Who stands up for tenants? Their elected representatives, who also hire.
When Matt Haney entered the California legislature, he discovered that he was part of a small minority: a legislator who rents.
Mr. Haney never owned property and, at age 41, spent his adult life as a tenant. His primary residence is a one-bedroom apartment near downtown San Francisco. The rent is $3,258 per month. (He also paid a $300 down payment for Eddy and Ellis, two orange cats he adopted from a shelter during the pandemic.)
“When I got there last year it looked like there were only three of us out of 120,” Mr Haney said of the legislature tenants. “That’s a very small number.”
To highlight their renter status and the 17 million California households that are renters — just under half of the state — last year, Mr. Haney and two Assembly colleagues, Isaac Bryan and Alex Lee, on the California Renters Caucus. A fourth Assembly member, Tasha Boerner, joined after the caucus was formed. The group added a senator, Aisha Wahab, after taking office this year.
Mr Haney said there was briefly a sixth, more politically conservative member who attended one meeting but never returned. It is possible that they have other colleagues who are tenants and have yet to come out.
“Being a renter is not necessarily something people project or post on their website,” said Mr. Haney.
So much seems to change. From cities and state houses to the US Congress, elected officials are increasingly playing up their status as tenants and forming groups to push for tenant-friendly policies.
Politics is about recognisability. Candidates pet dogs and hold babies and talk about their children. Given how many families struggle with the cost of housing and have lost hope of ever being able to afford one, it makes sense that elected officials are now starting to talk about being renters.
London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, often talks about her rent-controlled apartment in the city’s Haight neighborhood. Lindsey Horvatha member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors — the powerful body overseeing a $43 billion budget and more than 100,000 employees — predicts housing policy discussions with her tenant status.
In June, federal lawmakers followed California with its own tenant caucus, though it has looser criteria. Representative Jimmy Gomez, who is president of the Congressional Renters Caucus as well as one Democrat from Los Angelessaid his group, rather than real tenants, focused on members from high-tenant districts, even if they own homes, like he does.
“Good elected officials will fight for their voters no matter what,” Gomez said.
In addition, he added, the strictest definition of “tenant” may obscure economic uncertainty. For example, his parents were homeowners who never made more than $40,000 between them and lived in inland California without air conditioning. Other people own nothing but rent a $7,000 a month penthouse.
“Are they considered the same?” he said.
When asked how many of his colleagues were homeless, Mr. Gomez said, “My gut says it’s less than 10.”
In addition to promoting Democratic priorities such as subsidized housing and tenant protection, these legislators are betting that being seen as a pro-tenant is politically advantageous in an era when a growing number of Americans rent for extended periods and often for life. Mr. Haney and Mr. Gomez both describe their caucuses — subsets of lawmakers organized around a common goal — as a first for their body. That’s easy to believe.
Homeownership is synonymous with the American dream. Backed by various federal and state tax incentives, it is so encoded in American mythology and the financial system that historians and anthropologists argue it has come to symbolize permanent participation in society. The underlying message is that renting is, or should be, temporary.
“There’s a pretty fundamental anti-tenant bias in American sociological and political life,” said Jamila Michener, a professor of government and public policy at Cornell. “So when policymakers say, ‘Hey, this is an identity that’s relevant, and an identity that we want to own and lean into,’ that’s significant.”
About two-thirds of Americans own their homes, and study after study shows that the aspiration to own a home is no less powerful today than it was for generations past. But the number of tenants has grown steadily over the last ten years to approx 44 million households nationwide, while housing costs have migrated from coastal enclaves to metropolitan areas across the country.
Perhaps more salient to politicians is that renters are getting better off — households earning more than $75,000 have accounted for most of the renter growth over the past decade, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. At the same time, the struggle to find something affordable has escalated from lower-income renters to middle-income families who would very likely have owned their homes in previous generations.
In other words, tenant households are now made up of families who are much more likely to vote. And after a pandemic in which homeowners amassed trillions in equity while renters had to be supported with eviction moratoria and tens of billions in aid, the fragility of their position has become more apparent.
“With the cost emerging in places where we don’t expect it, there seems to be more political momentum to address these issues,” said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, a senior research associate at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
By organizing around an economic situation, lawmakers are embracing a concept tenant advocates call “tenants as a class.”
The idea is that while renters are a large and politically diverse group — low-income families on the verge of eviction, high-earning professionals who rent by choice, couples whose desire for suburban living but the inability to pay a down payment has made single-family homes one of the hottest corners of the real estate industry — they still have common interests. Those include the rising cost of housing and the instability of a lease.
“It’s a lens that I don’t think is captured in the same way as race, gender, age, ability, et cetera,” said Mr. Bryan, a member of the California Assembly and tenant council whose district is in Los Angeles. “I am thrilled to be among the first five legislators in California history to develop political awareness around this status.”
That the ranks of tenants include legislators, albeit not by much, is one of the points California lawmakers said they want to make by forming the tenants’ caucus. It also plunged them into the surprisingly thorny question of who is and who is not a tenant.
Does the list include legislators who rent a home in Sacramento but own a home or condominium in their district, a criterion that would qualify much of the legislature? The group decided no. What about Mr. Lee, a member of the General Assembly and a member of the Tenants’ Council, whose county home is his childhood bedroom, in a house his mother owns? He has no property, so sure.
Despite having only five members, the California Renters Caucus, like the state it represents, is racially diverse but dominated by Democrats (there are no Republicans in the caucus). The members are white, black and Asian. Mr. Lee is a member of the legislature LGBTQ gathering. Mrs. Wahab is the first Muslim American elected to the California State Senate.
Politically, the outlier is Tasha Boerner, who lives in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas and is the more conservative member of the caucus (as California Democrats say). Despite being the group’s longest-serving member of the legislature, Ms. Boerner, 50, was not initially identified as a tenant by her colleagues in the tenants’ meeting.
“Nobody ever called my office because I’m a white mom living in Encinitas,” she said. “They thought, ‘She must be a homeowner.'”
Ms. Boerner often disagrees with her colleagues about the effectiveness of policies like rent controls, she said, even though she voted for a statewide rent cap several years ago. She is also more skeptical of the state’s efforts to accelerate construction by allowing cities to take control of land use, voting against a bill that effectively ended single-family zoning in the state.
And yet Ms. Boerner is also a lifelong tenant who has moved three times since taking office. Her current home is a three-bedroom apartment she shares with her two children and her ex-husband, in part because it’s cheaper than if the parents had separate homes.
“Families that rent come in all shapes and sizes, and what I hope to bring is a little bit of diversity,” she said. “We have disagreements, like any caucus, but getting together and saying, ‘Hey, this is a demographic that matters’ — that’s what matters.”