Campaigning for reelection, President Joe Biden just signaled openness to rent-regulation policies in a speech at the NAACP National Convention on Tuesday. The commander in chief vowed that his administration would enact policy to cap rent hikes at 5% annually for large corporate landlords.
“If I’m reelected, we’re going to make sure that rents are kept at 5% [increases],” he told NAACP members on a campaign swing through Nevada. It was one of a series of proposals that Biden announced to reduce housing costs, which are a pain point for many voters. The timing of the announcement struck one local housing advocate as suspect. Housing Justice League organizing director Monica Johnson wondered: Why now?
“He’s had a lot of time throughout this term to get the House and Senate to enact things like this, and nothing happened,” she told Atlanta Civic Circle in an interview. “It strikes me as a last-ditch effort to try to drum up more support.”
The Biden White House’s rent cap plan would apply to corporate landlords that own upwards of 50 units. The proposal, which would likely require congressional approval, would give these landlords the choice of capping annual rent increases at 5% on existing units — or losing federal tax breaks for the next two years stemming from faster depreciation write-offs. The Biden administration said the plan would cover over 20 million rental units.
It’s not the first time Biden has floated policies to regulate how much landlords can hike rents. The White House last year published a blueprint for a “Renters Bill of Rights” that proposed limiting annual rent hikes for properties with federally backed mortgages. Such measures never saw the light of day.
Biden’s recent comments underscore the outsize impact institutional investors are having on driving rent increases in the housing market — especially in Atlanta, where built-to-rent homes abound and where corporations account for roughly a third of recent home purchases.
Biden’s 5% annual rent-cap proposal immediately drew the ire of the National Apartment Association, which said in a statement that suggesting “rent control” would ameliorate the nation’s housing affordability crisis is “the easy way out.”
“Rent caps, more commonly known as rent control, are failed policies that don’t work,” the trade group said. “Research has shown it: The lack of affordability in rent-controlled jurisdictions reinforces it, and statements from countless economists across generations and the political spectrum are crystal clear.”
Georgia rent control ban
Rent stabilization has long seemed almost impossible in Georgia, where state law prohibits local governments from enacting and enforcing “any ordinance or resolution which would regulate in any way the amount of rent to be charged for privately owned, single-family or multiple-family residential rental property.”
The Housing Justice League’s Johnson said Georgia’s landlord lobby has successfully thwarted efforts to repeal that law, mainly by politicizing and stigmatizing the term “rent control.” Corporate landlords typically insisting that such policies stifle the free market and result in subpar living conditions. Instead, they advocate for increasing the rental housing supply, asserting that more supply would be sufficient to bring rent prices down.
“Housing is a human right and a human need,” Johnson countered. “We need to reframe the conversation about who’s in control now, and what that is doing for the average person.”
“Pretty much everybody, outside of the top 5% or 10% [of the income ladder] are struggling to maintain their housing and their quality of life,” she continued. “There needs to be a balance put on the control that the developers and the landlords have on this very necessary thing, housing.”
Johnson added that it’s disingenuous to argue that rent caps or other forms of rent regulation would lead to low-quality housing if the state legislature won’t enact tenant protections to guarantee decent housing in the first place.
Georgia lawmakers just passed a landmark tenant-protection law, House Bill 404, which requires rental housing to be “fit for human habitation.” However, the new law, which took effect July 1, does not actually define habitability. That means it will be up to interpretation by judges hearing landlord-tenant disputes.
Housing advocates like Johnson aren’t optimistic that another Biden presidency would usher in rent stabilization measures at the federal level — nor would a Trump administration — since he’d still have to push the policies through a likely Republican-dominated Congress.
Johnson said she’s glad upper echelons of the federal government are at least discussing rent regulation — but she worries that could end up as little more than talking points. “Regular people are being affected by the near complete inability to find affordable housing anymore, and so we can’t allow lip service from either party, or either candidate, to lull us into complacency,” she said