President Joe Biden’s new tenant protection plan doesn’t go far enough to protect low-income tenants and fails to address unsafe housing conditions, according to community advocates and tenants’ rights groups.
Last week, the Biden administration rolled out a new action plan to protect tenants from skyrocketing rents and unfair housing practices. Those new actions were accompanied by a set of suggested goals and guidelines for housing providers to improve the quality of life for renters.
The plan includes commitments by federal agencies to alleviate the economic strain faced by many renters, as well as non-binding principles to help guide federal, state, and local housing policies.
But tenants’ rights advocates are blasting the White House for taking direction from landlord lobbying groups they say have been engaged in price-gouging on rent during the pandemic.
One of those landlord lobbying groups is now celebrating Biden’s new tenant protection plan as a win to protect its own interests, as first reported by The Intercept.
According to the Biden administration, the new plan came after six months of meetings with tenants, landlords, and their advocates.
And tenant rights activists say Biden did take some cues from a list of tenant protections proposed by the People’s Action Homes Guarantee campaign.
That list called for things like rent regulation requirements for federally financed properties, requiring cities and states receiving Community Development Block Grants to put rent regulations in place, and for state housing agencies to be encouraged to use Qualified Allocation Plans to cut excessive annual rent increases.
Biden’s plan includes crackdowns on tenant background check companies and ensuring accurate credit-history reporting, among other priorities.
But housing organizers within the national grassroots organization Community Change say Biden’s plan will exacerbate long-standing issues with public and subsidized housing by continuing to grant money to landlords who habitually fail to maintain safe living conditions in their buildings.
Rev. Ray Greene Jr., executive director of The Freedom BLOC, told TYT that Biden’s plan is a small step that allows grassroots organizations to be taken seriously but fails to address some of the most crucial challenges – such as “dilapidated” and “environmentally unsafe” apartment complexes – for tenants across the country who rely on public and subsidized housing.
“This is a conversation starter but it is far from where we're at,” said Greene, “[Y]ou can bring that [plan] into the room with people across the country that are working on tenants' rights to say that you have something, but it will be nothing close to what tenants’ rights organizations across the country are working towards.”
In addition to safe living conditions and structurally sound buildings, Greene is calling for mental health care and wraparound services to be prioritized to ensure families can be raised in a “violence-free zone.”
“We need a level playing field,” says Greene, “not just some bandaid to keep Democrats in office.”
Community Change has been working with Freedom BLOC to amplify housing issues in Akron, OH, and is pushing for solutions that empower renters who rely on subsidized housing.
In a statement to TYT, Jennifer E. Cossyleon, Ph.D., a policy lead at Community Change said, “[I] hope to see HUD [the U.S. Department of Housing and Development] meaningfully collaborate with tenants across the country to identify solutions that include tenants as part of the policy-making, implementation, and oversight of policies that directly impact their well-being.”
And instead of giving subsidies and incentives to landlords, housing organizers within the organization want to see those monies go directly to families to pay their own rent and cut out the “middleman landlord” to prevent discrimination against housing voucher recipients.
The Freedom BLOC and Community Change are two of 280 organizations that signed onto the list of tenant protections proposed by the Homes Guarantee campaign, which ended up being a much-scaled-down version of a proposed executive order that landlord lobbying groups put a stop to.
Biden’s plan says that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) will investigate practices that prevent tenants from attaining or keeping housing, and will hold tenant background-check companies accountable for unreasonable procedures. As noted by the White House, this will be the first time the FTC has requested information to explore unfair practices in the rental market.
Additionally, the plan says the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) will look into additional proposed renter protections and limits on “egregious” rent increases. And HUD will propose rules to require public housing authorities and project-based rental assistance property owners to give a 30-day notice before a lease can be canceled because of nonpayment.
While the actions listed by the Biden administration may be a start, Revolving Door Project Researcher Vishal Shankar said in a statement that the “watered down” version of the plan “refrains from taking any immediate action to rein in private equity’s real estate buying spree.” Nor does it “penalize their unlawful behavior, or require private equity-owned, government-supported rental properties to adopt stronger tenant protections,” he said.
Upon the release of Biden’s plan, the National Apartment Association (NAA), a corporate landlord trade group, touted that they were able to block the Homes Guarantee’s proposed executive order by pushing their concerns “over the demands of housing advocates.” In a statement, the group said, “NAA advocacy helped avert an executive order advanced by renters advocates and members of Congress, which would have imposed immediate policy changes.”
And the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC), another landlord lobbying group, said in a release that they are disappointed that the White House is “pursuing potentially duplicative and onerous regulations that are already appropriately addressed under state and local law.”
The NAA and NMHC were both credited by the White House for making commitments under Biden’s Resident-Centered Housing Challenge – a push to get state, local, and private housing actors to adopt the guidelines under the renters’ bill of rights blueprint.
Revolving Door Project Research Director Andrea Beaty told TYT that the kudos given to landlord lobbying groups for implementing internal changes that do nothing to really help renters is “disappointing.”
“It’s just really disappointing that the White House would take so much sway from corporate actors like the NAA and the National Multifamily Housing Council. These are lobbying organizations that represent landlords who have been price gouging [throughout] this entire pandemic,” said Beaty. “They're the ones who have been driving people into housing insecurity, driving up evictions, driving up the cost of rent, and they're being given credit for just like doing nothing, doing internal work that isn't really accountable to anyone.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But Beaty says that Biden’s plan does contain some wins.
The plan, she says, “affirms that the federal government, the executive branch, should be involved” in tenant protection issues. She also notes the expansion of the FTC to look into unfair housing practices to inform policy and enforcement measures.
And Tara Raghuveer, the campaign director for People’s Action’s Homes Guarantee campaign, said that the FHFA’s commitment to look into putting limits on egregious rent increases in government-backed properties is an opportunity for tenants to work with the agency to help “check the power of landlords.”
But Greene says solutions that protect the country’s most vulnerable tenants must be on the top of Biden’s list of actions. Chief among them are prioritizing safe housing, paid tenant union organizers in each apartment complex, and requiring that the management companies are local to the communities they serve.
“It's just valuing our families, valuing of our mothers, particularly our Black mothers who are living in these impoverished communities where you just find value in people as human beings. It's the first thing that the White House can begin to do,” says Greene.
Further, The Freedom BLOC and Community Change have invited HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge to Akron, in her former congressional district, to visit with actual tenants of public and subsidized housing, learn their stories, and formulate a plan to build new apartment complexes and establish a Black land trust.
TYT Washington Correspondent Candice Cole was previously a correspondent and senior White House producer for the Black News Channel and has worked at a number of local news outlets. You can find her on Twitter @CandiceColeNews.