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My name is Warren and I'm a tenant living in a Fannie Mae-financed building in Chicago . I am a member of the Homes Guarantee Campaign.

The rent in my neighborhood is rising very quickly because people need to be near transit to access jobs in the city — including quick year-over-year increases in large Fannie May-financed buildings like mine. All the while, recent inflation means everyday essentials are harder and harder for people to make ends meet and our wages have not kept up. Ensuring limits on rent hikes for Fannie May and Freddie Mac backed buildings like mine would not only help the tenants in these buildings, but could also help slow down rapid rent hikes in the local market around these buildings.

Rent is too high and it's displacing entire communities. The Federal Housing Finance Agency should protect tenants by limiting annual rent increases 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.

Also, the FHFA should ban evictions without good cause, ban source of income discrimination (which disproportionately affects queer and trans people, especially queer and trans youth of color), enforce and expand existing protections against discrimination, mandate safe and accessible housing conditions, publish a landlord registry, require fair and standardized leases, ENSURE tenants have the right to organize, and create an Office of Tenant Protections to genuinely enforce these rights in all properties with federally backed mortgages so it can actually make a material difference in people's lives.

This cannot wait, tenants across the US need protection NOW.

— Warren