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Hello, my name is Kelly Allen and I am a resident of Kansas City Missouri. I am a single mother, a scholar of housing and community development and the executive director of a neighborhood association representing a population mostly comprised of immigrants and refugees making a median income of around $26,000. I also fight with KC Tenants, our local citywide tenant union.

Housing costs in my city are absolutely out of control. In order to stay in the neighborhood that I have raised my son I scrambled to purchase a house in April of 2021, a decision that I am still unsure about to this day. I did not want to be priced out via rent, but property tax hikes, air bnb encroachments and pressure to immediately fix any minor curb appeal issue from property owners who treat our blocks like commodities instead of neighborhoods made of homes for people to build their lives in, are making me feel as pushed out as rising rent costs did two years ago.

My hometown is disappearing. The People have always been what makes Kansas City special. Not the slick and replicable entertainment districts, not the stadiums, not the dime a dozen craft breweries or a streetcar towing tourists to the aforementioned districts. Poor and working class People making art, food, music and memories on a budget, in our homes and backyards, in the basement of a church, on our front porches. That is the Kansas City that is shrinking away.

The commodification of housing to this degree is erasing the people I love from my hometown. It is a broken system, with no rock bottom. If we do not take action to regulate this exploitative system, OUR residents die on our streets while strangers from out of town take turns having bachelorette parties in what used to be our homes. The greed in this market is insatiable, the conditions that I see my neighbors enduring while paying over half their income to do so are shameful, dangerous, and getting worse, not better.

It is in your hands to do something. Federally backed mortgages should not be used to price people out of their homes. I believe that nationwide rent control is critical to provide the most basic of human needs, a dignified place to live safely without the risk of a landlord pushing you out of your home for an increase to their passive income. Beyond rent control 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,

Please heed the call of those who are being pushed out of the places and away from the people that they love. We need protection from this predatory market.