service, and the reasonable value of time spent gathering the information, not a flat markup. Landlords have to provide an itemized receipt showing those out-of-pocket expenses and time.

Where a credit report is part of the process, the applicant is entitled to a copy of that report within seven days of the landlord obtaining it. I didn't find a separate San Francisco-specific fee cap or consumer-report rule beyond these statewide requirements, worth noting directly rather than implying a city-specific figure exists where one doesn't.

6. Retention: no fixed number, same discipline as elsewhere

Neither California's statewide framework nor San Francisco's own rules set a specific numeric retention period for tenant screening records. The general principle, consistent with how this series treats retention elsewhere, is to keep information only as long as there's a genuine legal or business reason to hold it; application materials and screening reports for declined or since-ended tenancies are destroyed once that reason no longer exists, rather than accumulated indefinitely.