A Renters’ Bill of Rights: State and Local Reforms to Protect Tenants

By Kendra Neumann

August 28, 2025

The United States is facing a housing crisis. While nearly all U.S. residents are affected by this crisis, renters tend to face much more housing instability than homeowners.

Renters are more likely to be cost-burdened (meaning they spend over 30% of their income on housing). Nearly half of renters were cost-burdened in 2023, compared to only about a quarter of homeowners.1Drew Desilver, A Look at the State of Affordable Housing in the U.S., Pew Rsch. Ctr. (Oct. 25, 2024),https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/25/a-look-at-the-state-of-affordable-housing-in-the-us/ [https://perma.cc/2S4W-CXUY]. Renters are less likely to be able to pay for their basic needs, like housing payments, food, and medical bills.2Corianne Payton Scally & Dulce Gonzalez, Renters Are More Likely Than Homeowners to Struggle with Paying for Basic Needs, Urban Inst. (Nov. 1, 2018), https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/renters-are-more-likely-homeowners-struggle-paying-basic-needs [https://perma.cc/6H7L-FSP7]. Most notably, renters more often face evictions or forced movement.3Id. These challenges do not impact all renters equally: low-income renters, renters of color, and renters with children are most likely to face evictions.4Nick Graetz et al., Who Is Evicted in America, Eviction Lab (Oct. 3, 2023), https://evictionlab.org/who-is-evicted-in-america/ [https://perma.cc/5E3X-AGVX].

Renters need a bill of rights to ensure that, regardless of race, income level, or familial status, they can live in a safe space without being arbitrarily evicted and risking homelessness. A renters’ bill of rights could both provide legal protections when issues occur and discourage landlords from mistreating their tenants.  

Legislation to improve renters’ rights is one important avenue to addressing the housing crisis, although jurisdictions should also consider reforms to increase housing supply and support unhoused people. In creating a broad renters’ bill of rights, cities and states should include three key reforms:

  • Right to counsel in eviction cases.
  • Protection from evictions without cause.
  • Prohibition on source of income discrimination.

Many states and localities have adopted some of these reforms, but often protections are not as robust as they could be.

Right to Counsel

Evictions can be an extremely destabilizing experience for renters: they can lead to homelessness and stress, as well as worse economic and health outcomes.

In eviction cases, most landlords have lawyers, while few tenants do. Accurate numbers are difficult to find, but evidence suggests that, in the absence of right to counsel laws, only 4% of tenants are represented, while over 80% of landlords are.5Tenant Right to Counsel, Nat’l Coal. for a Civ. Right to Couns., https://civilrighttocounsel.org/resources/organizing_around_right_to_counsel/ (last visited Aug. 10, 2025) [https://perma.cc/JFL6-2KDA]. This discrepancy gives landlords disproportionate power in eviction cases. Tenants do not know how to contest arbitrary eviction filings, which can lead to unfair rulings and unnecessary evictions.

When tenants have lawyers, they are much more likely to win their eviction cases. In New York City, which has had a right to counsel law since 2017, 84% of those represented by lawyers in eviction proceedings remained housed in 2023.6Off. of Civ. Just., N.Y.C. Dep’t of Soc. Servs., Universal Access to Legal Services: A Report on Year Six of Implementation in New York City 4, 10 (2023), https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hra/downloads/pdf/services/civiljustice/OCJ_UA_Annual_Report_2023.pdf. Having representation decreases the chance that tenants will be evicted on weak charges, and the knowledge that a tenant has legal representation may disincentivize landlords from bringing frivolous eviction cases altogether.

Five states and at least 22 localities have enacted guaranteed legal representation in housing cases for those under a certain income level.7State and Local Tenant Protections Database, Nat’l Low Income Hous. Coal., https://nlihc.org/tenant-protections (last visited Apr. 1, 2025) [https://perma.cc/76J9-3EH3]. While many of these laws are still new, early evidence shows that they are successful in helping keep tenants housed.8Oksana Miranova, Right to Counsel Works, Cmty. Serv. Soc’y (Mar. 7, 2022) https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/right-to-counsel-new-york-tenants-lawyers-evictions [https://perma.cc/23NR-J7AJ].

However, for right to counsel to be maximally effective, states must not just guarantee this right theoretically, but also provide adequate funding for lawyers to ensure sufficient representation for those facing eviction. For instance, since January 2022, nearly 60 percent of people facing eviction in New York have been unrepresented in spite of New York’s right to counsel law, at least partly because of workforce shortages.9NYC Eviction Crisis Monitor, Right to Couns. NYC Coal., https://www.righttocounselnyc.org/nyccrisismonitor (last visited Apr. 1, 2025) [https://perma.cc/AG23-AWSH].

Depending on a jurisdiction’s funding situation, passing a basic right to counsel with some funding is a good start: it can act as a deterrent and limited funding will ensure that some people have representation. As their budgets allow, jurisdictions should scale up funding to ensure that all tenants can actually access this right.

Good Cause Standards

As discussed, eviction is a major concern for renters. Many renters worry that they will be evicted without good reason. While representation can help in some situations, legal representation is less helpful when renters can legally be evicted for any reason.

To mitigate this problem, 11 states and many localities have adopted good cause standards, which require landlords to give a reason before evicting their tenants.10State and Local Tenant Protections Database, supra note 7. Research on California cities provides some evidence that requiring a good cause for evictions can help decrease both evictions and eviction filings.11Julieta Cuellar, Effect of “Just Cause” Eviction Ordinances on Eviction in Four California Cities, Princeton J. Pub. & Int’l Aff. (May 21, 2019), https://jpia.princeton.edu/news/effect-just-cause-eviction-ordinances-eviction-four-california-cities [https://perma.cc/ARN6-4XPN]. In turn, this can lessen the resulting destabilization that impacts many renters.

Some experts are concerned these laws may unintentionally lead to higher housing costs, through both decreased housing stock and increased costs of evictions.12Vicki Been et al., NYU Furman Ctr., Navigating the Tradeoffs of Good Cause Eviction Legislation 3, 21-22 (2024), https://furmancenter.org/files/publications/Balancing_act.pdf. Therefore, jurisdictions must design good cause laws carefully to minimize any unintended cost increases.

Different laws and ordinances can be more or less expansive when defining what counts as a “good cause.” To appease jurisdictions concerned about the impacts on housing costs, any good cause legislation should initially define what counts as a good cause expansively. For instance, in Colorado, in addition to nonpayment and material violations, good causes also include history of repeated delayed payment, demolition or conversion of a residence, and withdrawal from the rental market to sell or occupy the unit.13Colo. Rev. Stat. § 38-12-1303 (2025). A lengthy list of good causes can begin limiting frivolous evictions while simultaneously attempting to avoid increased housing costs.

However, once these good cause laws are in place, jurisdictions should revisit them regularly to see whether the list of “good causes” included is too broad (or narrow) and make adjustments accordingly.

Source of Income Protection

Many extremely low-income renters receive rental assistance, and the country’s largest housing assistance program is the federal Housing Choice Voucher program, which provides assistance to over two million households.14Martha Galvez & Brian Knudsen, Discrimination Against Voucher Holders and the Laws to Prevent It, 24 Cityscape: J. of Pol’y Dev. and Rsch. 145, 146 (2024), https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscape/vol26num2/ch7.pdf. This program allows voucher holders to obtain housing in neighborhoods that would otherwise be unaffordable.

However, while the program sometimes works well, landlords often choose not to rent apartments to voucher holders, particularly in higher-income neighborhoods.15Mary K. Cunningham et al., A Pilot Study of Landlord Acceptance of Housing Choice Vouchers, Urban Inst. (Aug. 20, 2018), https://www.urban.org/research/publication/pilot-study-landlord-acceptance-housing-choice-vouchers [https://perma.cc/PL33-45KL]. These neighborhoods tend to have more access to opportunities, such as better schools, public transportation, and healthier foods. In some cities, voucher holders faced nearly 80% denial rates from landlords in 2016-17.16Id. Denials by landlords undermine rental assistance by unnecessarily limiting housing options for low-income renters.

Nearly half of states and over 100 localities have tried to address this problem by prohibiting source of income discrimination by landlords.17State and Local Tenant Protections Database, supra note 7. Sometimes, these laws specifically ban discrimination against voucher holders, while other times they more generally ban discrimination based on a person’s income.

Source of income protections can lead to more voucher holders actually using their vouchers to move into better housing. One study shows that legal protections may eventually increase voucher usage between seven and twelve percentage points.18Galvez & Knudsen, supra note 14, at 152 (citing Lance Freeman, The Impact of Source of Income Laws on Voucher Utilization, 22 Hous. Pol’y Debate 297 (2012)). People using vouchers have the opportunity to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods, which improves their housing, health, and economic outcomes on average.

However, the benefits of these protections can take several years to materialize.19Daniel Teles & Yipeng Su, Source of Income Protections and Access to Low-Poverty Neighborhoods, Urban Inst. 1 (Oct. 2022) https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2022-10/Source%20of%20Income%20Protections%20and%20Access%20to%20Low-Poverty%20Neighborhoods.pdf [https://perma.cc/7Q6H-H6UX]. Additionally, source of income protection laws are more robust when they are paired with active enforcement of such laws through testing. Well-resourced jurisdictions should strive to include enforcement funding in any legislation banning source of income discrimination. For under-resourced jurisdictions, merely passing these protections without enforcement can still lead to some benefit.

Conclusion

While none of these reforms are perfect (and no single reform will solve the housing crisis), the only way jurisdictions can fight the housing crisis is by undertaking a series of smaller reforms like these.

Not all jurisdictions will be able to fully implement these reforms, either because of lack of funding or political will. However, any of these could be a helpful starting point for tenants who face poor conditions and fear of eviction.

Kendra Neumann, J.D. Class of 2027, N.Y.U. School of Law.

Suggested Citation: Kendra Neumann, A Renters’ Bill of Rights: State and Local Reforms to Protect Tenants, N.Y.U. J. Legis. & Pub. Pol’y Quorum (2025).