If Rent Is Out of Control, Time to Control Rent

Sep 22, 2023

Wall Street firms have for years been buying up single-family homes, offering enough cash to snatch them out of the hands of potential mortgage holders and instead rent them out. To maximize profits, companies have raised rents, making housing unaffordable in cities across the United States.

Advocacy groups like People’s Action maintain that rent regulation is the only way to ensure affordable housing. Tara Raghuveer, director of the Homes Guarantee Campaign at People’s Action spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about the rent-control measures that her organization is demanding from the federal government.

Sonali Kolhatkar joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.