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Comment

My name is Addi and I am a tenant living in Louisville, KY. I am a member of the Homes Guarantee Campaign. I am submitting this comment on behalf of my colleagues who have asked that I share my experience as someone who has been a renter in the last 4 years. While I cannot speak to experiencing rent hikes on the properties I’ve lived, I have seen this occur disproportionately to other residents in my community. Take for example that l pay significantly less for housing than the neighboring apartment below me - even so, it requires that I seek out roommates to keep rent paid, to keep the lights on and the water running. This was not the case for my previous neighbors. Their family could not financially support their living situation and were evicted suddenly due to this. Could you imagine if they paid the lesser rent rate that I currently do? There is no consistency, no regulation, nothing stopping the property management group overseeing our residency from changing any tenants’ cost of living at a moment’s notice, and that can be life-altering. Moreover, the rent is too damn high. The Federal Housing Finance Agency should protect tenants by limiting annual rent hikes to 1.5 times the Consumer Price Index or 3%, whichever is lower, in properties with federally backed mortgages. These limits should be applied universally as a requirement to all federally backed mortgage programs. In addition to limits on rent hikes, the FHFA should prohibit evictions without good cause, ban source of income discrimination, enforce and expand existing protections against discrimination, require safe and accessible housing conditions, create a landlord registry, require fair and standardized leases, ensure tenants have the right to organize, and create an Office of Tenant Protections to enforce these rights in all properties with federally backed mortgages.
Sincerely,
A. Atkins