LEWISTON – City landlords and tenants don’t always know their rights and responsibilities when it comes to fair housing issues.

“Landlords may not know that they’re discriminating, and the tenants may not know enough to recognize it, either,” said Housing Community Development Officer Yvette Bouttenot. That’s the finding of a study released last week by the city on impediments to fair housing.

“It doesn’t mean that anybody intends to discriminate, but they may not know the law and what they can and cannot do,” she said.

The report found that Lewiston’s aging housing stock and high number of tenants with disabilities created pressures on rents and housing issues. Combine that with an immigrant population that’s been growing since 2000, and those factors have driven up rental prices, creating more fairness issues.

The study found instances where prospective tenants had been turned down for housing because they were immigrants, disabled, had children or were homosexual. Those groups are protected by state or federal law.

In other instances, landlords felt pressured to provide housing for people convicted of sexual assault.

“Obviously, landlords have to have some latitude about who they bring in, and criminal convicts are considered a protected class,” she said.

The answer is to teach landlords and tenants about their rights and responsibilities. That includes seminars, Web sites as well as brochures and handouts that can be given to new immigrants. The answer is also to help young people and recent immigrants learn personal financial skills through schools, banks and immigrant groups.

The city plans on bringing representatives from the Maine Human Rights Alliance in April to lead seminars for city staffers, landlords and tenants. It’ll be a brief refresher course on discrimination laws as they apply to rental housing.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires cities that get Community Development Block Grant funds to study fair housing issues and discrimination every few years. The city, which gets about $1.1 million per year in block grants, last studied fair housing in 1997.