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housing crisis
Rent Control Will Protect Students Against Homelessness
The situation is dire. Students and their families are suffering right now, with young people’s futures at stake—as well their immediate well being.
Mar 21, 2026
The numbers are dire. More than 1.4 million students are homeless in the United States. In California, there are more homeless students than ever: At least 230,000.
Something needs to be done, and quick. Rent control will provide the relief that students and their families need right now.
Numerous experts have pointed out that students need stable, affordable housing to learn and thrive. California Homeless Youth Project Director Pixie Pearl, for example, told LA School Report that unhoused students struggle with a lack of access to nutritious foods, mental healthcare problems, and chronic absenteeism, among many other issues. It’s incredibly difficult to receive an education when one is homeless.
We also know that unaffordable rents are linked to higher mortality rates, as reported by Eviction Lab, the prestigious think tank at Princeton University, and a wide-ranging UC San Francisco study on homelessness found that most people are pushed into the streets because of sky-high rents. So immediately addressing skyrocketing rents is key, and rent control is the tool to use.
Yet corporate landlords and certain politicians want to keep the status quo, saying that we merely need to build more housing to drive down rents. Not only is there no urgency in that approach, which has serious flaws and does nothing for students right now, but developers build almost exclusively luxury rental housing—a key fact that Zillow’s chief economist pointed out as a major problem for improving housing affordability. And, of course, poor and middle- and working-class families with students can’t afford luxury apartments.
As a result, housing experts are increasingly calling for politicians to pass rent regulations to protect tenants.
University of Southern California Professor Manuel Pastor, co-author of the USC Dornsife’s Rent Matters report, wrote: “The housing crisis requires a range of strategies, [and] moderate rent regulation is a useful tool to be nested in broader strategy. It has fewer damaging effects than are often imagined, it can address economic pain, and it can promote housing stability. And housing stability matters because it is associated with physical, social, and psychological well-being; higher educational achievement by the young; and benefits for people of color.”
In response to a recent effort to pass rent stabilization in Providence, Rhode Island, University of Minnesota Professor Edward Goetz noted in a Boston Globe op-ed: “City officials are responding to the [housing affordability] crisis with a proposal to enact rent stabilization. Vocal critics of the policy make a wide range of doomsday predictions about what will happen if a city adopts it. But the actual record of rent stabilization across the country tells a dramatically different story. In fact, rent stabilization can be an effective approach to the affordability challenges faced by Providence renters, as it has been in other U.S. cities.”
In a 2023 letter to the Biden Administration, a group of 32 top economists wrote: “Through well-crafted policies, rent regulations can be designed in a manner that protects the general health and well being of renters, promotes affordability, mitigates future inflationary episodes, and maintains landlords’ ability to receive a fair and reasonable return on investment.”
But rent control isn’t the only tool to protect students against homelessness.
Housing Is A Human Right and other activists have long urged elected officials to quickly implement the “3 Ps”: Protect tenants through rent control and other tenant protections; preserve existing affordable housing, not demolish it to make way for luxury housing; and produce new affordable and homeless housing through such concepts as adaptive reuse and prefabricated housing.
It bears repeating. The situation is dire. Students and their families are suffering right now, with young people’s futures at stake – as well their immediate well being.
Rent control will immediately stabilize rent and bring quick relief. Politicians, across the country, have that tool at their disposal. They need to pass rent regulations. Pronto.
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Twin Cities Unions Planning ‘Largest US Rent Strike in 100+ Years’ as ICE Occupation Drives Eviction Crisis
"Tenants in Minnesota are in a crisis," said Minneapolis City Council Member Aisha Chughtai. "The federal invasion forced many of our neighbors to stay home and devastated our local economy."
Feb 17, 2026
Tenant and labor unions in Minneapolis and St. Paul have announced plans to carry out what they said would be the "largest rent strike in the United States in the last 100 years."
Beginning on March 1, if Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz does not meet their urgent demands for an eviction moratorium and rent relief, a coalition of nearly 26,000 workers has pledged to withhold rent, which they said could create a massive economic disruption.
The plans were announced on Tuesday by the tenants union Twin Cities Tenants, which is joined by five labor unions: Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 26, SEIU Healthcare Minnesota/Iowa, UNITE HERE Local 17, the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) 1005, and Communication Workers of America (CWA) 7250.
They argued that a freeze on rents is desperately needed after "nearly three months of federal occupation" under President Donald Trump's "Operation Metro Surge," which sent nearly 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other immigration agents to the area, resulting in multiple fatal shootings and a wave of civil rights violations, including explicit racial profiling.
The unions said the daily presence of militarized agents "has taken a painful economic toll on poor and working-class tenants across the Twin Cities."
"Over 35,000 low-income Twin Cities households were already unable to afford the rent before the federal siege," they said. "Estimates show over $47 million in lost wages among people who have not been safe to go to work, and at least $15.7 million in additional rental assistance needed due to lost household income—leaving many of those households at imminent risk of eviction."
Evictions in Hennepin County spiked by 45% between this January and last, while requests for financial assistance have nearly doubled, according to a report this month from the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder.
As the federal siege wore on and immigrants remained trapped in their homes, community members raised tens of thousands of dollars through GoFundMe campaigns. But it proved far too little to help the thousands of families suddenly at risk of losing their homes.
On January 30, tenant organizers, union members, and other local activists staged a sit-in at the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority and called for an immediate halt to evictions. Another group gathered outside the governor's mansion in St. Paul.
“We’re here today because federal immigration enforcement, eviction courts, and the police power of the state are converging to terrorize the same families,” said Jess Zarik, co-executive director of HOME Line. “Housing instability is being used as a weapon, and the scale of this crisis is unlike anything we’ve seen in our 34-year history.”
While city and state leaders have fought back rhetorically against the Trump administration's highest-profile abuses—including the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by agents last month—and called for accountability, organizers said they've been slow to remedy the wider effects it has had on working-class residents across the Twin Cities.
“A lot of people just can’t get to and from work because ICE has been stopping random cars on the road, largely based on what they think the skin color of the driver is,” said Klyde Warren, a Minneapolis renter and Twin Cities Tenants organizer. “How are you supposed to go to work and make money to pay your rent in those conditions? The answer is a lot of people just can’t right now, but the eviction courts are still operating as if things are normal and they’re not normal.”
Last week, Walz's office told Axios that the governor "does not currently have the legal authority to enact an eviction moratorium."
Walz enacted an eviction moratorium in early spring 2020, which tenant organizers said allowed renters to stay home safely to avoid risks from the Covid-19 pandemic. He did this using what is known as a "peacetime emergency" declaration, which allows the governor to circumvent typical rulemaking procedures during extraordinary circumstances.
The city councils of both Minneapolis and St. Paul voted unanimously last month for nonbinding resolutions calling on Walz to take similar action to protect vulnerable residents from displacement.
"Tenants in Minnesota are in a crisis. The federal invasion forced many of our neighbors to stay home and devastated our local economy," said Minneapolis City Council Member Aisha Chughtai (D-10). "We need real solutions for the cliff of the rental crisis we are facing on March 1."
"I will be going on rent strike on March 1, and I call on my constituents to join me, until we can get a real solution from our state government for this crisis," she said.
Even as ICE's operation draws to a close, some agents are still deployed and arresting Twin Cities residents. Organizers said that even after the surge itself ends, the economic fallout will need to be addressed.
"We absolutely need an eviction moratorium," said Geof Paquette, the internal organizing director at UNITE HERE Local 17. "Our members were struggling to keep up with housing costs before ICE occupied our streets. It has now become an emergency as many of our members are behind in their rent. It's well past time for some relief."
The unions have estimated that if just 10,000 of their members withheld their rent, it could cause $15 million in economic disruption and pressure the city and state government into action.
"The people of Minneapolis and St. Paul have shown the way, fighting a federal invasion and caring for their neighbors; their fight and their care continue in this historic rent strike," said Tara Raghuveer, director of the Tenant Union Federation. "Tenants and workers have decided that... they have no other choice but to strike. In taking this step, they join a storied tradition of struggle. The struggle can end whenever the governor steps in to do what's right."
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Rent Control Is the American Way
Taking care of each other is a part of the American way. Politicians doing the right thing on the behalf of vulnerable tenants is also a part of the American way.
Feb 01, 2026
The real estate industry doesn’t want you to know an important fact about rent control: Since World War I, rent regulations have protected poor and middle- and working-class tenants against skyrocketing rents and predatory landlords. Rent control, in other words, has long been a part of the American way.
Soon after World War I, elected officials understood that they needed to protect tenants against sky-high rents due to a worsening housing shortage. Fair rent committees, with an emphasis on “fair,” were set up in 153 cities in the United States, and those committees routinely reached out to landlords to stop unreasonable rent hikes. In Washington D.C. and Denver, rent commissions determined fair rents, and, in New York, state legislators passed emergency laws to control sky-high rising rents.
Politicians knew that they couldn’t allow the status quo of unfair rents to continue, and they knew that they had the power to do something about it. So they stepped in to help hard-working Americans.
During World War II, politicians again did the right thing and expanded rent control. The federal government established rent control for around 80 percent of rental housing in the U.S. in response to housing shortages and rent gouging. When that federal program was phased out, some states, such as New York and New Jersey, established their own rent control policies in the early 1950s.
If there was ever time for politicians to protect tenants, now is that time, and the situation is dire.
Throughout this period, elected officials understood that tenants needed stable, affordable housing that would not force renters to choose between eating or paying the rent or paying medical bills or paying the rent. Americans’ well-being was at stake.
Fast forward to the early 1970s. With worsening inflation, rents spiked. President Richard Nixon pushed for temporary rent controls, and that was followed by American cities passing rent regulations, including Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Unfortunately, in the 1980s and 1990s, the deep-pocketed real estate industry pushed back, aggressively lobbying state legislatures across the country to pass rent control bans or restrictions. Landlords and lobbyists went against the American way of looking out for people.
Today, more than 35 states have laws that stop the expansion of rent control while the real estate industry’s profits, through unfair, excessive rents, go through the roof. Between 2010 and 2019, renters paid a staggering $4.5 trillion to landlords in the U.S, according to Zillow.
Recently, Big Tech and Big Real Estate teamed up to charge wildly inflated rents through a rent-fixing software program by RealPage, which brought about numerous lawsuits and investigations. The software allowed corporate landlords to collude and charge outrageous rents that harmed Americans throughout the nation.
If there was ever time for politicians to protect tenants, now is that time, and the situation is dire. Eviction Lab, the prestigious research institute at Princeton University, found that increasingly unaffordable rents are linked to higher mortality rates. And a wide-ranging study on homelessness by the University of California San Francisco revealed that people ended up living on the streets because of sky-high rents. An urgent way to address these life-threatening problems is to utilize rent control—an American tradition since World War I.
But activists believe that rent control isn’t the only tool to fix the housing affordability and homelessness crises. There needs to be a multi-pronged approach called the “3 Ps”: protect tenants through rent control and other renter protections; preserve existing affordable housing, not demolish it to make way for unaffordable luxury housing; and produce new affordable and homeless housing.
Taking care of each other is a part of the American way. Politicians doing the right thing on the behalf of vulnerable tenants is also a part of the American way. Today’s elected officials must continue that work, especially since tenants throughout the country are facing serious risks of death and homelessness. They must immediately utilize rent regulations and the 3 Ps.
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