Watch: Housing Justice in the States - Trends, Tools, & Tenant Power
By Ida V. Eskamani
We all have a right to safe, affordable, sustainable housing. We also know housing is an intersectional issue that touches all facets of our lives. From racial justice, to infant mortality, to the climate crisis, and more, housing sits at the intersection of countless identities and policy areas:
- Eviction During Pregnancy Worsens Birth Outcomes and Child Wellbeing
- Three Companies Own More than 19,000 Rental Houses in Metro Atlanta
- Black & Hispanic renters experience discrimination in major American cities
- Disability Justice and Equity in Housing
- The Intersections of LGBTQ+ Issues and Housing Advocacy
- Soaring rent prices aren’t just hurting wallets. They’re shortening life spans
- Climate Risk and State Insurance Policy
- Educator housing initiative launches in Northern Michigan
- Housing Advocates Design a Better Homecoming for People Leaving Incarceration
- The Wealth Gap between Homeowners and Renters Has Reached a Historic High
- High rents are forcing small businesses into tough choices
Our Economic Power Project's October briefing focused on renters. Renters in all states face skyrocketing costs and unfair evictions, while unchecked corporate landlords and private equity firms consolidate housing supply and price gouge working families. These corporate actors dominate the policy landscape— often through trade associations like the Apartment Association, Realtors, Homebuilders, and Chambers of Commerce— while policy decisions affecting renters are often made without renters at the table.
Corporate-backed solutions are generally “build-build-build,” through developer subsidies and incentives— but we know that we must go beyond supply-side strategies to ensure we’re not simply building more unaffordable housing and rewarding the same bad actors responsible for the housing crisis with more of our public dollars.
Featuring our partners at PolicyLink, American Economic Liberties Project, Private Equity Stakeholder Project, HouseUs, and Local Progress, this briefing details those trends and threats housing justice efforts face, as well as how legislators, local electeds, and renters have collaborated across the country to find solutions.
Need help connecting to tenant organizers in your state? Or are you a tenant organizer working to connect with aligned legislators? SiX can help.
Resources shared during the briefing:
- PolicyLink; Housing Tools & Resources
- American Economic Liberties Project & Local Progress:A New Culprit in the Housing Crisis: Rent-Setting Software Algorithms
- American Economic Liberties Project: How States Can Take on Junk Fees
- Private Equity Stakeholder Project: Report Series - Tools for Tackling Corporate Landlords
- FTC Takes Action Against Invitation Homes for Deceiving Renters, Charging Junk Fees, Withholding Security Deposits, and Employing Unfair Eviction Practices
- Have you or your constituents faced predatory landlord practices? Make sure to file a complaint to the FTC: FTC.gov/Complaint
- Criminalizing Homelessness Through Abusive Preemption
Would you like the slides from this presentation? Email us.
This briefing is part of our Economic Power Project (EPP) – a series of briefings SiX will hold throughout the months ahead on key economic trends in states across the country. Sign up for the EPP newsletter if you would like early invites to future briefings.
About our speakers:
Tram Hoang, Senior Associate, supports the PolicyLink housing team in transforming our nation’s housing system through policy analysis, research and advocacy, narrative change, and building the capacity of our partners in movement spaces. She brings experience working on ballot initiative campaigns, tenant protections, and housing and equitable development issues in roles with non-profit community developers, city planning departments, and policy advocacy organizations. In 2021, Tram led the historic Keep St. Paul Home campaign, which saw St. Paul voters pass the strongest rent stabilization ordinance in the country. Tram holds a master of urban and regional planning degree from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, where she was a Charles R. Krusell Fellow in Community Development at the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs. She was born and raised in Portland, Oregon and currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she spends her free time seeking elevation, ocean vibes, and recipes to replicate grandma-level food.
Pat Garofalo is the Director of State and Local Policy at the American Economic Liberties Project. Pat is the author of The Billionaire Boondoggle: How Our Politicians Let Corporations and Bigwigs Steal Our Money and Jobs. Prior to joining Economic Liberties, Pat served as managing editor for Talk Poverty at the Center for American Progress. Previously, Pat was assistant managing editor for opinion at U.S. News & World Report and economic policy editor at ThinkProgress, and his work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The Guardian, and The Week, among others.
Jordan Ash is based in Minnesota and is the Housing Director for the Private Equity Stakeholder Project where he has been for 3.5 years. Prior to this, he worked for a dozen years doing research and strategic campaigning for labor unions, including SEIU, LIUNA, and the St. Paul Federation of Teachers. Before that, he was at the grassroots community organization ACORN for 12 years, where his work focused on community reinvestment and fighting predatory lending.