CT Mirror | By: Ginny Monk
Good morning!
For the past several months, fair rent commission supporters have had a network in which they’re getting to know one another and sharing information, but July marked the public launch of the statewide Fair Rent Commission Network.
Housing experts, advocates, town officials, landlords and tenants gathered for the announcement last month at a Partnership for Strong Communities forum in New Haven. The network has been years in the making as fair rent commissions have grown across the state.
A fair rent commission is a municipal board that hears complaints about rent increases or housing conditions. It has the power to make legally binding decisions about whether rent increases are fair based on 13 factors that are laid out in state statute.
Connecticut used to have a fairly organized system of fair rent commissions, but the system and many of the fair rent commissions stopped operating during the 2008 recession because rents flattened and there were fewer complaints.
As rents rose during the COVID-19 pandemic, more people were looking for ways to protest rent increases or poor living conditions. In response, the state legislature in 2022 passed legislation requiring all towns with 25,000 or more residents to adopt ordinances creating fair rent commissions by July 1, 2023.
Since then, fair rent commissions have grown even further, in part because of a tenant union movement in Connecticut that has pushed renters to go through all available channels to argue against high housing costs and poor living conditions.
Just over 50 Connecticut towns have fair rent commissions, although tenants and landlords have reported different rules and experiences with different commissions.
One of the goals of the network is to share information that may help improve people’s interactions with the commissions and spread the word about their existence, said Wildaliz Bermudez, executive director of New Haven’s Fair Rent Commission and chair of the statewide network.
This is definitely a really exciting moment because we have not had an opportunity for various fair rent commissions who are already doing the work to come together in this way,” Bermudez said during last month’s forum.
The network is getting a two-year grant from the Connecticut Department of Housing to do its work.
Clarification: This article previously referred to the first formal meeting of the Fair Rent Commission Network in July. The first formal meeting was held in January, and the network launched publicly in July.