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My name is Alexis and I am a tenant living in Brooklyn, NY. I am also a member of the Homes Guarantee Campaign.

I currently spend 66% of my take home pay on rent. And this summer I learned that if I want to keep my apartment, I will have to pay an additional $110 dollars a month, meaning that over 70% of my income will now go towards rent. I have already been told at work that we aren't getting raises any time soon. So what does that mean for me? I have even less money to spend on groceries and health insurance, etc. In other words, I am forced to prioritize shelter over my food and health. How is that sustainable? It's not.

Despite this rent increase, the landlord still hasn't solved the problem of the mice that continue coming into my apartment, there was green slug coming out of the water tap last year (which I reported to the city and didn't receive a call about until over 6 months later), and the mold issues I've had in the bathroom in the past, and on and on.

We have a housing crisis in this country unlike anything we've experienced in the past, and yet despite everyone paying lip service to the issue, no one is doing anything to resolve it. Billions of dollars are spent every year providing temporary and often degrading shelter to the unhoused, hotels across the country have turned into a de facto shelter system, and yet the solution is so simple - shift those billions to building affordable housing and impose basic regulations on people that continue to profit off of tenants, especially heavily rent burdened tenants like myself, while no meaningful repercussions exist for them to allow buildings to fall into disrepair.

The issue of housing discrimination is deeply personal to me. One of the closest people in my life is a queer immigrant of color, and I know personally just how impossible it was for them to try to secure their own housing. Today, landlords rarely even see their potential tenants face to face, relying entirely on electronic forms and documents which allow them to go along with systems already in place that create enormous bias against people who are new to the credit and banking systems in the US. Add to that, the challenges of people needing to quickly navigate online systems that favor people with a certain access and experience with technology, and needing to produce a huge stack of electronic documents, including documents that may reveal the person's immigration status or trans identity, within minutes... There is no question that bias is not only present, but built into the system.

Housing is not only a necessity, but a basic human right. By not providing stable and affordable housing to everyone, you are actually setting the entire nation behind, failing to provide a pathway and opportunity for people the safety and stability required for them to prosper. 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. How will those millions of workers find a way to build skills, support themselves and the people in their lives, and flourish?

The fates of all of us are tied up together--allowing so many to struggle so much sets us all behind, and the problem is only growing worse. 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,
Alexis Clements