On Wednesday April 16, NLIHC’s State and Local Innovation (SLI) campaign hosted the latest iteration of its State and Local Tenant Protections: A Primer on Renters’ Rights webinar series with a call on rent stabilization protections. During the call, attendees had the opportunity to hear from researchers, tenant advocates, and housing organizers about efforts to enact permanent rent stabilization protections for renters at the state and local levels, including the importance of implementing such protections to promote housing stability and divert the threat of evictions. A recording of the webinar can be found here.
Across the country today, housing is out of reach for many of the lowest-income renter households. Indeed, rental costs are roughly 35% higher than they were in comparison to pre-pandemic averages, leading many renter households to be cost-burdened by their rent, or, paying more than 30% of their monthly income toward rental and utility costs. At the same time, demand in the rental market has increased considerably, leaving renters with very few affordable and available housing options. According to NLIHC's latest “The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes” report for 2025, the United States currently faces a shortage of 7.1 million affordable – and available – rental housing units for extremely low-income households. Meaning, there are just three affordable rental housing units available for every ten extremely low-income renters today.
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. Rent stabilization protections have been passed in three states nationwide, with more than 40 local jurisdictions - including cities and counties - having passed such protections.
During the webinar, which was joined by the Community Service Society of New York, the Community Alliance of Tenants, and CASA of Maryland, attendees learned about how rent stabilization protections work as a key anti-displacement tool to protect tenants against rent gouging and rental inflation that seeks to price tenants out of their homes. Nada Hussein, Project Coordinator, State and Local Innovation, provided an overview of the state and local level work happening across the country to enact rent stabilization protections. Nada provided an overview of NLIHC’s State and Local Tenant Protections Database and talked about NLIHC’s recent publication on rent stabilization protections. The toolkit, which was released in the fall of 2024, breaks out the core components of rent stabilization protections as well as highlights jurisdictions that have implemented such protections for renters. The toolkit, which can be found here, also provides recommendations from tenant advocates on how such protections can be strengthened to cover the greatest number of renter households.
Next, Samuel Stein and Oksana Miranova, senior policy analysts from the Community Service Society of New York, presented their research on rent stabilization protections in New York, including providing a succinct primer on the history of such protections in the state. Samuel and Oksana also showcased their recent research on rent stabilization protections, including tenants’ attitudes toward rent stabilization protections and how there is overwhelming support for the passage of rental regulatory policies across the state. Next, attendees heard from Kim McCarty, executive director of the Community Alliance of Tenants in Oregon, on the local efforts to enact rent stabilization in the state. Kim spoke about the state’s currently implemented rent stabilization bill, which was passed though “Senate Bill 608” in 2019 and described how tenant advocates rallied for such protections for years – first campaigning for such protections in 2016. Kim also spoke about the tenant-led and tenant-centered approach to passing rent stabilization protections in Oregon, including the coalition that led these efforts, the Stable Homes for Oregon Families coalition.
Advocates in Prince George’s County, Maryland, Eden Aaron, a policy and research analyst at CASA of Maryland, and Alex Vazquez, the national organizing director for the organization, spoke about similar approaches to centering tenants in the advocacy process in the county. CASA of Maryland, which helped secure rent stabilization protections for renters in Prince George’s County in 2024 through “CB-55-2024,” talked about how tenants rallied over the course of two years to make such protection permanent. CASA of Maryland talked about how they organized hundreds of tenants, door-knocked, signed petitions, used social media to amplify tenants’ stories, and made rent stabilization an election issue in order to uplift the crucial need for renter protections.
Overall, this webinar series was created to exemplify the efforts employed by housing advocates, tenant organizers, and legal aid service providers who have enacted state and local level renter protections. In the absence of federal level tenant protections, state and local level tenant protections are critical in keeping eviction rates down and preventing homelessness.
Resources from the call, including slideshow presentations from the panelists, can be found here.
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.