Zohran Mamdani and the Rise of the Renter Politicians
For renter candidates, the issue isn’t just that housing is unaffordable. It’s that current laws meant to protect tenants are sporadically enforced or require tenants to organize and sue, and that politicians reflexively take the side of homeowners and landlords. “They put a lot of money into these races, and they prop up a lot of these mainstream politicians,” Conrad Blackburn, who’s running to represent Harlem in the New York State Assembly, said of landlords. “Some of them are beholden to the interest of real estate and not the interest of the tenants and normal people. The landlord lobby is huge.”
Some tenant protections, like rent stabilization, don’t exist in many cities, either. “It breaks my heart as a state representative now when I get these calls asking me, ‘Is it legal for my landlord to increase my rent $400 to $500 at once?’” said David Morales, a state representative in Rhode Island and renter who is running for mayor of Providence. “And when I tell them that it is certainly legal, then they have to start trying to figure out what their next plan is, whether that is trying to … couch surf until they figure out where they’re eventually going to move, or if it just means that they pick up, leave Providence and go to a neighboring city or town—which, more often than not, is usually what ends up happening,” he said.
That’s exactly what these candidates don’t want people to have to do. Henry Mantel, who is running for Los Angeles City Council and is also a renter and a tenant rights attorney, said these second-order effects of the housing crisis—young people moving away to start families, and people having less money for spend in their community—matter to everyone, whether they rent or own. “The housing crisis really does relate back to every issue,” he said. With older voters, he tells them if they want to have grandkids living nearby, they need to support the construction of more affordable housing. And if California wants to maintain its number of Electoral College votes, and therefore its political power, it needs to stop the flood of people leaving the state for affordability reasons, he said.