Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) unveiled the “Emergency Price Stabilization Act” on August 4. The bill would expand the White House Supply Chains Disruption Task Force to include a new sub-task force with the power to monitor and analyze price increases in housing, energy, and other vital sectors; proactively investigate corporate profiteering, including price-gouging; and design controls and regulations to limit rent- and other price-gouging.
In her testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on August 2, NLIHC President and CEO Diane Yentel called on the Biden administration to take immediate steps to protect America’s lowest-income and most marginalized renters from the harmful impacts of inflation and rising rents, high rates of eviction fillings, and increasing homelessness. The Emergency Price Stabilization Act would allow Congress and the President to establish critical protections to help keep renters stably housed amid unprecedented and unwarranted increases in rent prices and housing instability.
Renters are facing increased inflation, skyrocketing rents, eviction filing rates that reach or surpass pre-pandemic averages, and, in many communities, increasing homelessness. Recent rent increases are driven by several factors, including a growing demand for rental housing, limited supply, and high inflation. Rent increases can also be attributed to a mostly unregulated rental market that permits landlords to raise rents as high as the market will allow, without regard to the impact on tenants with low incomes. Increased institutional investor ownership in the rental market is compounding the crisis, leading to further increases in rental prices and putting low-income renters at greater risk of eviction.
In Representative Bowman’s press release announcing the new legislation, Diane was said, “Even before the pandemic, millions of America’s lowest-income and most marginalized households were struggling to keep roofs over their heads, always just one financial shock away from falling behind on rent and being threatened with eviction, and in the worst cases, homelessness. Today, these same households are facing new threats with historic levels of inflation and skyrocketing rents. Just as some states have in place laws to prevent price or rent gouging after natural disasters, Congress should consider similar protections like those included in the Emergency Price Stabilization Act for renters coming out of a global pandemic.”
Read the bill text here.
Read the press release introducing the “Emergency Price Stabilization Act” at: https://bit.ly/3JzMuPc