Rent Inflation Climbed to 7.7% Over the Past Year; Recent Fed Hikes Will Continue to Squeeze Tenants
Contact: Johanna Kichton, press@peoplesaction.org, 202.660.0605
WASHINGTON, D.C. – People’s Action’s Homes Guarantee campaign is bringing 100 tenants to Washington, D.C. to present President Biden with language for an executive order to protect tenants and stabilize the economy. 250 legal partners, housing justice, and tenant-led organizations also signed onto the executive order language. Representatives of the Homes Guarantee campaign will join a meeting at the White House today in addition to hosting a congressional briefing on rent inflation later in the week.
“As of now, the Biden administration is dangerously silent on the single biggest line item in Americans’ budgets: their rent,” People’s Action Homes Guarantee Campaign Director Tara Raghuveer said. “Signing this executive order is the clearest way that the president can fight inflation and take on the corporate landlords who are rent gouging poor and middle-income families.”
The executive order would address the ongoing rent crisis, racial disparities in the impacts of that crisis, inflation, the consolidation of the rental market, and the government-sponsored dominance of institutional investors by creating a new set of cross-agency actions and protections to help tenants including the: Federal Housing Finance Agency, Federal Trade Commission, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, U.S. Department of the Treasury and Attorney General.
“Inflation doesn’t just hurt at the gas pump. We need the White House to take immediate action to address sky-high rents that are costing families their homes,” Rights and Democracy New Hampshire Tenant Leader Mary Osborne said. “I need to know that the President is fighting for me.”
Read the full text of the executive order here.
Last week, the Federal Reserve further increased interest rates, hurting tenants by keeping prospective homebuyers out of the market and increasing price pressure in an already-crunched rental market. Polling from Data for Progress and Bipartisan Policy Center point to bipartisan voter appetite for federal action to mitigate rising housing costs. Earlier this year, the campaign sent the White House a memo of recommended federal actions to curb rent inflation signed by 220+ legal partners, housing justice, and tenant-led organizations.
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People’s Action builds the power of poor and working people in urban, rural, and suburban areas to win change through issue fights and elections. We are a national network of 38 state and local grassroots power-building organizations in 28 states–united in the work of building a bigger “we.”