As former members of Portland’s rent board – one a homeowner in District 5 and the board’s first chairperson; the other a tenant in District 1 – we write to express our strong support for ballot Question C: An Act to Protect Tenants.

During our time on the rent board, we saw firsthand how Portland’s housing crisis affects our community. We watched landlords try to skirt the ordinance as tenants confronted illegal rent increases and faced eviction for standing up for their rights. We saw renters unionize in order to protect themselves from these harmful violations, as the folks at City Hall lacked resources and funding to proactively enforce the ordinance, falling back on an ineffective policy of “voluntary compliance.”

It is no secret that Mainers are experiencing a housing crisis exacerbated by the acute social and economic hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic, all amidst an era of high inflation fueled by corporate greed, rising fuel costs, massive increases in the cost of living and rapid gentrification in Portland. These harsh realities are felt hardest by poor and working-class renters. That’s why the tenant protections proposed by Question C are so long overdue. People are doing everything right and still being harmed.

Our community needs to use every tool and incentive available to get people housed as safely and quickly as possible, and while there is so much more our state and federal government could do to support tenants, this is a crucial step in the right direction for our city. We must put an end to onerous application fees, provide stronger local eviction protections, limit rent increases to the true cost of inflation and empower tenants who unionize. By lowering the amount landlords can raise rent in a year by almost 30%, we can provide tenants, especially those on fixed incomes, with added material security in order to avoid a seven-day eviction notice for nonpayment of rent. All of these provisions will address some of the biggest barriers faced by vulnerable renters in search of safe and affordable housing.

Despite eviction being a leading cause of homelessness, landlords continue to displace people – often with only a month’s notice – simply because it is legal for them to do so. During this process, tenants accrue myriad costs involved with moving, including application fees, exorbitant security deposits, a mountain of paperwork, time lost and potential discrimination – all without the guarantee that they will actually have a place to live by the time they are forced to move.

If the median monthly cost of rent in Portland is approximately $1,700, that means a tenant must have more than $5,000 saved in order to find new housing when they are displaced. Landlords should not generate excessive revenue off the hardship of honest working-class folks. It is time for us to collectively recognize that landlords are not simply passive tools of “the economy,” but rather powerful actors and decision makers who profit off what ought to be a human right.

Though not always the case, we have seen too many examples of landlords failing to be responsible stewards of this power. Given all this, requiring relocation assistance to tenants in order to ease the detrimental effects of displacement is a reasonable safeguard to counterbalance this asymmetry.

Landlords are not vulnerable in the midst of a housing crisis. Tenants are. As rent assistance programs draw to a close, and 71% of tenants in Portland are burdened by housing costs, renters need relief now. Question C is fundamentally about protecting tenants, providing them with financial security and stability, and protecting them from the speculative “free market” or the whims of landlords. It is about transferring wealth from the pockets of the privileged few to the hardworking many. In the richest country in the world, in the largest city in Maine, there is plenty of prosperity to go around.