This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Fit to Live In: Fixing Our Housing Stock
UPDATEd NOV. 25
When community organizer Val Thomason started to drum up support for Nevada bill AB223 earlier this year, she immediately thought of her old apartment.
The bill was written to make it easier for tenants to hold landlords accountable for their rental unit’s habitability. It might have made Thomason’s life easier back in the summer of 2018. Her very first night in her new Las Vegas apartment, she’d gotten up to use the bathroom, turned on the light, and saw a “swarm” of “maybe a thousand roaches, bleeding from the bathroom into the bedroom.”
She immediately called her landlord and property management company, and many times after—”more than once a week, just constantly.” They didn’t seem to share her view that the situation required urgent action. “You know what they do?” Thomason says. “They come and they spray a little bit … then they call it a day.” Habitability law in Nevada says that landlords only need to make “best efforts” to solve a problem like Thomason’s, so from a legal standpoint, these ineffectual sprayings satisfied the landlord’s obligations even if they didn’t actually accomplish anything.
Eventually, it got so bad that Thomason says she refused to eat in the apartment and had trouble sleeping there. “I got a plastic chair, and I put it in the living room,” Thomason says. “And I would sleep on it so they wouldn’t get me.” A single mom in her 20s who’d just left an abusive ex, she didn’t know anything at the time about how to access habitability protections or even that they existed. She left after a few months.
When she returned to knock on doors at the apartment complex, it didn’t take long for her to see that the building still had a roach problem. “Roaches were crawling up people’s windows when I was standing at the door,” Thomason says. “They were crawling out from the door.” But when she informed them of their rights under Nevada’s habitability law, nearly all declined to withhold rent to push the landlord to remedy the building’s problems. “A lot of them are scared,” Thomas says. “And rightfully, because Nevada’s laws are not in their favor. If they do withhold rent, they are very likely going to be evicted.”
Changing Tides
A number of similar ordinances or bills have recently passed in states and cities across the U.S., including in Colorado, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. In Nevada, a habitability law was vetoed by the governor. Habitability can be a slippery concept. There’s a general common sense idea of what makes a dwelling habitable—comfort, safety, utilities—and then there’s the legally enforceable ‘implied warranty of habitability,’ which is the legal term for a landlord’s obligation to make a rental unit livable. The latter varies between municipalities and in some places doesn’t rise to what most would consider a reasonable minimum standard. (The state of Mississippi, for example, doesn’t require landlords to provide heat in the winter or air conditioning in the summer, though they must maintain existing heating and cooling units. Arkansas doesn’t have any implied warranty of habitability at all.) In most municipalities, the implied warranty of habitability requires that units have working heat in the winter, running water, doors and windows that lock, working utilities, and no pests or environmental hazards.
The truth is, we don’t even enforce the minimum housing code we have.”
Todd Swanstrom, professor of public policy
But enforcement is spotty, not only because so many cities and states are cutting budgets to the bone, but also because jurisdiction over habitability can be confusing. Depending on the problem, a tenant might need to call the municipal building code office, or the Department of Health. And tenants who report their landlords over habitability issues are often retaliated against, and face a judicial system tilted heavily in favor of their landlords. “The truth is, we don’t even enforce the minimum housing code we have,” says Todd Swanstrom, a professor of public policy at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Even where existing laws are enforced, those standards have been essentially unchanged since the 1970s—one expert told me that most habitability laws have been essentially copy-and-pasted—and are in dire need of updating.
In the big picture, many of these updated habitability bills fall into two main categories: cooling and mold. As climate change makes summer heat waves hotter and deadlier, air conditioning has become as vital as heat in the winter, but in many places local laws are a tangle of conflicting, inconsistent, and often inadequate regulations. Take the District of Columbia, for example, where landlords aren’t required to provide AC, but are required to maintain any existing AC systems. In nearby Montgomery County, Maryland, landlords are required to provide enough cooling between June 1 and Sept. 30 to keep homes below 80 degrees. Across the line in Virginia, that upper limit is set at 77 degrees, but only for certain types of rentals.
This state of general inconsistency is the norm across America, but that’s changing. In Los Angeles County, a long-discussed cooling mandate finally passed this year. The ordinance, which will be enforced starting Jan. 1, 2027, will make landlords responsible for keeping indoor spaces under 82 degrees, and protect tenants from retaliation for installing their own air conditioning devices. In North Carolina, which saw a five-year high in the number of heat-related ER visits in the early summer of 2025, a bill was introduced this year that would have required landlords to provide AC; it died in committee. In Portland, Oregon, the city government is considering a code amendment that would require landlords to install heat pumps or AC units in rentals. And this summer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the city began enforcing a cooling ordinance passed earlier in 2025 that allowed fines up to $500 a day for landlords in violation.
The other front in the battle for habitability is mold. Mold hasn’t traditionally been included in the warranty of habitability, but recent science has made it clear that it’s a serious health hazard. Mold thrives in warm, damp conditions, so it’s also linked to climate change, and is an especially big threat in cities with warming weather and frequent flooding. But mold is endemic all over the country. Minneapolis passed a mold ordinance in 2023. A representative from HOME Line in Minnesota, a nonprofit that offers advice to tenants, told Mpls.St.Paul Magazine that 20 percent of the calls they receive involve mold. There’s also a racial dimension to the problem; only 18 percent of the population of Minneapolis is Black (and a lower percentage of the state), but nearly a third of mold complaints to HOME Line came from Black callers. In July of this year, the Maryland Tenant Mold Protection Act went into effect, requiring landlords to test for mold and remediate it under certain circumstances. In hot, humid (and moldy) South Carolina, a bill to add mold protections to state tenant laws has been introduced twice in the state legislature in recent years, but hasn’t been put to a vote.
Fighting for Change in Las Vegas
The bill that Thomason was there to rally support for, AB223, contained provisions to improve Nevada’s habitability protections in a few important ways. One was to require landlords to actually solve problems on their properties, instead of merely making a “best effort.” If the bill passed, landlords would no longer be able to skate by with token efforts like the once-a-week sprayings that had done little to nothing in Thomason’s old apartment. It would also make it easier for tenants to exercise their rights under the warrant of habitability without submitting to onerous requirements like placing their rent in escrow just to gain legal standing.
AB223 was the brainchild of assemblywoman Venicia Considine. Las Vegas, Considine tells Shelterforce, is a tough market for renters. Evictions don’t require any court process, and tenants who want to withhold their rent to force their landlord to address habitability problems face a complicated legal process. Considine says a few bad landlords in Las Vegas take advantage of lax enforcement and a legal system tilted against tenants to cycle credulous renters through uninhabitable units. “They’re older buildings,” Considine says. “The landlord will move somebody in. The person will pay the rent for several months. And then when they realize that there’s something wrong with the unit, they’ll start complaining and [the landlord] will just do nothing, and they will wait until the person either leaves on their own or the landlord just evicts them. And a lot of tenants think, well, you can’t evict me. I don’t have running water. There’s no way you can evict me. And then they find out that they can be evicted. And the landlord just evicts them, keeps the security deposit, and just lets the property to the next person.”
With help from supporters like Thomason, AB223 garnered enough support to breeze through the assembly and senate.
Housing in Decline
There’s also a larger structural reason that habitability concerns are mounting: the declining state of the rental housing stock. Todd Swanstrom notes that government-subsidized apartments make up only a small share of the affordable housing in America. “Most people get their affordable housing not through subsidies from the government, but through being forced to make a trade-off between quality and affordability,” says Swanstrom. “That is to say, they rent or own older homes that are deteriorated to the point that they become, quote, affordable, unquote. That’s the reality of affordable housing. Most of it is what’s called ‘naturally occurring,’ which is not natural at all.”
According to a report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, our rental housing is currently older than ever. The median age of a rental unit in 2021 was 44 years; in 2001, the median age was 34 years. On top of that, a huge amount of routine maintenance has been deferred; in 2023, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia estimated that it would cost $51.5 billion to bring all occupied rental stock up to a baseline of safe habitability, the report says. Swanstrom sees this as the unspoken underside of the gentrification debate. “Gentrification . . . is about reinvestment, affluent people moving into neighborhoods,” he says. “It’s a real issue. But … there’s very little discussion of the opposite, which is disinvestment, decay, deterioration.” Partly, Swanstrom and others say, this is because the U.S. prioritizes the production of new affordable housing over maintaining the affordable housing we already have.
This combination of aging buildings and accumulated neglect and disinvestment has had a profound impact on the U.S. rental stock. “Forty-three percent of renters are living in units with habitability issues like broken windows or no heat,” Ruthy Gourevitch, the housing and communities policy director at the Climate & Community Institute, says. “This is a very significant percentage of the market.” Shoring up habitability standards is a way of arresting this large-scale slide into uninhabitability. As one habitability expert told Shelterforce, it’s about establishing a floor on the quality of affordable housing.
In a time of municipal belt-tightening, all this maintenance can seem like an insurmountable financial problem. But it’s probably not as bad as it seems. Gourevitch pointed out that taxpayers are already bailing out neglectful landlords—and that it would be relatively straightforward to induce those landlords to bring their properties up to code. “The public sector is already picking up the bill for what private landlords aren’t doing,” says Gourevitch. “Like when the AC goes out, private landlords pass the cost to the government; they force them to run cooling buses or cooling centers. And so I think there’s a question here of, how do we ensure that the policies that we have are being enforced, which doesn’t just mean more state capacity and finances, but also means more penalties and more hooks to kind of ensure that landlords follow through.”
No Transparency, No Accountability
Holding landlords accountable has gotten even more difficult in recent years, in part due to a sharp increase in out-of-state landlords. A booming post-pandemic housing market attracted a lot of investor money, often across state lines; as a result, many renters now pay rent to distant landlords who may never set foot on the property. “Landlords live out of state increasingly,” Gourevitch says. “And are kind of divorced from the day-to-day operations of the property.”
In love, absence may make the heart grow fonder, but in real estate it more often leads to neglect. At a press conference in Georgia, at which Sen. Jon Ossoff called for legislative fixes for abuses or neglect by out-of-state landlords, one woman said that when her carbon monoxide alarm went off, she phoned her landlord and was transferred to an overseas call center, where she was given a maintenance date that was three weeks away. (Ossoff said that 30 percent of single family rentals in Georgia are now owned by out-of-state investors.) In Easthampton, Massachusetts, tenants in support of S.1447, a tenant protection bill, enumerated the difficulties of renting from a property manager located in Florida, and having to convey their complaints through the mail. In nearby Springfield, Massachusetts, neglect by an out-of-state landlord led to such severe mold and pest infestations in the Springfield Gardens complex that the firm was banned from owning or managing property in the state. And in Connecticut, overseas or out-of-state landlords hiding behind LLCs have severely neglected local rental properties. As ownership becomes more geographically diffuse, stronger and more specific habitability laws will be needed to preserve affordable housing.
High Rents, Low Quality
Finally, there’s an under-the-radar but ubiquitous factor in the present habitability push. Every expert I spoke to cited increasing rent as a big reason that renters are making noise right now. “The rent is too damn high and the quality is way too low,” says Ruthy Gourevitch. With the median rent in the U.S. rising 32 percent between 2020 and 2024, tenants are paying more than ever for properties that, with increasing frequency, are dilapidated, neglected, and owned by unresponsive absentee landlords.
The rent is too damn high and the quality is way too low.”
Ruthy Gourevitch
Perversely, framing the issue as one of value rather than fairness might actually be persuasive to the legal system that oversees habitability cases. In a 1995 case in New York over building maintenance, the state court of appeals found that because the plaintiffs paid “comparatively high rents,” the landlord’s responsibilities “encompassed more than the minimal amenities,” thereby explicitly stating what most of us already suspected: that the rich are entitled to a little more justice than everyone else. Now that we’re all paying high rent, maybe we can finally expect a commensurate increase in fairness and living conditions?
But the push to improve habitability standards in U.S. rentals is encountering pushback from some quarters. In Nevada, after AB223 sailed through the legislature, it went to the desk of Gov. Joe Lombardo, who promptly vetoed it. In a memo accompanying his veto, Lombardo said AB223 “needlessly disrupts a well-established balance in Nevada law,” and “would create fundamental unfairness in the lessor-lessee relationship.” (Lombardo’s wife is a commercial real estate executive and his chief of staff is a former lobbyist for a corporate landlord.)
To say Considine disagrees with Lombardo is an understatement. “In Nevada, an eviction doesn’t require any court process whatsoever,” she says. “We’re the only state that does that.” Under the summary eviction system, the only way for a tenant threatened with eviction to get a court hearing is to file their own case in court, representing themselves or hiring a lawyer—either way, a daunting proposition for most anyone. “Most people will just self-evict on their own,” Considine says, even if they have a strong habitability case. Clark County, which Considine represents, has one of the highest eviction rates in the U.S.
If it had passed, AB223 would have made it so that landlords could no longer summarily evict tenants who withheld rent but didn’t put it into escrow—as long as the court confirmed that the tenant had kept the funds.
Considine intends to try to pass a habitability bill again in the next legislative session, in 2027. By that time, she might have backup: Val Thomason, the community organizer, is running for a seat in the state assembly in an adjacent district, and is making habitability improvements a major part of her campaign.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correctly attribute statistics on Minnesota helpline calls to HOME Line.
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