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Comment

My name is Leanne and I am a tenant living in Mount Vernon, New York. I am a member of the Homes Guarantee Campaign.

I come from a single-parent household where my mother has raised three children while working full-time. Our rent is inching close to $1,300 a month, over half my mother’s monthly paycheck. She has had to take on countless overtime hours to cover the base rent as well as some utilities. Throughout high school, I worked part-time jobs to help contribute to the household and ease my mother’s burden, and even then we struggled to meet all our expenses. In 2023, there is not a single state where a worker employed full-time at the federal minimum wage can afford a modest two-bedroom apartment. Our rent goes up every year but our paychecks don’t while the structure of the buildings we’ve lived in have deteriorated under our feet.

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,
Leanne