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My name is Rose Lenehan and I am a tenant living in Los Angeles.

I am an active member of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which is an organization that helps tenants organize to protect their rights. I answer the email account for LATU every day, and every day I receive a dozen inquiries from tenants who are in horrific crises. Their rent is too high, their landlords don't make repairs, they can't find decent legal help, and the city enforcement agencies move slowly or not at all. There is an acute homelessness crisis here, and while many agencies and politicians in Los Angeles are trying (or saying they're trying) to change that, every day more people are evicted into homelessness. The rents are just too high. Meanwhile luxury properties sit vacant because landlords can make higher profits by keeping them off the market rather than lowering the rent to house people. Rents have far, far outpaced wages over the past several decades and it is time for the federal government to use some of its power to put some downward pressure on rents.

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,
Rose