How can my husband build credit when no one will give him a chance?

So, my husband wasn’t too reckless prior to me domesticating him, but he had defaulted on one credit card long ago (and paid it long ago) but also had county fees that he hadn’t paid for years which was sort of a lien against him..well, he paid that off this year.

We’ve paid off both of our debts (student loans, liens, and any little credit card debt we had)-living with my parents for a year definitely helped!
And we went searching for a new place to live, but we knew my husband had poor credit and stupidly, we told the future landlords this. They didn’t even give us a chance (well, they’d take our money for a “credit check” then never call us again) So, we stopped informing people of his bad credit and finally got a place! I did tell them it wasn’t the greatest, but when the lady called she said he didn’t have bad credit, it just wasn’t established. Okay.

He’s been applying for credit cards (Wal-Mart, TD-Bank, Best Buy..) and NO ONE will even give him a $300 limit! That was what my first credit card had. Oh and he also applied for a Visa on their site.
So, applying for all these cards will hurt his credit, but we don’t know how else to build it!
He is going to be the main person on our lease, does that help at all?
Is there anything we can do to build it up at all? Any places to get a credit card easily..? Heck, we don’t even care what store it is, we just need him to have better credit so in 5 or so years, we can buy a house! btw, I have great credit..but no job, no income is apparently worse! But, I still can get a credit card with a huge limit quite easily. Jerks.

Any information would be great!