Re: renting to tenant with foster children - Landlord Forum thread 350199

Re: renting to tenant with foster children by Garry on January 17, 2017 @14:04

Foster care is NOT childcare. There is a big difference between the two. Childcare is a business, of which someone is providing care for someone else's children on a daily weekly, or monthly schedule, and charging for it, in hopes to make a profit. Those kids go home each night with their parents. Foster care is having a child(ren) in your home for months or even years, and stay in the home 24/7, and a state pays the foster parent a certain amount each month to held pay for food, clothing, medicine, keep a roof over their heads, etc. The foster children are supposed to be treated as your OWN children until someone wants to adopt them (which could even be the foster parent). That all being said, the foster parent still has to follow all the local housing codes, which also includes the number of people per bedroom living in the same home. Foster parents and their children are to be treated as a FAMILY unit, which means you as a LL cannot discriminate against families with children, unless you want to get in BIG trouble with the Civil Rights people. (but you do not have to allow someone in your property if they want to do daycare in your unit).

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Re: renting to tenant with foster children by Jill (OH) on January 18, 2017 @18:16	[ Reply ]

I did look up the laws for my state. They say the maximum number of foster children a provider can care for at one time is 5 children, which is fine with me. However, there are then all sorts of exceptions to this, such as sibling groups, family groups, etc. And in those cases, the maximum can then be 10 children in a home! This is a 4 bedroom house. The foster mother will have 1 bedroom, her adult (elderly) father will be in another room, and then there are 2 more bedrooms for foster children. I plan to call the state office to find out more information for myself.

Re: renting to tenant with foster children by P-Bone (NY and OH) on January 25, 2017 @08:55	[ Reply ]

Be careful how you think about this. The general rules are 2 people per bedroom, plus one. That would be 9. You can't assume certain people will live in certain rooms. I also know that there are usually other HUD guidelines related to the amount of square feet per room in order to allow a certain number of people to sleep in that room. I don't remember the specifics, but just thought it was something to look into. If you have a room that's under 100 square feet, it may not be big enough for two people. I remember some sort of ruling that there must be at least 50 square feet per person in the room.

Re: renting to tenant with foster children by Anonymous on January 18, 2017 @18:16	[ Reply ]

I did look up the laws for my state. They say the maximum number of foster children a provider can care for at one time is 5 children, which is fine with me. However, there are then all sorts of exceptions to this, such as sibling groups, family groups, etc. And in those cases, the maximum can then be 10 children in a home! This is a 4 bedroom house. The foster mother will have 1 bedroom, her adult (elderly) father will be in another room, and then there are 2 more bedrooms for foster children. I plan to call the state office to find out more information for myself.

Re: renting to tenant with foster children by Garry on January 18, 2017 @19:56	[ Reply ]

It's good you are going to follow up with questions about your state's foster care program. What you found online was probably only policies and/or guidelines in a general nature. They would need the specifics of a given situation to give you a more correct answer as to how many people/children could live in your specific house.