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Comment

My name is Becca Anderson and I am a bank tenant living in Kansas City, Missouri. I am a member of the Homes Guarantee Campaign.

Though I count myself lucky to have the relative stability of a mortgage rather than rent changed at the whims of a property owner/manager, I stand in solidarity with not only the poor and working class tenants in the city-wide tenant union but also the callers I speak to on a crisis hotline I help staff. I answer calls from survivors of sexual violence and in the past few years, I have received more and more calls from folks who do not have a safe place to live. They are making the choice between putting a roof over their heads or leaving an abusive household for the streets.

Rent is unaffordable across the board - median rents in the U.S. have risen nearly 20% in the last two years alone. 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 a universal requirement for any federally-backed mortgage programs.

In addition to capping rent hikes, the FHFA should prohibit evictions without good cause, ban source-of-income discrimination, enforce and expand existing protections against discrimination, require housing conditions to be not only safe but also accessible, 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,
Becca