NLIHC’s State and Local Innovation (SLI) project will soon host the next component of its State and Local Tenant Protection Webinar Series: A Primer on Renters’ Rights with three new installments focused on state and local tenant protections. This webinar installment is a continuation of a series launched in November 2024 with a webinar focused on laws that limit excessive rental fees. The next installment will take place February 25 and will focus on “just cause” eviction protections for renters. “Just cause” – often known as “good cause” or “for cause” – protections prevent arbitrary, retaliatory, and discriminatory evictions by establishing standards that limit the reasons for which a landlord can evict a tenant or refuse to renew a tenant’s lease when the tenant is not at fault or in violation of any laws. The webinar will take place from 2-3 pm ET and registrants will have the opportunity hear from a broad range of speakers, including tenant advocates and legal service providers about specific campaigns, resources, and efforts to advocate for just cause protections for tenants. Register for the webinar here!
In 2025, in all but 11 states including the District of Columbia, a landlord evict a tenant without providing sufficient cause. The forced displacement of a tenant, either through legal or informal means, is a significant driver of housing instability with significant repercussions beyond a tenant vacating their home. In fact, the mere presence of an eviction filing on a tenant’s public record, which then appears on a prospective tenant’s credit screening report when applying for new housing opportunities, can result in an – often automatic – denial of a renter’s housing application. Such circumstances greatly constrain a renter’s housing choices, resulting in a tenant securing inadequate housing in unsafe, unstable, and inaccessible condition. Additionally, evictions can have serious mental, physical, and social consequences, including negative health outcomes such as depression and asthma, as well as an increased rate of food insecurity, especially among children and young adults.
Just cause protections, and tenant protections more broadly, support tenants against the destabilizing effects that evictions can have on families and communities. Tenant protections, which are laws, policies, and programs that strengthen renters’ rights by providing legal safeguards against the threat of eviction, ensure that tenants are protected at all levels of tenancy. When passed alongside one another, tenant protection policies like rent stabilization protections, eviction record sealing and expungement policies, pay-to-stay provisions, source-of-income protections, and right to counsel protections level the playing field between landlords and tenants, ensuring that tenants are treated equitably throughout their lease term free from discrimination and harassment.
The webinar series will include two additional installments on April 16 and June 11 from 2-3:30 pm ET and will focus on rent stabilization protections and laws that strengthen code enforcement procedures and habitability standards, respectively. 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. For the upcoming webinar on just cause protections, registrants will hear from advocates in Oregon and Washington – both of which passed good cause protections for renters in 2019 and 2021, respectively.
During the calls, registrants will have the opportunity to learn more about the details of each jurisdiction’s advocacy campaign, including how each law works in implementation, how it is being enforced, and the challenges and lessons learned from each protection passed.
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.