On a trip to Las Vegas, where rents climbed twice as fast as wages last year, President Joe Biden is pitching a plan for national rent stabilization — sort of. The plan wouldn’t directly cap rents — despite a growing freak-out from the lobbying groups that fight tooth and nail to oppose rent controls — and it would need the approval of Congress.
But while acknowledging its limitations, tenant organizers and advocates see Biden’s announcement as a rare acknowledgment that the federal government could wield its vast power to shape the housing market on behalf of tenants.
The announcement is one of several populist economic policies Biden has recently endorsed as progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) circle the wagons around the embattled president while making the case that his path to victory lies through pro-working-class policy. Rising rents are a key driver of inflation and a top concern for voters in battleground states like Nevada.
Tenant organizers see the proposal as both a partial measure that kicks the can down a road that could dead-end come November — and a political victory.
“As recently as a few years ago, we were being laughed out of rooms — rent regulation was a third-rail policy idea,” says Tara Raghuveer, director of the National Tenant Union Federation. As policy messaging, “it’s hard to overstate how significant the shift is.”
Rent control is still fairly rare in most of the United States, thanks to a nationwide industry campaign, beginning in the 1980s, to preempt its adoption at the local level. Mark Paul, an economist at Rutgers University who has urged a rethinking of the conventional economic wisdom against rent control, praised Biden’s announcement as a step in the right direction. “We have policies in place that have helped build the middle class through federal support for housing,” Paul says. “However, that federal…
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Auteur: Rebecca Burns
