As Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker’s US$2 billion housing plan moves forward, heated debates continue about another set of municipal housing proposals that could transform Philadelphia tenants’ rights.
In June 2025, Philadelphia’s City Council considered three housing bills, collectively known as the Safe Healthy Homes Act. The package was introduced by Nicolas O'Rourke, an at-large council member who belongs to the Working Families Party.
One of the bills authorized the city to create a fund for tenants to relocate if their buildings are condemned by city inspectors. It was signed into law, though it remains unclear how the fund will be financed.
The other two bills stalled. One was an ordinance that would broadly strengthen tenants’ rights, and the other – known as the Right to Repairs – would shift how Philadelphia ensures housing is safe for tenants, empowering the city to proactively inspect rentals for housing code violations.
These bills deal with housing policy, but they’re also matters of public health.
I know this because I am a researcher in Philadelphia who studies how housing affects our health outcomes. And in particular, recent research by myself and others suggests the fate of the Rights to Repairs legislation could have major implications for Philadelphians’ well-being.
To understand this new evidence, it’s important to first understand the system of housing regulations Philadelphia has now, in the absence of the proposed Right to Repairs legislation.
When a landlord rents an apartment, Pennsylvania law mandates that apartment must be habitable and free of hazards such as mold, cockroaches and dangerous dilapidation.
This legal principle is known as the “implied warranty of habitability.”
All 50 states except Arkansas have some kind of policy like this, though they vary in how much they hold landlords responsible for tenants’ safety.
Under Pennsylvania’s warranty and related municipal law, if conditions deteriorate in a rental property, Philadelphia tenants are first supposed to alert their landlord, who has 30 days to fix the given violation – such as rodents or lead exposure.
If landlords refuse, however, tenants are in a bind. They could file a complaint with the Department of Licenses and Inspections, which might come and issue a citation. Tenants could also file a lawsuit against their landlord, and they are entitled to withhold rent. But all of these options risk provoking your landlord – at potentially high cost.
Invoking your warranty rights as a tenant can therefore be tricky. You have to know your rights, document repair requests in writing, and be willing to take your landlord to task legally.
That’s challenging in a city like Philadelphia, where most renters – outside of a pilot program in some ZIP codes – aren’t guaranteed lawyers in housing court.
Indeed, nationally, 9 in 10 landlords have lawyers in housing cases, while 9 in 10 tenants do not.
The stakes are high for tenants. If they complain, they risk eviction – and that’s amid a shortage of affordable housing in Philadelphia and across the country.
In 2018 alone, according to a local news investigation, Philadelphia landlords filed over 2,000 eviction cases soon after tenants raised habitability issues, despite such retaliatory evictions being illegal. More up-to-date estimates are hard to come by, as these illegal evictions are not systematically tracked.
Tenants have little choice. Philadelphia does not require that an apartment pass an inspection before the city issues rental licenses or certificates of rental suitability. If housing violations arise, it’s on tenants to assert and defend their rights.
Housing quality protections for tenants, in other words, largely boil down to implied warranties of habitability, plus associated fines the city can issue. But this works only if tenants are able to properly document violations, submit complaints and defend themselves from the blowback.
Despite warranties forming the backbone of Philadelphia’s housing quality governance system – and concerns that these laws saddle tenants with unreasonable enforcement responsibilities – little is known about whether warranties are even effective. Do they keep tenants from getting sick due to poor housing conditions?
To find out, fellow researchers and I examined what happened when nine states enacted implied warranty of habitability laws like the one in place in Pennsylvania today. We wanted to know whether renters’ health improved after warranty policies were enacted, compared with other states where such laws didn’t go into effect over the same period.
We also used homeowners as a control group, comparing whether renters’ health uniquely improved when these laws were enacted. Homeowners are useful here because we wouldn’t expect homeowners’ health to be affected by these laws.
Our findings were stark: We found no improvements for renters at all, across a slew of housing-related health outcomes, even 10 years after enactment.
There were no effects on renters’ asthma, respiratory allergies, bronchitis, mental health, hospitalizations, or even less clinical outcomes such as self-rated health.
To be clear, implied warranties of habitability are important laws and are surely helpful for individual tenants. Broadly speaking, however, our findings suggest that these policies simply don’t work.
That is likely especially true in Pennsylvania, a state whose implied warranty of habitability was given an F- by researchers who evaluated the comprehensiveness of states’ policies for protecting tenants’ well-being.
A 2014 study in neighboring New Jersey helps shed light on why these policies fall short.
Researchers there examined 40,000 eviction cases, looking for whether tenants successfully raised implied warranty of habitability violations as a defense. Given how often landlords retaliate after violation complaints are made, one might expect thousands of tenants party to these lawsuits to have invoked their warranty rights.
The result? Only 80 tenants did so – 80 out of 40,000.
In practice, then, existing data paints a bleak picture: The vast majority of tenants lack the financial resources, legal knowledge, alternative housing options or freedom from fear necessary to protect themselves from unsafe conditions at home.
What policies might work instead? Cities such as Rochester, New York, may provide an answer.
In 2005, Rochester implemented a more proactive rental inspection program to combat their child lead-poisoning crisis – a problem Philadelphia shares.
This meant that Rochester’s municipal inspectors began proactively inspecting rental units on a regular basis and issuing fines for any violations they found. Tenants did not have to file a complaint and therefore weren’t forced into adversarial disputes with their landlords.
The results were dramatic. By 2012, childhood lead poisoning in Rochester had dropped by 85%. This decline was nearly 2.5 times faster than the rest of New York state.
Further, scientists found that units that were inspected every three years had one-third of the rate of housing code violations as units inspected every six years.
Whether the Right to Repair is good policy for Philadelphia is a question for city legislators. But research is increasingly clear: The city’s current housing policies do not protect tenants from unsafe housing, while proactive rental inspections show real promise for fighting persistent housing-related health problems.
Read more of our stories about Philadelphia.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Gabriel L. Schwartz, Drexel University
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Gabriel L. Schwartz's research described in this article was funded through a pilot grant from the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. UCSF had no role in the design, completion, or reporting of that study. The views expressed in this article solely represent the scientific opinion of the author, and do not necessarily represent the opinion of either UCSF or his employer.
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Gabriel L. Schwartz's research described in this article was funded through a pilot grant from the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. UCSF had no role in the design, completion, or reporting of that study. The views expressed in this article solely represent the scientific opinion of the author, and do not necessarily represent the opinion of either UCSF or his employer.
Gabriel L. Schwartz's research described in this article was funded through a pilot grant from the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. UCSF had no role in the design, completion, or reporting of that study. The views expressed in this article solely represent the scientific opinion of the author, and do not necessarily represent the opinion of either UCSF or his employer.
