When Matt Haney entered the California Legislature, he found himself in a tiny minority: a legislator who rents.
Mr. Haney has never owned real estate and, at age 41, has spent his adult life as a renter. His primary residence is a one-bedroom apartment near downtown San Francisco. Rent is $3,258 per month. (He also paid a $300 deposit for Eddy and Ellis, two orange cats he adopted from a shelter during the pandemic.)
“When I got there last year, it seemed like there were only three of us out of 120,” Mr. Haney said of the tenants in the Legislature. “That’s a very small number.
In an effort to highlight their renter status and the 17 million California households who are renters — just under half the state — last year, Mr. Haney and two assembly colleagues, Isaac Bryan and Alex Lee, founded the California Renters Caucus. A fourth assembly member, Tasha Boerner, joined after the committee was formed. The group added state Sen. Aisha Wahab after she took office this year.
Mr. Haney said he 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 tenant is not necessarily something that people project or put on their website,” Mr. Haney said.
A lot seems to be changing. From cities and statehouses to the U.S. Congress, elected officials are increasingly toying with the status of renters, forming groups to push for renter-friendly policies.
Politics is about being in a relationship. Candidates pet dogs and hold babies and talk about their children. With how many families are struggling with housing costs and have given up hope of ever being able to buy one, it makes sense that elected officials would now start talking about being renters.
London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, often talks about her rent-controlled apartment in the city’s Haight neighborhood. Lindsey Horvathmember of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors — a powerful body that oversees a $43 billion budget and more than 100,000 employees — predicts discussions about housing policy with her status as a tenant.
In June, federal lawmakers followed California with its own board for renters, albeit with looser criteria. Representative Jimmy Gomez, who is the chairman Tenants Congress Committee as well as a Los Angeles Democrathe said that instead of actual renters, his group targeted members from renter-heavy neighborhoods, even if they own a home, like him.
“Good elected officials will fight for their constituents, no matter what,” Mr. Gomez said.
In addition, he added, the strictest definition of “landlord” can mask economic uncertainty. His parents, for example, were homeowners who never made more than $40,000 combined and lived in outback California without air conditioning. Others own nothing but rent a $7,000-a-month penthouse.
“Are they considered the same?” he said.
Asked how many of his colleagues did not own a home, Mr. Gomez said: “My gut is that it’s less than 10.”
In addition to pushing Democratic priorities like subsidized housing and tenant protections, these lawmakers are making a bet that being seen as a landlord is politically advantageous at a time when a growing number of Americans are renting for longer periods of time, often for life. Mr. Haney and Mr. Gomez both describe their caucuses — subgroups of lawmakers organized around a common purpose — as first for their bodies. Which is easy to believe.
Home ownership is synonymous with American Dream. It is supported by various federal and state tax credits and so encoded in American mythology and the financial system that historians and anthropologists argue that it has become a symbol of enduring participation in society. The basic message is that the lease is temporary, or should be.
“There’s a pretty fundamental rentier bias in American sociological and political life,” said Jamila Michener, a professor of government and public policy at Cornell. “So when politicians say, ‘Hey, this is an identity that’s relevant and that we’re willing to own and lean on,’ that’s significant.”
About two-thirds of Americans they own their homesand survey after survey shows that the desire to own a home is no less strong today than it was in previous generations. However, the number of landlords has steadily increased over the past decade to approx 44 million households nationwide while punishing housing costs they migrated from coastal enclaves to metropolitan areas across the country.
Perhaps more importantly for policymakers, renters are getting wealthier — households earning more than $75,000 have accounted for the vast majority of 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 in past generations were very likely to own their homes.
In other words, rental households are now largely made up of families more likely to vote. And after the pandemic, the homeowners gained trillions in freehold property while tenants had to be supported by a moratorium on evictions and aid in the order of tens of billionsthe fragility of their position was made clear.
“As cost burdens appear in places where we don’t expect them, there seems to be more policy momentum around addressing these issues,” said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, senior research fellow at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
By organizing around economic conditions, legislators embrace a concept that tenant advocates refer to as “tenants as a class.”
The idea is that while renters are a large and politically diverse group—low-income families on the brink of eviction, high-earning professionals renting at will, couples whose desire for suburban living but inability to afford a down payment has made single-family rentals one of the hottest corners of the real estate business—they still share common interests. These include rising housing costs and tenancy instability.
“I don’t think it’s a lens that’s been captured in the same way as race, gender, age, ability, etc.,” said Mr. Bryan, a California assemblyman and tenant committee member whose district is in Los Angeles. “I am thrilled to be among the first five legislators in California history to develop political awareness of this status.”
The fact that there are also legislators among the tenants, though not many, is one of the points California lawmakers have said they want to create a tenant committee. It also threw them into the surprisingly vexed question of who is and isn’t a tenant.
Does the list include legislators who rent in Sacramento but own a home or condominium in their district, a criteria that would qualify a significant portion of the Legislature? The group decided not to. How about Mr. Lee, an assemblyman and tenant committee member whose county seat is his childhood bedroom in the house his mother owns? He doesn’t own 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 on the caucus). Its members are white, black and Asian. Mr. Lee is a member of the legislature LGBTQ Board. Mrs. Wahab is the first Muslim American elected to the California Senate.
Politically, the farthest is Tasha Boerner, who lives in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas and is a more conservative caucus member (like the California Democrats). Although Ms. Boerner, 50, is the longest-serving member of the group in the Legislature, she was not initially identified as a tenant by her colleagues on the tenant committee.
“No one ever called my office because I’m a white mother living in Encinitas,” she said. “They thought she must be the owner of the house.
Ms. Boerner often disagrees with her colleagues on the effectiveness of policies such as rent control, she said, although she voted for national rent ceiling a few years ago. She is also more skeptical of the state’s efforts to speed up construction by taking zoning control from cities and voted against it account which has effectively ended single family zoning in the state.
And yet Ms. Boerner is also a lifelong renter who has moved three times since taking office. Her current home is a three-bedroom apartment she shares with her two children and ex-husband, partly because it’s cheaper than if her parents had separate places.
“Families that rent come in all shapes and sizes, and I hope to bring some variety,” she said. “We have disagreements, like any committee, but we come together and say, ‘Hey, the demographic that matters’ — that’s important.”
