The Tenants Agenda is a plan to achieve safe, stable, and affordable housing for tenants in Portland Maine. Add your name to our petition to the Portland City Council to: 1) Lower the Rent, 2) Guarantee Safe and Stable Housing, and 3) End Landlord Corruption.
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Over the past year, the Portland Tenants Union has helped tenants win back hundreds of thousands of dollars from greedy landlords. We do this by supporting tenants in making their cases before the Rent Board. In our experience, more often than not, the Rent Board tells the landlord they were charging an illegal rent (it violated Portland's rent control laws) and that they are required to pay money back to the tenants.
This has been a wildly successful strategy, but over the past year we started asking: what would it look like to go on the offensive? We don't just want the city to tell landlords to pay up after they've broken the law. We need the city to stop landlords from charging illegal rent in the first place.
We created the Portland Tenants Agenda to address the housing crisis in Portland. Our city can make tangible strides towards safe, stable, and affordable housing this year! Let's get to work. First step is signing this petition! Read the full Tenants Agenda below.
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Tenants Agenda:
Lower the Rent:
- Digitize the rental registration process so that illegal increases, changing base rents, and falsely claimed banked rent are stopped at the point of registration.
- Audit and verify all 2020 base rents through lease verification and set illegally changed base rents back to legal levels, as required by law. The city has failed to verify the bulk of base rents.
- Collect leases, rent increase notices, and proof of voluntary turnovers annually to verify landlord claims of rent levels and to stop illegal increases as required by law.
Guarantee Safe and Stable Housing:
- Make all rentals safe. No more moldy rentals, broken heaters, lead paint and missing fire alarms.
- End no-fault evictions and remove financial incentives for landlords who evict their tenants.
- Implement the right of first refusal for tenants in homes that are being sold.
End Landlord Corruption:
- Make the Rent Board imposed fines mandatory and automatic for landlords who break rent control laws.
- Implement a three strikes rule where landlords who repeatedly fail to follow the law lose their landlord licences.
- Stop landlords from fraudulently claiming the owner occupancy exception by verifying all owner occupancy claims using the homestead exemption and by requiring landlords to show proof they lived in the building 181 days every year.