{"id":350746,"date":"2026-06-07T17:52:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T17:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/350746\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T17:52:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T17:52:11","slug":"opinion-hard-working-tenants-cant-wait-they-need-rent-control-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/350746\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: Hard-working tenants can\u2019t wait — they need\u00a0rent\u00a0control\u00a0now"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Apartments<\/a>New apartments in downtown San Diego\u2019s East Village. (File photo by Chris Stone\/Times of San Diego)<\/p>\n

Corporate landlords and YIMBY groups keep pushing a flawed, one-dimensional solution for the housing affordability and homelessness crises that doesn\u2019t urgently help hard-working tenants. <\/p>\n

\"Opinion<\/a><\/p>\n

What middle- and working-class renters need is immediate relief from unfair, skyrocketing\u00a0rents. What they need is a multi-pronged approach, which includes\u00a0rent\u00a0control. It\u2019s called the \u201c3 Ps.\u201d<\/p>\n

The real estate industry, which includes YIMBY (\u201cYes In My Back Yard\u201d<\/a>) groups, advocates for a flawed, self-serving solution called \u201ctrickle-down housing.\u201d They want to flood the\u00a0rental\u00a0market with new luxury housing, saying that more high-end apartments will eventually bring down\u00a0rent\u00a0prices for middle- and working-class tenants.<\/p>\n

First, Americans know from decades of experience that\u00a0trickle-down anything<\/a>\u00a0enriches the wealthy first and foremost, with working people getting little, if any, benefits from such a policy. In fact, when applying a trickle-down approach to housing, the middle and working class won\u2019t see any immediate relief from sky-high\u00a0rents, if they\u2019ll see them at all.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, hard-working renters drown under excessive\u00a0rents\u00a0with life-altering consequences. Eviction Lab<\/a>, the prestigious think tank at Princeton University, has linked unaffordable rents to higher mortality rates, and a\u00a0wide-ranging study<\/a>\u00a0by UC San Francisco found that exorbitant\u00a0rent\u00a0is the leading cause of homelessness.<\/p>\n

Second, a trickle-down approach makes no sense for the serious problem at hand. Look at this way: when you see a person with life-threatening injuries and another person with sniffles and a cocktail in his or her hand, you don\u2019t first help the person with sniffles and a cocktail. You immediately attend to the person who may die.<\/p>\n

In our case, the people under the most threat are middle- and working-class renters, who are getting slammed the hardest by the housing affordability crisis and face the very real prospect of homelessness. They need help first and foremost.<\/p>\n

Third, a\u00a0white paper<\/a>\u00a0published at the\u00a0Harvard Business Review\u00a0and other studies point to the fact that rent control is a key tool to protect tenants against predatory landlords. In fact, there is no other tool to immediately stop corporate landlords from charging unfair\u00a0rents.\u00a0Rent\u00a0control\u00a0is it.<\/p>\n

Lastly, the real estate industry says\u00a0rent\u00a0control\u00a0is the wrong solution for the housing affordability crisis. That\u2019s ridiculous: Housing justice advocates have never said\u00a0rent\u00a0control\u00a0is the only answer to exorbitant\u00a0rents. In fact, it\u2019s Big Real Estate that\u2019s pushing for a single solution \u2014 trickle-down housing.<\/p>\n

Based on decades of experience, activists want politicians to implement a multi-pronged approach that\u2019s known as the\u00a0\u201c3 Ps\u201d<\/a>: protect, preserve and produce. This is simple and direct.<\/p>\n

Elected leaders must protect middle- and working-class tenants against predatory business practices by passing rent control and other renter protections. Politicians must also preserve existing affordable housing, not demolish it to make way for luxury housing. And elected officials must produce new affordable and homeless housing through such methods as the adaptive reuse of existing buildings and pre-fabricated housing. Protect, preserve, produce.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also important to point out that corporate landlords, such as scandal-plagued Greystar<\/a> and Equity Residential<\/a>, don\u2019t want\u00a0rents\u00a0to go down. They want profits to grow quarter after quarter, year after year. So it\u2019s naive, even delusional, to think that corporate landlords want to solve the housing affordability crisis for middle- and working-class renters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After all, the real estate industry is pushing for more luxury housing through its trickle-down housing agenda because it will give corporate landlords more affluent tenants who can pay sky-high\u00a0rents, which will result in bigger profits.<\/p>\n

In the end, American tenants need\u00a0rent\u00a0control\u00a0now. They also need affordable housing to be preserved and more affordable and homeless housing to be produced. They can\u2019t wait any longer. Their wellbeing is at stake.<\/p>\n

Patrick Range McDonald is an award-winning advocacy journalist for Housing Is A Human Right, the housing advocacy division of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New apartments in downtown San Diego\u2019s East Village. (File photo by Chris Stone\/Times of San Diego) Corporate landlords…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":350747,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[24804,112769,21009,74,76,75,23681],"class_list":["post-350746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-apartments","tag-corporate-landlords","tag-rent-control","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-yimby"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}