Last week the Federal Housing Finance Agency made an announcement of Multifamily Tenant Protections to be included in new multifamily loan agreements beginning in February 2025.
Protections for Renters Announced:
Covered housing providers will be required to provide tenants with the following:
- 30-day written notice of a rent increase
- 30-day written notice of a lease expiration
- 5-day grace period for rent payments
Results from FHFA’s Extensive Engagement with Key Stakeholders
Back in June of this year, members of many of the local housing provider associates sat down with FHFA’s director Sandra Thompson and others to give provide input on the various ideas they had on protecting the renters from us. That event was recorded.
These protections are some of the first that came out of the collaboration of the FHFA, the Enterprises (Fannie & Freddie), renters, and housing providers.
Tara Raghuveer, the leader of KC Tenants had this to say about these new protections:
“Ultimately, these requirements are marginal to tenants’ primary struggle: the rent. FHFA’s new requirements won’t meaningfully protect tenants from rent hikes, rampant in properties owned by landlords who rely on federal financing. . . .”
And a quick Google search shows no real other response to this announcement as just a few days later, President Biden called for Nation Wide Rent Control. Maybe we needed him to join us at these listening sessions and to send him back to take Econ 101.
Some quotes from Multi Family Executive Article discussing Biden’s plan include:
National Multifamily Housing Council president Sharon Wilson Géno pointed to decades of academic research that show rent caps reduce the supply of housing and fail to aid the renters who need it the most while harming other residents.
“This legislative proposal will not create a single new unit while raising costs on the very residents it purports to help,” she said. If the administration’s goal is to lower housing costs and support residents, it would be better advised to implement policies that expand housing supply—the only real way to sustainably lower housing costs and create more housing security for renters as the Biden administration pointed out in its very own Housing Supply Action Plan. Rent control has been tried for decades and been a resounding failure. Now is the time for actual solutions, not electioneering.”
Mortgage Bankers Association president and CEO Bob Broeksmit agreed, adding that “while the odds are stacked against this proposal ever passing Congress, a federal rent control law would be catastrophic to renters and our nation’s rental housing market.”
