Comment Detail

Comment

"My name is Mason DeVries, and until recently, I lived in Bozeman MT. I'm a member of Bozeman Tenants United.

While living in Bozeman during college, my landlord raised the rent of my apartment by $100 every year I lived there without reason. Many of my friends lived in apartments where the landlords raised the rent by $400 or more when the lease was renewed (again, without reason), effectively forcing my friends out of the apartment.

My friends and I work in the service industry, at restaurants, clothing stores, schools, and the like. As we and people like us are forced out of our homes due to arbitrary rent increases, the small businesses who depend on our labor will be unable to find workers who live close enough to town to work for them.

Unless the Federal Housing Finance Agency protects tenants by limiting annual rent hikes to 1.5 times the Consumer Price Index or 3%, (whichever is lower), this process will continue to devastate these small businesses and the economies of small towns they're part of.

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.

Businesses are made up of people. The economy is made up of people. America is made up of people. Please impliment these restrictions so that people like us can afford to live and work in our great country.

Sincerely,

Mason G. DeVries"