Stable, affordable housing is essential for maintaining good health. When that’s taken away by corporate landlords and other predatory landlords who charge unfair rents, a person’s well being is immediately threatened. Politicians, though, can protect the public’s health, and save lives, by passing rent regulations.
In 2023, a wide-ranging study by UC San Francisco found that Californians are homeless because excessive rents are pushing them into the streets. “People are homeless because their rent is too high,” Dr. Margot Kushel, the lead investigator of the study, told the Associated Press.
Also in 2023, Eviction Lab, the prestigious think tank at Princeton University, found that unaffordable rents are linked to higher mortality rates. “Someone paying half or more of their income towards rent was 9% more likely to die over the next 20 years compared with someone paying a third of their income towards rents,” Eviction Lab researchers wrote. They added, “Meanwhile, someone paying 70% of their income toward rent was 12% more likely to die.”
And Zillow, the real estate site, reported that in cities “where people spend more than 32% of their income on rent can expect a more rapid increase in homelessness.” Sky-high rents are a menace to public health, and we’ve seen that in Los Angeles and throughout the United States.
As the housing affordability crisis worsened in the Los Angeles area, between 2014 and 2021, Los Angeles County Department of Public Health records show that homeless deaths increased every year, totaling more than 7,300 fatalities, between 2014 and 2021. And at least 2,202 unhoused individuals died in the L.A. area in 2021.
Between 2016 and 2020, a time when the national housing affordability crisis was out of control, The Guardian found that homeless deaths across the U.S. rose by 77%, with at least 18,000 fatalities. National Health Care for the Homeless Council thought that the death count could be higher — between 17,000 and 40,000 every year.
During this same period, the greed of corporate landlords and other predatory landlords has reared its ugly head. There are endless news stories about corporate landlords charging outrageous rents and quickly evicting people. And over the past few years, the RealPage scandal has been playing out.
In 2022, Propublica found that corporate landlords used a RealPage software program to collude and charge wildly inflated rents in cities throughout the nation. Since then RealPage and numerous real estate companies have faced major lawsuits and investigations, including a lawsuit brought forth by the Department of Justice in Washington.
As a result, experts at the Open Markets Institute wrote an article, in 2024, for the Harvard Business Review in which they argued that “more muscular government involvement in housing” is needed to protect tenants, and that includes passing rent regulations. In 2023, a group of top economists from across the country wrote a letter to the Biden Administration that also urged for the use of rent regulations to help tenants.
It’s now up to politicians in California and other states to immediately pass rent regulations that will save lives and stop the greed-driven business practices of corporate landlords and other predatory landlords.
But rent control isn’t the only answer.
Housing Is A Human Right and other activists want politicians to fully embrace and quickly implement the “3 Ps”: protect tenants through rent control and other tenant rights; preserve existing affordable housing, not quickly demolish it for unaffordable luxury-housing; and produce new affordable and homeless housing through such concepts as adaptive reuse and prefabricated housing.
Poor and middle- and working-class tenants are suffering the most during the housing affordability crisis. Their needs must be met first and foremost. Their lives depend upon it.
Patrick Range McDonald is the award-winning advocacy journalist for Housing Is A Human Right, the housing advocacy division of AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
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