At the DNC, housing organizers are telling Democrats that rent control and other substantive affordable housing measures can win them the election.
Dolores Huerta at the California Democratic Party delegation breakfast on August 19, 2024. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
In recent years, the Democratic Party has had a simple method for dealing with the issue of skyrocketing living costs: ignore it and tell everyone that everything’s fine.
Home prices have spiked 54 percent since 2019, continuing to rise in the majority of US cities, while rents have surged 19 percent in that same period. The number of renters who are cost-burdened, putting more than 30 percent of their income toward rent and utilities, hit an all-time high of more than twenty-two million Americans, twelve million of whom spend more than half of their incomes on these two things. As a result, the number of eviction cases has soared to above pre-pandemic levels in many places, and homelessness is at a record high of more than 650,000 people.
Little of this has been reflected in top-level Democratic rhetoric, which has tended to stress themes like the survival of American democracy and the preservation of personal freedoms, while pointing to a slowing inflation rate to assure voters they need not be so unhappy about rising costs.
Some at the Democratic National Convention are trying to change that. Day two of the DNC saw several events led by progressive activists tackling the growing unaffordability of housing, and agitating to put it front and center on the Democratic Party agenda — and making the case that doing so is a surefire pathway to the White House.
The progressive nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) made a presentation to Democratic Party insiders and Kamala Harris delegates with a simple message: the nation’s tens of millions of renters are an untapped Democratic-leaning voter pool that could make the difference in November.
“This race writes itself,” Analilia Mejia, CPD co-executive director and national political director for Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, told the crowd. “We’re running against a racist slumlord.”
Mejia ran through some of the top-line results of a poll conducted by the group earlier that year of five hundred voters in each of the battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania: renters lean toward the Democrat on the ticket over Republican nominee Donald Trump, and vice versa for homeowners; but renters are also significantly less likely than homeowners to say they will “definitely” vote come November, by a roughly twenty-point margin. Prioritizing the cost of rent would make all voters’ lives much better, but they hear politicians address housing costs less than every other major issue in this election. Building more affordable housing and, especially, putting in place rent stabilization are wildly popular ideas whose support carries over across partisan and ideological lines.
“When talking about inflation, what’s the number-one obligation each month?” Mejia asked the crowd.
“The number-one reason people were calling us during the pandemic was the inability to pay rent,” panelist Cathryn Paul, public policy director for immigrant rights organization CASA, later told me. “It’s still the number-one reason.”
Pew polling this year shows that concerns about the cost of housing has gone up at the same time that concerns about gas, groceries, and other consumer goods prices have declined. While the partisan gap between those worried about the last two is sizable — Republicans see both as a far bigger worry than Democrats do — that gap is almost nonexistent when it comes to housing costs, suggesting the issue has not yet been poisoned by partisan and media polarization.
The polling results seemed to have been confirmed by door-knocking operations. Canvassers in Nevada, civil rights organization Make the Road Nevada’s director Leo Murrietta told the crowd, found that housing was a critical issue for voters in the state, whether they lived in urban, suburban, or, especially, rural areas. It was also a top issue for male, independent Latino voters — a constituency that Trump has made inroads with. Canvassers found the cost of housing was likewise “the number-one concern” for voters in Pennsylvania, CASA National Communications Director Jossie Sapunar later told me.
The CPD’s presentation wasn’t the only place where housing was a focus. Earlier that day, an assortment of elected officials and activists put the matter front and center at a meeting of the Poverty Council, set up in 2018 — with persistence and effort in the face of surprisingly vehement party opposition — by anti-poverty campaigner Susie Shannon, a 2016 Sanders delegate who became a member of the Democratic National Committee. Shannon, who had joined the Democratic Party and formed the Progressive Caucus of its California chapter in the early 2000s to advance her anti-poverty work, told those assembled she was pleased the council had become a “huge platform” to help the unhoused and renters.
“I feel like our party is moving in the right direction,” she said, though she stressed the need to keep pushing the Democrats to prioritize these concerns.
If front-loading a focus on housing, the plight of renters in particular, is a political winner and a commonsense pathway to victory, you wouldn’t have known it from the DNC programming.
While speakers talked about a range of issues — workforce training for young people, the historic spike in child poverty, and the need to renew the expanded Child Tax Credit — housing was the overriding theme. It was “central” to why people were in poverty, said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), in her second meeting of the day. Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors member Hilda Solis told the crowd that the homeless are “our neighbors. Many of them look like us in this room.” Dolores Huerta said the scale of US homelessness “is a blatant example of how our model of capitalism doesn’t work” and highlighted the Proposition 33 measure on the ballot in California this November, which would let localities in the state put in place rent control.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA), founder of the now-thirty-eight-member Congressional Renters Caucus, said affordable housing “is no longer a blue state, blue city problem, but an American problem,” and talked about the existence of “burn-it-down moderates” — ideologically centrist voters who have become so frustrated with the system they’re on the cusp of revolutionary anger. The meeting’s panel, featuring socialist Chicago alder Byron Sigcho-Lopez and an array of local housing activists, discussed, among other things, the city’s struggles to lift the state ban on rent control and the battle against Barack Obama’s presidential library’s potential displacement of local black residents.
Activist efforts still have a long way to go, as activists readily admit. If front-loading a focus on housing, the plight of renters in particular, is a political winner and a commonsense pathway to victory, you wouldn’t have known it from the DNC programming.
Certain themes have stood out in DNC speeches so far: reproductive rights; democracy; Trump is a felon; Harris is a prosecutor. On the DNC’s second night, housing was rarely discussed, and when it was, it was buried in a brief mention in the middle of a speech and inadequately addressed. Housing got a mention in Obama’s convention speech in a list of policy priorities for a future Harris administration, but rather than talking about rent control, he talked about the need to “build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes.”
Still, activists are encouraged by some of the shifts that have been visible at the top of the Democratic ticket, like reference to the cost of housing in Biden’s State of the Union speech earlier this year and the unveiling of policies to deal with it — and his eleventh-hour adoption of a national 5 percent rent cap on corporate landlords, which has made it into the Democratic platform. Recently, Harris rolled out an affordable housing plan that includes building three million new units and a $25,000 first home buyer grant.
Many of the day’s speakers stressed that, for this to come to pass, progressives needed to elect more Democrats into positions of power. The party’s ongoing internal contradictions make this difficult.
Democrats just lost exactly one such member of Congress in Cori Bush, who was instrumental to getting the pandemic-era eviction ban extended, set up the Congressional Caucus on Homelessness, and sponsored an Unhoused Persons Bill of Rights, but was felled only weeks ago thanks in large part to record spending that came largely from real estate interests and the private equity industry — the same industry that Waters told yesterday’s attendees to ask their elected officials face-to-face to reject. That spending was directly enabled by the party’s refusal to ban dark money and Super PAC spending in its primaries.
Can the Democratic left achieve its policy goals if the party establishment enables the corporate interests they’re battling to undermine their theory of change? Activists remain optimistic.
“It shows the outsize power of organized money,” says Mejia. “But organized people is the counterbalance.”