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My name is Miracle and I am a tenant living in east Las Vegas in Nevada. I am a member of the Homes Guarantee Campaign.

We are a military family having to live off-base, and our rent has already been raised in our one year of being stationed here. Some months it is a struggle between rent and groceries to keep food on our table. Our application fees, "animal rent," and the 3x amount of money we have to make is ridiculous. We have never missed or been late on a payment, take care of our apartment, and have no added benefits or anything else to explain or validate the rent increases. They took days to fix our air conditioning recently. Landlords are raising rents at the highest rates in over 40 years. Median rents in the U.S. have risen nearly 20% in the last two years alone. Nationally, median rent has surpassed $2,000 for the first time ever. 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.

The rent is too 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,
Miracle Beasley