Courted as ‘key’ to White House, U.S renters flex their power

US Elections 2024: Read our full coverage.

• Harris, Trump campaigns focus on housing crisis
• Renter groups create first-ever national union
• Major national efforts seek to get tenants to vote

WASHINGTON - With the cost of housing becoming a key issue in next month's U.S. elections, renters could be a critical voting bloc, and campaigners hope that could lead to real gains.

"Housing is at the base of a lot of people's economic insecurity, so that's shaping the election in ways that don't appear necessarily obvious," Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project (NHLP).

"There's a moment of promise here," he told Context. "We might see real housing policy change in the coming administration and Congress."

Record rises in house prices and rents have created an "unprecedented affordability crisis," a Harvard University analysis said in June, leaving the country needing an estimated extra 7.3 million affordable homes.

But housing has traditionally received little attention during national election campaigns, while housing groups have shied away from politics.

That has changed dramatically, Roller and others say, in a way that some suggest could prove decisive, with the NHLP noting renters head about 36% of the country's households.

Ahead of the election, the group and others in June unveiled a national tenants bill of rights that called for safeguarding reasonable rent rises, allowing tenants to organise, due process in evictions and more.

"Renters hold the key" to winning the White House, said the non-profit Popular Democracy in Action, a network rolling out a $2.5-million campaign to reach tenants in five battleground states, with a focus on 1 million minority voters who voted for the first time in 2020.

"We must use this moment to build more awareness in order to get people to build organisations that can actually speak for folks who are either missed by or not cared about in our society," said DaMareo Cooper, the group's co-executive director.

It is backing legislation unveiled in September that would create a national housing authority to oversee the building or maintenance of 1.3 million new social housing homes.

Housing costs are the primary concern among renters, according to Popular Democracy in Action swing state polling, which also found that housing saw the largest gap in terms of the priority that voters versus politicians place on the issue.

Cooper stressed November's vote was critical, but so is the pre-election organizing that is creating new power for tenants.

What happens around the election, he said, "will decide what the next 50 to 60 years will look like."

'Political discourse is catching up'

In July, President Joe Biden's administration made waves by supporting national rent caps on certain properties and cracking down on what it called price gouging by corporate landlords.

Since then, the campaigns of both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have included a focus on housing affordability.

Harris has laid out a plan to construct 3 million new homes, offer cash support for those purchasing their first homes, and move against the effects of corporate investors and new technologies in driving up rents, her campaign said in an email.

Trump would ban mortgages for illegal immigrants, cut development regulations, halve the costs of new homes and open federal lands to large-scale housing construction, Republican National Committee spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an email.

Tenant organisers said the attention presented an unprecedented opportunity to consolidate renters' influence.

In August, five city and state tenant unions formed the country's first Tenant Union Federation, which backers say is working with dozens more local unions.

"Rent is the key economic issue of our time," said Tara Raghuveer, a tenant organiser in Kansas City, Missouri, and director of the new federation.

"It's the biggest bill that most working-class people pay every month. It's the most enduring and substantial contributor to overall inflation, and has been for years."

Meanwhile, the real estate industry has changed significantly, she said, requiring a national voice for renters.

"Our landlords are no longer operating businesses that are regulatable by state or city governments. Their businesses extend beyond state lines," she said.

While housing affordability has long been written off as a local issue, Raghuveer said that was finally changing.

"As we go around knocking on doors in buildings and neighbourhoods, talking with tenants … this is more resonant than ever before. The national political discourse is catching up to what the people have been feeling for a long time."

In Bozeman, Montana, apartment prices have tripled over the past decade, said Ozaa EchoMaker, 33, a mother and renter in low-income housing.

After a new landlord purchased the building in 2019 and failed to make timely needed fixes, EchoMaker started organising neighbours a year ago.

"I have felt really empowered and like my voice is actually going somewhere," EchoMaker said.

There are now four tenant unions coming together across Bozeman, and they are all paying keen attention to the election, locally and nationally.

"We're seeing increasing membership because people are fed up," EchoMaker said. Renters "work and keep the economy going. There's more of us, and we deserve to have a voice."

'Shift the priorities'

There is also a move away from the traditional reticence of affordable-housing groups to get involved in voter engagement, said Courtney Cooperman, with the non-profit National Low Income Housing Coalition.

This year, she said, enthusiasm among housing and homelessness groups for such work was "at a larger scale than ever before".

Low-income voters tend to vote at lower rates than other groups due to transportation obstacles, voting registration problems, difficulty in getting off work or simply scepticism that their vote matters, said Cooperman, who manages a programme called Our Homes, Our Votes.

So, Cooperman and her colleagues help trusted local organisations – a homeless services group, say, or a soup kitchen – to do nonpartisan voter outreach, and this year "we've really been scaling up everything we've been doing".

Candidates "need to recognise that low-income renters are their voters," Cooperman said. "That has the potential to change the political calculus, and shift the priorities."

(Reporting by Carey L. Biron; Editing by Jon Hemming.)