Comments
TENANT PROTECTION - For years, Housing Is A Human Right and our parent organization, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, have been advocating for the “3 Ps” to address the housing affordability crisis in the United States. While corporate landlords and YIMBY groups push for a trickle-down housing solution that never helps middle- and working-class tenants, the 3 Ps is an urgent, common-sense way to help people who need it most.
The 3 Ps are simple, as all good ideas are: protect tenants through rent control and other protections; preserve existing affordable housing, not demolish it to make way for luxury housing; and produce new affordable and homeless housing through adaptive reuse and other methods.
Protect, preserve, produce. It’s simple, effective, and makes sense. In short, the 3 Ps is a winning solution for the housing affordability crisis.
What makes the 3 Ps so important is that poor and middle- and working-class tenants are bearing the brunt of the housing affordability crisis. They can’t afford to pay sky-rocketing rents, year after year, and people are pushed into homelessness when they can’t come up with the cash. So the 3 Ps immediately help the most vulnerable tenants, unlike Big Real Estate and YIMBY groups’ trickle-down housing agenda.
The fact that corporate landlords and Corporate YIMBYs don’t push for the 3 Ps is a clear indication of what matters to them most, and it’s not helping struggling tenants. Corporate landlords are only concerned about making outsized profits, and Corporate YIMBYs, for various reasons, are more than happy to help them.
California YIMBY, YIMBY Action, and Abundant Housing LA, for example, recently worked with corporate landlords and their front group, the California Apartment Association, to kill Prop 33 in 2024. That measure would have repealed statewide rent control restrictions in California, allowing cities to better protect their tenants. Corporate YIMBYs and Big Real Estate went after a key tenant of the 3 Ps: protect tenants.
What’s also telling is that Big Real Estate and Corporate YIMBYs push for the construction of more luxury housing before anything else. But people who can afford luxury apartments and condos are not struggling with excessive rents; the poor and middle and working class are. They need affordable housing first and foremost
Big Real Estate also routinely pushes back against anything that forces them to include affordable housing in new development projects – and corporate landlords and developers are more than willing to demolish existing affordable housing to build luxury housing. So the real estate industry is going against two other key tenets of the 3 Ps: preserve existing affordable housing and produce new affordable housing.
In the end, it all shows that Big Real Estate, with help from the California Apartment Association, real estate lobbying groups, and Corporate YIMBYs, doesn’t care about addressing the housing affordability crisis. Corporate landlords and developers only want one thing: to make bigger and bigger profits – no matter the consequences to hard-working tenants.
But things can improve with the 3 Ps. To that end, across the United States, residents must tell their elected representatives to pass policies that protect tenants, preserve existing affordable housing, and produce new affordable housing. Residents should also support ballot measures that seek to implement the 3 Ps, which will urgently help tenants and send a message to politicians. The 3 Ps are smart, sensible, and urgent. The 3 Ps work.
Follow Housing Is A Human Right on Facebook, X, Instagram, and Bluesky.
(Patrick Range McDonald, author and journalist, Best Activism Journalism: Los Angeles Press Club, Journalist of the Year: Los Angeles Press Club, Public Service Award: Association of Alternative Newsmedia, advocacy journalist for Housing is a Human Right, and a contributor to CityWatch.)
