CPD Action's Letter to President Joe Biden to Address America’s Housing Crisis

August 2024

Dear President Joe Biden: 

We appreciate the steps your administration has taken to address America’s affordable housing crisis. We welcome your recent proposals that lay bare the housing affordability crisis. We applaud your recent announcement to combat egregious rent hikes through a 5% rent cap, and we also welcome your regulatory actions to use public land for affordable housing, provide grants for deeply affordable homes, and require 30-day notice for rent increases and lease expirations as well as a grace period for fee increases in FHFA-backed apartment rentals.

While you will not be seeking a second term, we believe that you can and must take further action immediately to address the crisis before the conclusion of your first term.  Now is an unprecedented opportunity to recognize the widespread pain Americans face in our housing emergency.  Taking stronger action will resonate deeply with working and low-income people and people of color nationwide.  Now is a critical moment for aggressive action to help end the worst housing and homelessness crisis our country has ever seen, help renters and houseless folks struggling with the cost of rent now, and set the country on a long-term path of providing safe, stable, and permanently affordable rental housing for decades to come. Tenants and houseless folks experience the daily pain of the housing crisis with massive rent increases, unsafe and uninhabitable housing, landlord harassment, and criminalization of the houseless.

We, the undersigned, are calling on you to show leadership by using your executive authority immediately, to effect change now – during the worst housing and homelessness crisis of a generation.  With the Supreme Court decision to criminalize people who are unhoused, we need you to stand up and create more humane housing policies today. We are a network of 51 powerful affiliate organizations and allies across the country organizing together in the House Every One! Campaign for guaranteed Green Social Housing, expanded tenant protections, and rent caps. At a time of a deep housing affordability crisis, our country needs visionary housing policies. We must protect families from the looming threat of unprecedented homelessness and displacement; halt Wall Street speculation and corporate landlords’ growing influence over the housing market; create truly affordable green social housing; and redress our federal government’s history of institutionalized bias, putting us on a path towards greater racial, economic, and gender equity. We all deserve a safe, stable, and affordable place to call home. We must urgently create a more just and sustainable housing system.

We are calling on you as the current sitting President to take action on the following policies to ensure all our communities have a home to thrive: 

• An Executive Order for an Office of Social Housing: Establish an Office under HUD to develop plans for expanding permanently and deeply affordable social housing, and to align existing programs with social housing goals, with the input of housing justice organizations; 
• An Executive Order for Rent Regulations and Good Cause Eviction Protections in Federally Insured Properties: Limit rent increases for tenants in all properties financed by government-backed mortgages to 3 percent or 1.5 times the CPI, whichever is lower, annually. Mandate good cause eviction protections in these same properties, so that evictions are only permitted for serious and repeated lease violations provable in a court of law, and tenants are guaranteed a right to lease renewal;   
• Call for legislation and funding for increased tenant protections and construction of deeply affordable social housing: Support a federal right of all tenants to organize and bargain collectively as tenant unions with landlords over rents and living conditions, including in all federally subsidized properties.  Support appropriating $1 trillion over ten years for creating 12 million permanently and deeply affordable homes, as well as $230 billion to fully repair and green our existing public housing.

Sincerely,

CPD Action 
Stand up Alaska
Arkansas Community Organization
Fuerte Arts Movement
LUCHA
ACCE Institute
Organization United for Respect
United for a New Economy
Make the Road Connecticut
SPACES in Action
Delaware Alliance for Community Advancement
Florida Rising
Black Male Initiative   
New Georgia Project
Hoosier Action
Sunflower Community Action
VOCAL Kentucky
Step Up Louisiana
CASA
Maryland Communities United
Maine People's Alliance
Detroit Action
Flint Rising
COPAL
New Justice Project
TakeAction Minnesota
Communities Creating Opportunity 
Action NC
Rights & Democracy
Make the Road New Jersey
Organizers in the Land of Enchantment (OLE)
Make the Road Nevada
Churches United for Fair Housing
Make the Road New York
New York Communities for Change
VOCAL-NY
Ohio Organizing Collaborative 
PCUN
215 People’s Alliance
Center for Coalfield Justice
Make the Road Pennsylvania
One Pennsylvania 
Texas Organizing Project
VOCAL-Texas
Workers Defense Project
New Virginia Majority
Working Washington
Black Leaders Organizing Communities 
Leaders Igniting Transformation
Our Future West Virginia 
Human Impact Partners
Redress Movement 
WZA Consultant
Little Listeners (LLOTC)
Right to the City Alliance 

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CPD Action is the largest network of community-based grassroots organizations in the country with 48 affiliates in 200 cities and 33 states, plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. CPDA’s work is rooted in communities of color, working class communities, immigrant communities, and the LGBTQIA+ community. The CPDA network works to understand the root causes of the challenges that we confront, build consensus around transformative solutions, and drive the scaled deep organizing required to achieve change.