Sen. Elizabeth Warren first released a comprehensive “Safe and Affordable Housing” proposal back in March, and on Monday, Nov. 18, gave an update that will have many middle-class and low-income workers feeling pretty hopeful. While her initial housing plan covered a lot of ground, the new edition has a special focus on an issue that’s under-discussed when we talk about housing crises and cost of living: rent.
First, let’s dig into Warren’s update, then move into why renters’ rights are so important—and so often forgotten in housing crisis conversations. Warren’s update highlights a few key issues, including the need to regulate corporate landlords, the real threat of gentrification, and why we need to put more funds into public housing.
In detail, this proposal includes creating a federal standard for evictions (and a right to renew your lease), as well as a small-dollar grant program to help families stop evictions because of money emergencies. This includes a nationwide right-to-counsel fund, which is pretty amazing.
Evictions can separate families, cause turmoil for children, create serious trauma for people with disabilities, and, obviously, lead to homelessness. On that note, it’s worth pointing out that others in the race have also touched on evictions. For example, both Sens. Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar have proposed funds for legal counsel for people facing eviction, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg has supported more federal protections for people facing eviction.
Warren also wants to start an Innovation Lab to study and strategize on how to keep rent affordable, such as rent control and leases that span multiple years. The 2020 hopeful also wants to create a Tenant Protection Bureau with the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
More people in the United States own homes than rent them. Data suggests that the ratio of homeowners to renters is about 2-to-1. The big exception to that figure is, perhaps unsurprisingly, people in their twenties. But with student loan debt and the gig economy breeding instability, many young people don’t see the same direct path to homeownership that their parents might have at the same age.
And of course, not everyone who rents is a few years out of college. In fact, many people work full-time, raise families, and live entire lives, all while renting. Under the current model, homeownership simply isn’t fiscally accessible to everyone. There are people who have never owned a home, as well as people who have owned homes but lost them and now rent. While it might not fit the now-dated vision of the American Dream, for many people, renting is a lifelong financial reality, and those people deserve protection as much as anyone else.
Thanks to gentrification, low-income people and people of color are being displaced from their communities. Corporate landlords have a large role in that displacement—eager to make more money on suddenly “desirable” neighborhoods, families are being pushed out and have little recourse.
As research from Pew points out, more households in the U.S. are renting now than in the last 50 years, and that rate applies to both people who traditionally have been more likely to rent—young people and people of color, for example—and people who have been less likely to rent, including white people and middle-aged folks. Expanding renters’ rights helps everyone, even if the traditional cultural dialogue has centered on homeowners.
Fellow 2020 hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released an exciting public housing bill recently as well. This proposal, which comes in at about $172 billion, seeks to update more than one million public housing units to curb carbon emissions. Warren is a co-sponsor of this bill.