Zohran Mamdani and the Rise of the Renter Politicians
In 2019, Aparna Raj was living with five friends in a group house in Washington, D.C., that had no shortage of problems. Half the house lost electricity for a time. Worse, there were rats running around. She said her landlord refused to do anything about it. “He couldn’t fix anything,” she said, “but he could send people around to collect rent from us.”
In March of that year, she and her roommates learned that even though they’d been paying their rent, the landlord hadn’t been paying the mortgage. The house was foreclosed on and then snatched up by someone who worked in real estate. The tenants tried to lobby their new landlord to fix the problems, but he was only interested in converting the house into condos and flipping it for a profit. A few months later, everyone had to scramble to move—including Raj’s downstairs neighbors, who hadn’t even been notified when the house went into foreclosure.
“It just opened my eyes, in that moment, I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t know who to turn to,” she said. “In D.C., we do have really strong tenant protections, but even so, we didn’t have any sort of say in what happened to us.”
After that, Raj began volunteering to organize tenants and helping them fight abusive and neglectful landlords. Through that work she realized something else, too. “Right now, there are only two renters on the [D.C.] Council, and so few of them understand the experiences that renters face and the instability that renters face, and the fact that we’re just at the whim of our landlords,” she said. “And so going into these meetings with council members, so many of them did not care.”
Now Raj, 32, is running to represent Ward 1 on the council, in part to give renters more voice in local politics. Around the country, other renters are doing the same, running for city, state, and federal offices. Like Raj, many of the renter candidates I spoke to have been shaped by their experiences as tenants. And their policy ideas are intertwined with how they believe the country should resolve the class divides that housing costs are exacerbating.
Almost all candidates and elected officials around the country have been homeowners, at least until recently. A 2022 study found from Boston University and the University of Georgia found that 93 percent of office holders at federal, state, and local levels (in 190 of the country’s largest cities) were homeowners, many of them in single-family homes worth more than the median home value in their zip codes. Only 2 to 7 percent of office holders at various levels were renters, while almost half of the people in the cities surveyed were renters.
That underrepresentation shapes policy at all levels, and influences the ways that politicians speak about housing—like focusing on homebuying and mortgages. Less attention has been given to the full-blown crisis facing renters. A new report out Thursday from the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies shows exactly how bad it’s gotten. Almost half of all renters were burdened by high costs in 2024, meaning they spent more than a third of their incomes on rent, a sign of financial distress. Just over a quarter are severely cost-burdened, meaning they spent more than half their incomes on rent. And that’s nationwide. The percentage of renters who are cost-burdened have risen in 44 states in the past 5 years. What’s more surprising is that over the past few years, the number of rent-stressed households in middle- and even high-middle incomes has grown too. While the lowest-income households are the most burdened, 49 percent of renters making between $45,000 to $74,999 are also burdened, a share that has increased almost ten points since the pandemic.
These shifts may have helped to propel candidates last year who promised to address renters’ issues. The most high-profile among them were Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Katie Wilson in Seattle, both renters, who became mayors of their respective cities by defeating establishment Democrats who were homeowners. “More and more people are rent burdened, and in terms of [that burden] climbing the income scale, I think it just speaks to how unaffordable a lot of places are becoming,” said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, the lead author of Harvard’s report.
Spending more on rent makes it harder for renters to save money for a potential down payment on a home, which also reduces homeownership opportunities and keeps the rental market crowded. While the lowest-income families face the most problems—Airgood-Obrycki cited another study showing they only have $210 on average left to spend each month after housing and utility costs are met—the high cost of housing reduces spending for more comfortable families, too. It all has a greater impact on the cities they live in and on the country as a whole. Because the middle class tends to be more politically engaged—and politicians are more responsive to them—we’re likely to see the needs of renters becoming a more prominent electoral issue. “I think there is this growing call for solutions and for people to do something about it, and that’s gaining slightly more momentum,” she said. “And the other place we’re really seeing it is in statewide zoning reforms.”
Many of reforms around the country have been pushed by renters, or people with organized renters in their coalition. Claire Valdez, who rents in Ridgewood, Queens, and was elected to the New York State Assembly in 2024, is now running to replace U.S. Rep. Nydia Velázquez, who is retiring. Valdez faces a crowded field, but if she wins she will join Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents a nearby district, as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and renter in Congress who are fighting a new class politics from the left. “I think so often we’re treated as … people who are not engaged in neighborhoods, who are transient, and sometimes that is true, because rents go up [and] we’re forced to move around, because we’re seeking affordability in our housing,” she said. “We deserve the same stability as homeowners, and the same representation as well.”
New York City may become the center of reform. Mamdani reopened the city’s Office to Protect Tenants when his term began earlier this year. Its new head, Cea Weaver, another DSA member, has come under fire for a resurfaced 2019 social media post in which he denounced homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy.” She said in January that this is not “how I would say things today,” and seizing private property is undoubtedly a fringe position on the renter left. No one I spoke to said anything of the sort. Instead, candidates tout ideas for increasing access to homeownership, such as nonprofit development and social housing, as well as opportunities for tenants to buy their apartment buildings to run as cooperatives.
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.
“A big part of my campaign is making it clear L.A. can’t improve unless we can solve this crisis,” he said. “This is not a recent problem. It’s definitely not just this city council’s fault, but they really are not treating this crisis with the kind of urgency it deserves.”