Demands for Federal Action to Regulate Rent Released in Memo and Letter to the Administration
Contact: Johanna Kichton, [email protected], 202.660.0605
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Homes Guarantee campaign, based at People’s Action, today led a coalition of over 220 tenant unions, community organizations, and legal partners to call on President Biden to regulate rents in a new memo and letter. The demands come just a day before July’s inflation numbers are set to be released.
Rent has become a major driver of core inflation. June 2022 saw the biggest one-month increase in rents since 1986. Nationally, median rent is over
$2000 for the first time ever.
“The president must act immediately to regulate rents, as part of the administration’s efforts to curb inflation, and as a critical foundation for long term protections to correct the imbalance of power between tenants and their landlords,” the signers wrote.
The demands for federal action to combat rent inflation include:
- Declaring a state of emergency on housing;
- Imposing rent regulations on all borrowers of federally-backed mortgages;
- Defining excessive rent increases as an unfair practice and enforcing it;
- Investigating corporate landlords using unfair tenant screening and debt collection practices;
- Obtaining and investigating rent increases at publicly traded companies that own and manage rental residential properties;
- Conditioning new Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) funds with rent control measures; and
- Attaching good cause eviction protections to the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit.
The full text of the demands, letter, and signers may be found here.
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People’s Action builds the power of poor and working people in urban, rural, and suburban areas to win change through issue fights and elections. We are a national network of 38 state and local grassroots power-building organizations in 28 states–united in the work of building a bigger “we.”