Addressing Causes of Homelessness

“Even if they don’t want to, they will charge the (rent control limit) every year. It will make renters poor and increase homelessness. The cause of homelessness is a lack of housing availability and it’s all of these laws that’s driving homelessness,” Mr. Fallon said.

At the beginning of this year, the Biden administration announced a blueprint for a renters bill of rights, urging federal agencies and politicians to help tenants find, afford, and stay in housing. While only guidance and not policy, the blueprint lists the types of protections renters need and how to achieve them.

In that document, there is also a request that the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) look at ways to limit “egregious rent increases.”

A group of 32 economists also wrote a letter to the Biden administration saying that rent control is an effective tool to protect people with low, middle, and working-class incomes. They said anti-rent-control arguments pushed by the real estate industry are outdated and wrong.

Landlord advocate Mr. Paletz says the government and experts should look more at the causes of a lack of available housing and less at government mandates.

“Rent control is a very short-sighted and politically expedient false promise to make,“ he said. ”Let’s tackle the real problem, which is the state of the housing market we’re in. Many of these rental properties are up for refinancing with increasingly high interest rates.

“But the core issue is the life choices by tenants, not landlords, that have put some renters in the precarious position they’re in,” he said. “I don’t want to sound dismissive. I’m an ironic ambassador, being an eviction attorney, because I see it up front and personal every day. I’m very mindful of this issue and some of these stories are heartbreaking.

“But we are all an accumulation of our life choices and some have been unexpectedly thrust upon us, like an illness, death, a job loss or a bad marriage. Life is not easy. Trying to dispossess one group of people’s rights for the betterment of another is not the answer,” Mr. Paletz added.

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