NLIHC’s State and Local Innovation (SLI) project released today a new publication exploring habitability protection measures in two jurisdictions: New Orleans, Louisiana and Cincinnati, Ohio. The publication is the latest installment in NLIHC’s State and Local Tenant Protection Series: A Primer on Renters’ Rights, a collection of resources aiming to shape the conversation about state and local tenant protections. Read the new case study.
Nationwide, over six million families live in housing with serious health and safety hazards, including holes in walls and windows, broken heating and plumbing, pest infestations, falling plaster, mold, missing smoke detectors, crumbling foundations, leaking roofs, and more. Poor housing conditions can directly impact a person’s physical health by causing injury, infection, respiratory illnesses, and poor mental well-being. Low-quality housing is also disproportionately concentrated in communities of color and widens the health inequity gap across several metrics, including mortality and disease.
Currently, a patchwork of federal, state, and local laws and regulations establish a minimum set of quality standards for rental housing. These standards are not consistent nationwide, offering various levels of protection. Many jurisdictions have expanded on state and local habitability protections, but enforcement of these policies has historically been weak. Strengthening state and local habitability laws can ensure that renters have access to safe and quality housing by expanding habitability standards, creating and implementing mechanisms for enforcement, and protecting renters from reporting unsafe housing conditions.
The new case studies explore habitability protection measures passed recently in two jurisdictions: New Orleans, Louisiana and Cincinnati, Ohio. The first case study highlights the years-long efforts undertaken by housing advocates in New Orleans to pass ordinance No. 29239, which created the Healthy Homes Program. The program requires landlords to register their residential rental properties, imposes stronger health and safety standards for housing units, implements anti-retaliation protections, and creates an unfunded Anti-Displacement fund. The second case study explores how legislators in Cincinnati passed three bills in December 2023 aiming to improve substandard conditions in rental housing. Ordinance 413-2023 allows the city to make emergency repairs to rental units; Ordinance 414-2023 makes a rental inspection program permanent and expands its geographic area; and Ordinance 415-2023 mandates that landlords provide relocation assistance to tenants who must relocate due to uninhabitable living conditions.
Like other materials in the State and Local Tenant Protection Series, the new publication is meant to help state and local advocates identify successful tactics for advancing, enacting, and implementing tenant protections in their own jurisdictions, as well as to offer insights into the challenges that can occur during the advocacy and legislative processes. The case studies also highlight the qualitative impact of these protections for tenants and how such laws can be critical in mitigating the threat of housing instability.
More information about the 600 tenant protections that have been enacted in states and localities across the country, including habitability protections, can be found in NLIHC’s State and Local Tenant Protections Database.