NLIHC to Host Webinar on State and Local Rent Stabilization Protections on April 16

This month, NLIHC’s State and Local Innovation (SLI) campaign will host the next installment of its State and Local Tenant Protection Webinar Series: A Primer on Renters’ Rights with a new webinar on rent stabilization protections. This new webinar installment is a continuation of a series previously launched by the SLI campaign in November 2024 with a webinar focused on laws that limit excessive rental fees, commonly known as “junk fees.” In February 2025, the SLI campaign continued the series by hosting a webinar on “just cause” eviction standards and the upcoming webinar on April 16 will focus on state and local efforts to enact rent stabilization protections. These are laws that limit the speed and amount by which rents can increase. The webinar will take place from 2-3:30 pm ET and registrants will have the opportunity to hear from a broad range of speakers, including tenant advocates and legal service providers, about specific campaigns, resources, and efforts to advocate for rent stabilization protections for tenants within their jurisdictions. Register for the webinar here!  

In 2025, housing remains out of reach for many of the lowest-income renters. Across the country, rents have risen to rates far higher than what the lowest-income and most marginalized renters – including seniors, people with disabilities, and working families – can afford. At the same time, demand in the housing market has increased considerably, leaving renters with very few affordable and available housing options. According to NLIHC’s recent report, The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes, no single state in the country has an adequate supply of affordable housing for the lowest income renters. In fact, the country faces a shortage of 7.1 available and affordable housing units for each extremely low-income renter household - that is, just 3 houses available for every 10 extremely low-income renters today. 

When housing is wholly unaffordable for the lowest-income renters across the country, tenant households are not only constrained by their housing choices, but securing housing often means that a renter is overextending their budget, leading to greater and greater shares of a tenant’s monthly income to be spent on housing and only a small margin leftover for other necessities such as transportation, healthcare, and food. According to The Gap, 87% of extremely low income renters are cost burdened, paying more than 30% of their monthly income towards housing and utility costs, leaving them with few resources to make ends meet and one financial shock away from falling behind on rent, facing eviction, and in the worst cases, homelessness.  

To make housing more affordable to tenants, lawmakers in state and local jurisdictions across the country have turned to implementing rent stabilization protections for tenants. Once implemented, rent stabilization protections slow the appreciation of rental costs per year - or throughout the duration of a tenant’s lease agreement - making a tenant aware of how much will be charged to them in rent each month. NLIHC has tracked in its State and Local Tenant Protections Database rent stabilization protections in three states nationwide and the District of Columbia, with more than 40 local jurisdictions - including cities and counties - having passed such protections for renters. 

During the upcoming webinar, registrants will have the opportunity to hear from advocates in Portland, Oregon and Prince George’s County, Maryland about local efforts to advocate for rent stabilization protections. Registrants will also learn more about how each law works in implementation, how it is being enforced, and the challenges and lessons learned from each of the protections being passed – especially at the state level in Oregon and at the local level in Prince George’s County.  

As noted, NLIHC’s State and Local Innovation (SLI) Project will host the webinar series. The SLI campaign is an initiative created by the National Low Income Housing Coalition in April 2024 to support state and local partners across the country in the pursuit of advancing, implementing, and enforcing state and local tenant protections. The campaign also works to create and sustain emergency rental assistance programs, prevent the criminalization of homelessness, and provide technical assistance around state-level housing trust funds. With just a patchwork of federal-level tenant protections that exist for renters, the work of state and local housing advocates to keep eviction rates down and prevent homelessness is critical.   

The webinar series was created to exemplify the advocacy efforts employed by housing advocates, tenant organizers, and legal aid service providers who have enacted just cause eviction protections, rent stabilization ordinances, laws that strengthen code enforcement procedures and habitability standards, and laws that limit excessive rental fees. Such protections were highlighted in NLIHC’s State and Local Tenant Protection Series: A Primer on Renters’ Rights, a series of four toolkits released in August 2024. The toolkits provide an overview of each one major tenant protection listed, detail the common components of the protection, list information about state and local jurisdictions that have adopted the protection, suggest provisions that should be taken into consideration when enacting the protection, and highlight complementary policies that can be passed alongside the protection to ensure the greatest impact possible. Corresponding to the toolkits are case studies that provide specific cases of state and local jurisdictions to have enacted such protections.  

The SLI campaign will host one final webinar on June 11 on laws that strengthen code enforcement procedures and habitability standards for renters. Register for the webinar here.

For more information on NLIHC’s State and Local Innovation project, please visit: https://nlihc.org/state-and-local-innovation.