(Bloomberg) — Elizabeth Warren unveiled proposals Monday aimed at strengthening tenants’ rights and depressing rents, promising that her administration would withhold federal funding from landlords who violated the new standards.The 2020 Democratic presidential contender said she’d create a federal Tenant Protection Bureau, modeled after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a key component of the 2010 Wall Street overhaul legislation that she advocated.Warren said her administration would provide a nationwide right-to-counsel and establish a federal grant program aimed at benefiting low-income tenants facing eviction.“Tenants that organize to take on bad landlords are up against a massive power imbalance,” Warren wrote in a Medium post Monday. “I’ll fight to put power back where it belongs: with tenants, not big corporate landlords.”Warren promised to withhold federal funding from corporate landlords with a history of “harassing” or red-lining tenants and to direct the Federal Housing Administration to deny all financial support to landlords that violate tenants’ rights. Corporate landlords would be required to publicly disclose data like median rent, the number of tenants they’ve evicted and building code violations, as well as the names of any individuals with an ownership interest of 25% or more.Buttigieg Wants Public College Free for Some (6 a.m.)Pete Buttigieg called for spending $120 billion on the Pell Grant program and making public colleges tuition-free for students eligible for those federal grants as part of his proposal released Monday to improve college affordability.Unlike some of his primary opponents, Buttigieg isn’t calling for public colleges to be tuition-free for all students, or for total student-debt cancellation. He’s said families that make over a certain income threshold should pay at least some of the cost of their kids’ higher education. The plan released Monday focuses on helping lower- and middle-income families.The proposal also calls for a $2 billion pilot program to expand the free and reduced-price lunch program to provide food vouchers to students in community college, and for automatically enrolling students who take out loans for college in affordable, income-driven repayment plans. Buttigieg also said he’d support legislation that would allow student-athletes to get paid for the use of their likeness, saying he supports California’s new Fair Pay to Play Act. The South Bend, Indiana, mayor also proposed extending Pell Grants to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival recipients, and increasing funding for historically black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions by $50 billion. The Buttigieg campaign said details about how the plan would be funded would come at a later date. — Tyler PagerCOMING UPTen candidates have qualified for the fifth Democratic debate, on Wednesday in Atlanta: Joe Biden, Warren, Bernie Sanders, Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, Cory Booker and Tom Steyer.–With assistance from Tyler Pager.To contact the reporter on this story: Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou in Washington at [email protected] contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at [email protected], Kathleen Hunter, Elizabeth WassermanFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
