Corporate landlords and YIMBY groups keep pushing a flawed, one-dimensional solution for the housing affordability and homelessness crises that doesn’t urgently help hard-working tenants.
What middle- and working-class renters need is immediate relief from unfair, skyrocketing rents. What they need is a multi-pronged approach, which includes rent control. It’s called the “3 Ps.”
The real estate industry, which includes YIMBY (“Yes In My Back Yard”) groups, advocates for a flawed, self-serving solution called “trickle-down housing.” They want to flood the rental market with new luxury housing, saying that more high-end apartments will eventually bring down rent prices for middle- and working-class tenants.
First, Americans know from decades of experience that trickle-down anything enriches the wealthy first and foremost, with working people getting little, if any, benefits from such a policy. In fact, when applying a trickle-down approach to housing, the middle and working class won’t see any immediate relief from sky-high rents, if they’ll see them at all.
In the meantime, hard-working renters drown under excessive rents with life-altering consequences. Eviction Lab, the prestigious think tank at Princeton University, has linked unaffordable rents to higher mortality rates, and a wide-ranging study by UC San Francisco found that exorbitant rent is the leading cause of homelessness.
Second, a trickle-down approach makes no sense for the serious problem at hand. Look at this way: when you see a person with life-threatening injuries and another person with sniffles and a cocktail in his or her hand, you don’t first help the person with sniffles and a cocktail. You immediately attend to the person who may die.
In our case, the people under the most threat are middle- and working-class renters, who are getting slammed the hardest by the housing affordability crisis and face the very real prospect of homelessness. They need help first and foremost.
Third, a white paper published at the Harvard Business Review and other studies point to the fact that rent control is a key tool to protect tenants against predatory landlords. In fact, there is no other tool to immediately stop corporate landlords from charging unfair rents. Rent control is it.
Lastly, the real estate industry says rent control is the wrong solution for the housing affordability crisis. That’s ridiculous: Housing justice advocates have never said rent control is the only answer to exorbitant rents. In fact, it’s Big Real Estate that’s pushing for a single solution — trickle-down housing.
Based on decades of experience, activists want politicians to implement a multi-pronged approach that’s known as the “3 Ps”: protect, preserve and produce. This is simple and direct.
Elected leaders must protect middle- and working-class tenants against predatory business practices by passing rent control and other renter protections. Politicians must also preserve existing affordable housing, not demolish it to make way for luxury housing. And elected officials must produce new affordable and homeless housing through such methods as the adaptive reuse of existing buildings and pre-fabricated housing. Protect, preserve, produce.
It’s also important to point out that corporate landlords, such as scandal-plagued Greystar and Equity Residential, don’t want rents to go down. They want profits to grow quarter after quarter, year after year. So it’s naive, even delusional, to think that corporate landlords want to solve the housing affordability crisis for middle- and working-class renters.
After all, the real estate industry is pushing for more luxury housing through its trickle-down housing agenda because it will give corporate landlords more affluent tenants who can pay sky-high rents, which will result in bigger profits.
In the end, American tenants need rent control now. They also need affordable housing to be preserved and more affordable and homeless housing to be produced. They can’t wait any longer. Their wellbeing is at stake.
Patrick Range McDonald is an award-winning advocacy journalist for Housing Is A Human Right, the housing advocacy division of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
