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My name is Ben Ishibashi and I am a renter living in Rogers Park, Chicago, Illinois. I am a proud member of the Homes Guarantee Campaign and writing to demand that FHFA do much, much more to protect tenants.

I have rented every year of my life since 2012. When the Bay Area, where I was born and raised, got too expensive, I ended up having to uproot my life and move half way across the country to Chicago, where I live now, to find rent that was affordable for my income. I've grown to love it here in Chicago, but won't lie: if I had my way I never would have left my family and my friends back home in California. The Rent was too damn high for me to live where I grew up, and increasingly, its getting too damn high just about everywhere. Simply put, that ain't right. While I am personally lucky enough to have relatively low rent increases each year, most of my friends and neighbors are not so lucky, and I feel like half the people I now in my age cohort (20's and 30's) are spending outrageous amounts of money just to have a roof over their head. As a taxpayer, I am also sick and tired of seeing my hard earned tax dollars going to landlords in the form of Freddie and Fannie loans with NO requirements that tenants be protected from rent hikes or landlord/property manager abuse. That these loans to landlords don't require the best standard of conduct towards tenants and renters (who are often the most vulnerable to abuse!) is bad value for money and blatant favoritism.

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,
Ben Ishibashi