Rent Control Saves Lives
Safe, affordable housing is critical for maintaining good health. When that’s taken away by corporate landlords and other predatory landlords charging wildly inflated rents, a person’s health is immediately threatened — whether it’s seniors or families or individuals. Rent control, though, can protect the public’s health. Rent control, in other words, saves lives.
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. In 2021, at least 2,201 unhoused individuals died in the L.A. area, and activists believe that number is probably higher.
Between 2016 and 2020, The Guardian found that homeless deaths across the United States rose by 77 percent, with at least 18,000 fatalities. National Health Care for the Homeless Council thought that the death count could be even more — somewhere between 17,000 and 40,000 every year.
Around the same time, Zillow, the real estate site, found, in 2017, that a five percent rent hike for L.A. County tenants would force at least 2,000 people into homelessness. Zillow also reported that in cities “where people spend more than 32 percent of their income on rent can expect a more rapid increase in homelessness.”
In addition, Eviction Lab, the prestigious think tank at Princeton University, recently found that “someone paying half or more of their income towards rent was nine percent more likely to die over the next 20 years compared with someone paying a third of their income towards rent.” Eviction Lab added, “Meanwhile, someone paying 70 percent of their income toward rent was 12 percent more likely to die.”
And a recent, wide-ranging UC San Francisco study found that Californians are homeless because sky-high 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.
There’s no question that sky-high rents force people into homelessness, and then face the strong possibility of dying on the streets. And excessive rents, on their own, increase mortality rates.
With lives hanging in the balance, especially elderly residents and people who have existing health conditions, an urgent response is desperately needed. That’s where rent control comes in.
Top economists recently wrote a letter to the Biden Administration, saying that rent control will immediately stabilize the housing affordability crisis. Studies by the University of Southern California and UC Berkeley found the same thing. Rent control, as a result, will stop corporate landlords and other predatory landlords from charging excessive rents year after year, prevent more people from falling into homelessness, and prevent more deaths.
To that end, a statewide coalition of housing justice groups, labor unions, social justice organizations, and civic leaders, including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and labor and civil rights icon Dolores Huerta, is now working to pass Proposition 33 in California. The November ballot measure will repeal statewide rent control restrictions and allow cities to expand rent control — and save lives. AIDS Healthcare Foundation and its housing advocacy division, Housing Is A Human Right, are sponsoring the initiative.
At the same time, the nation’s largest corporate landlords — Essex Property Trust, AvalonBay Communities, Equity Residential, to name a few — and their lobbying group, the California Apartment Association, are trying to kill Prop 33. They’re expected to spend at least $100 million to fund a massive misinformation campaign to stop the measure. (Tellingly, California YIMBY, the controversial lobbying group for Big Tech and Big Real Estate, has joined corporate landlords to oppose Prop 33 and rent control.) Corporate landlords, who have generated trillions in revenue by charging outrageous rents, put profits over people.
But activists don’t believe rent control is the only solution for the housing affordability and homelessness crises. For years, they’ve been urging elected officials to carry out the “3 Ps”: protect tenants through rent control and other rights; preserve existing affordable housing, don’t demolish to make way for luxury housing; and produce more affordable and homeless housing. Rent control is a crucial part of the 3 Ps: it will immediately help millions of people who are facing sky-high rents and the prospect of homelessness and death.
It can’t be said enough: rent control saves lives.
Patrick Range McDonald, the author of this article, is the award-winning advocacy journalist for Housing Is A Human Right.
