As Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker’s US$2 billion housing plan strikes ahead, heated debates proceed about one other set of municipal housing proposals that might rework Philadelphia tenants’ rights.
In June 2025, Philadelphia’s Metropolis Council thought of three housing payments, collectively referred to as the Protected Wholesome Properties Act. The package deal was launched by Nicolas O’Rourke, an at-large council member who belongs to the Working Households Celebration.
One of many payments approved the town to create a fund for tenants to relocate if their buildings are condemned by metropolis inspectors. It was signed into legislation, although it stays unclear how the fund will likely be financed.
The opposite two payments stalled. One was an ordinance that will broadly strengthen tenants’ rights, and the opposite – referred to as the Proper to Repairs – would shift how Philadelphia ensures housing is protected for tenants, empowering the town to proactively examine leases for housing code violations.
These payments cope with housing coverage, however they’re additionally issues of public well being.
I do know this as a result of I’m a researcher in Philadelphia who research how housing impacts our well being outcomes. And specifically, latest analysis on my own and others suggests the destiny of the Rights to Repairs laws may have main implications for Philadelphians’ well-being.
Housing protections at this time
To know this new proof, it’s vital to first perceive the system of housing rules Philadelphia has now, within the absence of the proposed Proper to Repairs laws.
When a landlord rents an condo, Pennsylvania legislation mandates that condo should be liveable and freed from hazards similar to mould, cockroaches and harmful dilapidation.
This authorized precept is named the “implied warranty of habitability.”
All 50 states besides Arkansas have some form of coverage like this, although they fluctuate in how a lot they maintain landlords accountable for tenants’ security.
Beneath Pennsylvania’s guarantee and associated municipal legislation, if situations deteriorate in a rental property, Philadelphia tenants are first imagined to alert their landlord, who has 30 days to repair the given violation – similar to rodents or lead publicity.
If landlords refuse, nonetheless, tenants are in a bind. They might file a grievance with the Division of Licenses and Inspections, which could come and concern a quotation. Tenants may additionally file a lawsuit towards their landlord, and they’re entitled to withhold hire. However all of those choices danger scary your landlord – at probably excessive value.
Invoking your guarantee rights as a tenant can due to this fact be difficult. You must know your rights, doc restore requests in writing, and be keen to take your landlord to process legally.
That’s difficult in a metropolis like Philadelphia, the place most renters – exterior of a pilot program in some ZIP codes – aren’t assured legal professionals in housing courtroom.
Certainly, nationally, 9 in 10 landlords have legal professionals in housing instances, whereas 9 in 10 tenants don’t.
The stakes are excessive for tenants. In the event that they complain, they danger eviction – and that’s amid a scarcity of reasonably priced housing in Philadelphia and throughout the nation.
Tenants have little alternative. Philadelphia doesn’t require that an condo go an inspection earlier than the town points rental licenses or certificates of rental suitability. If housing violations come up, it’s on tenants to say and defend their rights.
Philadelphia Metropolis Council member Nicolas O’Rourke launched a housing laws package deal guided by three rights – the correct to security, the correct to repairs and the correct to relocation. Solely the correct to relocation invoice was handed.
Lisa Lake for MoveOn by way of Getty Pictures
Do habitability legal guidelines work?
Housing high quality protections for tenants, in different phrases, largely boil all the way down to implied warranties of habitability, plus related fines the town can concern. However this works provided that tenants are in a position to correctly doc violations, submit complaints and defend themselves from the blowback.
Regardless of warranties forming the spine of Philadelphia’s housing high quality governance system – and considerations that these legal guidelines saddle tenants with unreasonable enforcement obligations – little is understood about whether or not warranties are even efficient. Do they preserve tenants from getting sick as a result of poor housing situations?
To search out out, fellow researchers and I examined what occurred when 9 states enacted implied guarantee of habitability legal guidelines just like the one in place in Pennsylvania at this time. We wished to know whether or not renters’ well being improved after guarantee insurance policies had been enacted, in contrast with different states the place such legal guidelines didn’t go into impact over the identical interval.
We additionally used owners as a management group, evaluating whether or not renters’ well being uniquely improved when these legal guidelines had been enacted. Owners are helpful right here as a result of we wouldn’t anticipate owners’ well being to be affected by these legal guidelines.
Our findings had been stark: We discovered no enhancements for renters in any respect, throughout a slew of housing-related well being outcomes, even 10 years after enactment.
There have been no results on renters’ bronchial asthma, respiratory allergic reactions, bronchitis, psychological well being, hospitalizations, and even much less medical outcomes similar to self-rated well being.
To be clear, implied warranties of habitability are vital legal guidelines and are absolutely useful for particular person tenants. Broadly talking, nonetheless, our findings counsel that these insurance policies merely don’t work.
That’s probably very true in Pennsylvania, a state whose implied guarantee of habitability was given an F- by researchers who evaluated the comprehensiveness of states’ insurance policies for safeguarding tenants’ well-being.
A 2014 research in neighboring New Jersey helps make clear why these insurance policies fall quick.
Researchers there examined 40,000 eviction instances, searching for whether or not tenants efficiently raised implied guarantee of habitability violations as a protection. Given how usually landlords retaliate after violation complaints are made, one would possibly anticipate hundreds of tenants celebration to those lawsuits to have invoked their guarantee rights.
The outcome? Solely 80 tenants did so – 80 out of 40,000.
In apply, then, current information paints a bleak image: The overwhelming majority of tenants lack the monetary sources, authorized data, different housing choices or freedom from worry essential to guard themselves from unsafe situations at dwelling.
Proactive rental inspections present extra success
What insurance policies would possibly work as an alternative? Cities similar to Rochester, New York, could present a solution.
In 2005, Rochester applied a extra proactive rental inspection program to fight their youngster lead-poisoning disaster – an issue Philadelphia shares.
This meant that Rochester’s municipal inspectors started proactively inspecting rental items regularly and issuing fines for any violations they discovered. Tenants didn’t should file a grievance and due to this fact weren’t compelled into adversarial disputes with their landlords.
The outcomes had been dramatic. By 2012, childhood lead poisoning in Rochester had dropped by 85%. This decline was practically 2.5 instances quicker than the remainder of New York state.
Additional, scientists discovered that items that had been inspected each three years had one-third of the speed of housing code violations as items inspected each six years.
Whether or not the Proper to Restore is nice coverage for Philadelphia is a query for metropolis legislators. However analysis is more and more clear: The town’s present housing insurance policies don’t shield tenants from unsafe housing, whereas proactive rental inspections present actual promise for preventing persistent housing-related well being issues.
