Sponsors (15)
Official title: To protect consumers from price gouging of residential rental and sale prices, and for other purposes.
Introduced May 6, 2025 by Steven Horsford · Last progress May 6, 2025
The bill gives HUD and federal agencies stronger data, enforcement tools, and targeted remedies to curb price gouging, investor-driven distortions, and discriminatory screening — improving protections for renters and low‑income households — at the cost of expanded federal oversight, new data collection (and privacy risks), compliance burdens, and potential impacts on investment and housing supply.
Renters and homebuyers gain federal protections against unconscionably excessive price increases during declared housing crises and stronger renter protections in many multifamily properties, reducing sudden rent spikes and displacement risk.
A new federal data and oversight effort (investigations, Unit archives, and market reviews) will detect investor concentration, anti‑competitive practices, and information‑sharing that inflate prices, helping policymakers and local governments target interventions.
Consumers and renters gain better visibility and protections against discriminatory or opaque tenant‑screening and eviction‑related practices through federal data collection and FTC/CFPB oversight of algorithmic screening.
Landlords, sellers, investors, and property managers face increased compliance costs, legal risk, and regulatory uncertainty from emergency price controls, expanded investigations, data demands, and potential new rules.
The combination of short emergency price‑control windows, broad standards like 'unconscionably excessive,' and FTC‑style enforcement risks subjective adjudications and uneven application across regions and cases.
Collecting and sharing detailed race, gender, socioeconomic, and tenant‑screening data — including exemptions from some paperwork/privacy safeguards — raises privacy and civil‑liberties risks and could expose applicants and residents to misuse of their information.
Based on analysis of 9 sections of legislative text.
Authorizes HUD to declare temporary housing crises that ban unconscionably excessive rents/single‑family sale prices, creates HUD monitoring/enforcement units, and mandates interagency investigations and reports.
Creates temporary federal authority to declare an "affordable housing crisis" and ban grossly excessive rents and single-family sale prices during crisis periods, tasking HUD with enforcement and market monitoring. It also requires investigations, new HUD data and enforcement units, interagency reporting on tenant screening and anticompetitive behavior, and FHFA rulemaking to protect renters in properties backing government-sponsored mortgage purchases. Establishes definitions, data collection and reporting requirements, concentration thresholds for investor purchases, penalties modeled on FTC enforcement powers, a $1 million FY2025 authorization for an HUD investigation, and interagency reports to Congress within specified timelines.