NLIHC’s State and Local Innovation (SLI) project supports state and local partners in advancing, implementing, and enforcing state and local tenant protections, sustaining emergency rental assistance (ERA) programs, preventing the criminalization of homelessness, and supporting the advancement of other innovations that keep eviction rates down and prevent homelessness. The SLI project also aims to shape and inform federal policies that address the needs of the lowest-income and most marginalized renters in the U.S. To support these efforts, the SLI project maintains a Tenant Protections Database that gathers together the latest information about the passage of tenant protections in states and localities around the country.
Explore the SLI Tenant Protections Database
The SLI project builds on the success of NLIHC’s ERASE project, which ran from January 2021 to December 2023. ERASE worked alongside state and local partners to ensure that the historic $46.5 billion in ERA passed by Congress during the pandemic reached the lowest-income and most marginalized renters. By informing and improving ERA program design, the ERASE project helped create more visible, accessible, and preventative ERA programs that ultimately helped keep millions of renters housed. ERASE also supported state and local partners’ efforts to pass, implement, and enforce tenant protections that ensured renters were able to stay housed once they received rental assistance. Since January 2021, more than 280 such protections have been passed in states and localities around the country.
Now, however, as rents continue to rise, wages remain stagnant, and the affordable housing crisis worsens, the need for action at the state and local levels is more pronounced than ever. To meet this need, NLIHC’s State and Local Innovation project helps state and local partners advance, implement, and enforce state and local tenant protections, sustain ERA programs, oppose the criminalization of homelessness, and develop other innovations.
Over the next year, the SLI project will make available a range of new resources, including a range of tenant protections tools and resources – including draft language, frequently asked questions, and briefs – to support the state and local passage and implementation of key tenant protections like “just cause” eviction standards, rent stabilization ordinances, laws that strengthen code enforcement and habitability standards, and laws that limit “junk fees.” Likewise, NLIHC will release tools and resources to support state and local solutions to end homelessness, including the Housing First model, and to combat efforts to criminalize homelessness.
The SLI project’s Tenant Protections Database tracks permanent state and local emergency rental assistance programs while advocating for their passage along with the federal “Eviction Crisis Act.”
Visit the SLI project webpage here to learn more!