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My name is Laura and I am a tenant living in Denver,Colorao. I am a member of the Homes Guarantee Campaign.

I live on Social Security and can’t find a job. Neither can my husband. We both have college degrees with high honors and specific skills, but we are being priced right out of Denver. Out= landlord has raised our rent by $700 a month over the last 3 years and will no doubt raise it again next spring. We do not get raises, so we are now paying 58% of our income on rent and pay all the utilities on top of this. We are dependent on food banks and our veggie garden for food and thanks to Trump get no SNAP benefits or housing assistance (our landlord refused to cooperate). We are going to have to move by next spring to find affordable housing elsewhere or become homeless. After the mortgage fiasco that took the homes of millions of people, often illegally, we know we can’t count on our government to do anything to help.

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,