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Honestly, I could write a lengthy essay here, but it becomes more and more clear that landlords (independent "mom and pop" all the way up to entities like Greystar and other private equity landlords) need much more oversight and control to avoid bleeding people dry with rents and all other manner of abuse. Personally, my experience renting has declined significantly over the last several years; it gets harder and harder to find a reasonable place to afford and landlords have taken advantage of the nearly unchecked privilege they have by being petty, abusive, exploitative, and very opaque about their practice. As I write this, I have strong evidence to suggest that my landlord was trying to conceal that he likely knew raw sewage from my neighbor's toilet was leaking into my bathroom and there was no indication that he was thinking about calling a qualified plumber until I brought it up. Before that I had a landlord fail to follow state law forbidding the collection of advance rent in my state for 3 YEARS despite being "a second-generation, privately-owned housing company that has the understanding of a tenant wants, needs and desires; and has been doing so since 1965." Even before that my landlord was skimming from people's security deposits unlawfully as well. These are just my own experiences, but I also notice many of my friends moving, usually to worse places, and several even due to large private equity firms that buy a property, raise rents substantially, and cut services. This is all to say that somehow landlords are people/companies who can buy up excess housing and exploit others to use it for personal gain. These individuals often have little to no qualifications or demonstrable competencies to administer such affairs or warrant that amount of power over people, their lives, and their homes. Yet somehow, they are able to make substantial profits. Until the day comes when we stop seeing housing as a commodity to use for extracting profit, the new tenant protections proposed by FHFA are just the beginning of hopefully many more reforms to promote a culture of fairness, equity, transparency, respect, and accountability regarding one of the most basic human needs – housing.