During the pandemic, Brooks and her colleagues shifted to focus on eviction prevention and it is only now, as the mayoral and council races heat up, that she is coming back to rent regulation.
“We see rent prices continue to skyrocket,” Brooks told a scrum of tenants and activists outside City Hall before the long-awaited rent control hearing Wednesday. “We also see the prices of goods and services going up, but we don’t see it going up in our pockets. It’s time to return to this conversation about rent control.”When Brooks was elected in 2019, she and district representative Jamie Gauthier were the only two renters on City Council.
But absent a progressive sweep of the mayoral and City Council elections, rent regulation faces a difficult path in Philadelphia. At aWhen most people think of rent control, they imagine rigid forms of regulation from the early 20th century that froze rents during times of particular stress, such as the housing shortage after World War II. It’s that kind of rent control — with strict monetary caps — thatThat’s not what most rent regulation looks like in the United States today.
Most forms of rent regulations exempt small landlords. New construction is usually exempted, too, partly because newly built apartments tend to be marketed to higher-income people and partly because most policymakers don’t want disincentives for new construction. In New York, rent stabilization applies only to buildings from before 1974; in San Francisco the date is 1979. A new law in St. Paul, Minn.
That noise you hear is capital fleeing the City.