"A huge chunk of affordable housing progress will be wiped out with just this one bill... This is very, very bad."

The GOP state legislature is about to trump Madison's restrictions on landlords:

The bill's critics say the loss of these protections will reverse decades of efforts to help people in Madison afford decent housing and avoid homelessness. They say that the city regulations helped keep the actions of inconsiderate, unscrupulous and even biased property owners who cared more about milking the value of their properties than the rights of their tenants in check, especially important given the high numbers of young student renters here....

Advocates predict that bigger landlords in the city with more desirable housing stock will use the screening tools handed to them by the new state law to “keep certain people out,” as Konkel puts it, while smaller landlords with deteriorating properties will accept the tenants nobody else wants.

People typically viewed as problem tenants include minorities with criminal records, undocumented immigrants without Social Security numbers, people on public assistance, and people with disabilities on fixed incomes, say advocates.

The newspaper — The Capital Times — passes along an assertion about how landlords "typically view" people. With "minorities" thrown in as if state and federal law didn't clearly make it illegal for landlords to discriminate based on race and ethnicity.