The Tenant Movement Will Build on the Biden “Nothingburger” Rent Announcement

The mid-December issue of this newsletter included an excerpt and description of my article in Jacobin ,“Rents are Too High: President Biden Should Issue an Executive Order Lowering Them.”

The inspiring People’s Action Home Guarantee Campaign, along with hundreds of other organizations and Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, among others, were pushing the President to sign an order requiring rent controls for landlords benefitting from federally-backed mortgages—which includes nearly a third of rental housing--and cities that are seeking federal housing funds. They also demanded good-cause requirements for evictions from federally-supported housing and investigations into rent-gouging as an unfair trade practice.

President Biden issued his formal response to the campaign last week, and it was a disappointment. (My first draft of the article reporting on the Biden announcement included the terms “weak sauce” and “nothingburger.” 😊 )

That short article is available on the Jacobin website so I encourage you to read it there—Jacobin is non-profit and serves a very important role in our society, IMO. But I will paste the article in below, too, preceded by three quick observations:

1.The national tenants’ rights movement is not going away.  As Tara Raghuveer, the director of the Home Guarantee campaign made clear, the only reason Biden felt the need to make his performative announcement was because of tenant pressure. Although the White House statement fell far short of real reform, the movement goes on. The same day as the Biden announcement, I attended a spirited tenant action in Louisville, Kentucky. I’ll be writing more soon about the wins being racked up by that multi-racial, multi-generational tenant union.  

2.Landlord money is fighting tenants’ rights. Big, institutional landlords make profits off of powerless tenants, and they want to keep it that way. As outlined in the article below, Biden pulled his punch on meaningful federal rent regulation after the White House was the target of full-sprint lobbying by the real estate industry. The arm-twisting was led in part by the National Association of Realtors, which last year spent $81 million on lobbying (#1 among trade organizations, according to Open Secrets—almost three times as much as PhRMA) and another $24 million in political campaign contributions. That $100 million earned them a Biden dodge that they and other real estate lobbyists shamelessly claimed credit for. (Shout-out to the Revolving Door Project for reporting on the landlord industry victory dance.) None of which is a surprise, given how the real estate industry has spent millions to stop the eviction moratorium and oppose state-level rent control.

3.Social movements lose before they win. Anyone who knows the history of social movements is aware that a movement only succeeds after getting knocked backward several times. Look at the abolition of slavery movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid and anti-colonial movements, etc. etc. The tenants rights movement will be no different. In fact, some of the recent U.S. rent control victories happened only after a prior defeat.  Raghuveer said in response to the Biden announcement, “We are counting on this administration to continue working with our campaign to make (tenant protections) happen.” That was not a vague hope. It was the agenda for the next phase of action. Here is the Jacobin article:

Joe Biden’s New Relief Plan for Renters Is Incredibly Weak

As reported last month, a national U.S. tenant movement is rising out of a crisis that has rents spiking 20% over the past two years, increased corporatization of the nation’s rental housing, and evictions on the rise. Tenants from multiple states, including some who were evicted during the pandemic, have laid out an ambitious housing reform program and successfully demanded meetings to lay out their demands to Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Marcia Fudge and multiple other Biden administration officials. Tenants also convened a Congressional briefing on rent inflation hosted by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, and other members of Congress.

But the so-far result of that advocacy, a new weak statement by the Biden administration claiming to include renter protections, showed the tenants that their fight is far from complete. “The White House announcement introduces potential for agency-level action, but falls short of using the full power of the administration to regulate rent and address market consolidation by corporate landlords,” says Tara Raghuveer, a Kansas City-based tenant advocate and director of People’s Action’s Homes Guarantee Campaign.  

Tenants have been demanding that Biden order federal agencies to cap rent increases on properties with government-backed mortgages, an order which would cover nearly one-third of U.S. rental housing, and require a similar rent-control commitment from states and cities that seek federal Community Development Block Grants. The tenants’ agenda also calls for aggressive investigations of unfair trade practices by institutional landlords and good-cause requirements for lease nonrenewal or eviction from housing funded by federal tax credits.

Their argument is that landlords and local politicians may boast about the private market’s beneficial role in housing, but they should be forced to provide common-sense renter protections if they want to keep dipping their hands into the federal government’s multi-billion dollar housing till.

Yet Biden’s announcement this week failed to include any immediate action to bring relief to the 7.5 million households who are behind on their rent, or the millions more struggling to get by each month. Instead, it is awash with bureaucratic commitments to “collect information,” “examine proposed actions,” and convene meetings. Equally wispy was a supposed “Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights” that vaguely called for “clear and fair leases” and unenforceable aspirations for safe and affordable housing.

The Washington Post called the Biden announcement “significant,” but one very interested stakeholder was not fooled: the landlord industry. A wave of furious White House lobbying by the National Multifamily Housing Council, the National Apartment Association, and the National Association of Realtors had paid off, and they were not shy about saying so. "What we can say with certainty is NAA’s advocacy helped avert an executive order advanced by renters advocates and members of Congress, which would have imposed immediate policy changes," the apartment owners group bragged in a statement responding to the Biden announcement. The organizations representing the corporate landlords that used historic rent hikes to earn a whopping 57% in profits in 2021 even received lengthy shout-outs in the Biden announcement, in return for their toothless commitments to “improve the quality of life for their renters.”

So far, Biden appears to be betting that the politically expedient path is to appease wealthy landlords and pacify tenants with platitudes. But the administration’s own announcement admitted that one-third of the U.S. population is renting their homes, and many are struggling. In our law school clinic, we represent tenants in eviction court every week, and they know that a lofty-sounding presidential statement won’t prevent them from soon being forced to sleep in their cars, on a relative’s floor, or on the streets. That level of widespread frustration has caused rent control and other tenants’ rights efforts to succeed in recent months, even some that failed before.   

All of which leaves Raghuveer and the tenant movement determined to persist. Even on the day of the Biden statement, some of those tenants who went to Washington to advocate confronted corporate landlords in their own communities. “While the White House announcement affirms a role for the federal government in correcting the imbalance of power between landlords and tenants, the President can do much more to provide relief to tenants,” Raghuveer said.

“We are counting on this administration to continue working with our campaign to make it happen.”