It’s the Rent, Actually

The June housing law also restricted investor purchases of single-family homes — but not apartments or manufactured homes, to Muz’s disappointment. (The legislation did include reforms aimed at expanding future production and siting of manufactured homes.) Muz spent the spring advocating for Michigan legislation that would create new pathways for manufactured housing residents to purchase mobile home parks themselves when owners plan to sell. But the measures, championed by the grassroots group MHAction, are still pending.

While she owns her home itself, Muz, like most park residents, must pay ​“lot rent” on the land underneath it. And since most so-called mobile homes are often expensive or impossible to move, acquiring parks and raising those rents is a profitable strategy for investors, one of whom infamously compared the venture to running a Waffle House ​“where everyone is chained to the booths.”

Rents have already risen since the park was purchased by a different out-of-state firm a few years ago. ​“I don’t know where I’m going to be in two years if they keep doing what they’re doing,” Muz says.

Abbie Pedrotte, a neighbor of Muz’s who votes Democrat, already pays $560 in lot rent ​“for nothing,” she says. She worries about falling behind, being evicted and losing her entire investment if she’s unable to move her home in time.

Both Muz and Pedrotte name housing affordability as a top political issue for them — and the common ground between the two neighbors may be something of a national microcosm, according to Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, which surveys the public on policy issues where there appears to be substantial common ground, despite gridlock in government.

In July, Kull’s team published results from polling on housing affordability administered across 11 electorally competitive states and 28 competitive congressional districts, including the one encompassing Saginaw.

The survey found strong support for key elements of the new federal housing law — including limiting corporate home-buying and stimulating private investment through tax credits — but also support for ​“policies that go substantially further,” Kull notes. For example, 86% of Democrats and 64% of Republicans said that they would back billions in direct investment to build housing affordable for low- and very low-income households. The takeaway, Kull says, is that dissatisfaction with the cost of living is driving ​“a remarkable level of support … for a much more activist government role.”

Will an affordability agenda deliver on this demand for bolder action on housing? It depends on whose agenda.

Democrats’ near unanimous embrace of the term followed the June 2025 primary victory of then mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who ran on freezing rents for more than 2 million rent-stabilized tenants. A year later, you’d be hard-pressed to find a politician or caucus that hasn’t released an affordability agenda, which might refer alternately to tax breaks, permitting reform, or sweeping new social programs funded by taxes on billionaires. Housing is central to the push and pull over the politics of affordability, as a new crop of left-wing congressional candidates run on freezing rents and protecting renters, building off the momentum of years of resurgent tenant organizing.

From Pedrotte’s vantage point, it makes little sense to talk about affordability as an abstraction. ​“I think the conversation about affordable housing and the conversation about corporate greed have to go hand-inhand,” she says. ​“Because truly that is who is pricing us out of our homes.”

In a July 2024 speech before the NAACP’s annual convention, then President Joe Biden struck an unexpectedly populist note on housing. Speaking in Las Vegas, where rents had increased more than twice as fast as wages over the preceding four-year period, Biden pitched a new plan to withhold federal tax write-offs from large landlords that raise rents by more than 5% annually — a form of national rent stabilization, more or less, that drew cheers from progressives and backlash from the real estate industry.

The last-ditch July 2024 rent cap announcement was part of a bid to shore up support from progressive standard-bearers for Biden’s re-election campaign as questions about his mental fitness mounted. (Squinting at the teleprompter in Las Vegas, Biden actually garbled the plan’s details and told the crowd that corporate landlords wouldn’t be able to raise rents by more than $55 a month.)

Tenant organizers saw a presidential candidate talking about rent caps as a welcome rhetorical opening. But the actual policy intervention was ​“too little and way too late” to register with voters, says Tara Raghuveer, director of the Tenant Union Federation, a national organization that spent the waning months of the Biden administration pushing for stronger federal action to protect tenants, including by attaching rent caps to federally backed apartment loans.

In the early years of the pandemic, the Biden administration allocated an unprecedented $46.6 billion in emergency rental assistance, making more than 12 million payments to households at risk of eviction. But this lifeline was blunted by broader dynamics in the rental market, as corporate landlords routinely flouted state and federal eviction moratoria while helping drive double-digit rent increases through alleged price-fixing using the real estate software RealPage, now the subject of multiple antitrust lawsuits. In 2022, the share of renters considered cost-burdened rose to nearly 50%, with a record high of 22.4 million households spending more than 30% of their income on rent. 

Inaction on landlord profiteering exemplifies the grave political miscalculation that helped pave the way for President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, according to Raghuveer. While the Biden administration focused on selling voters on the idea that ​“Bidenomics is working, the stock market is great, jobs numbers are up,” that upbeat message ignored ​“the real pain that everyday people were feeling every month when they paid their rent,” she says.

Soon after the July 2024 rent cap announcement, of course, Biden would drop out and be replaced by then Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s new de facto nominee. At her first major campaign rally in Atlanta, Harris delivered a fiery speech pledging to take on corporate landlords and ​“cap unfair rent increases,” stoking speculation that she would stay the course charted by Biden’s eleventh-hour populism. 

But after her nomination became official, Harris pivoted toward middle-of-the-road economic messaging and embarked on an ill-fated quest to reach Republican voters through conservative campaign surrogates like former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney​.An ad in which Harris looked straight at the camera while pledging to ​“crack down on landlords who are charging too much” performed best at persuading voters, according to message testing by the firm Blue Rose Research, but rarely aired. 

Harris did release and campaign on a plan to lower housing costs by building 3 million units nationwide. The plan focused primarily on supply-side solutions like tax incentives for homebuilding and an expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), which has subsidized millions of apartments classified as ​“affordable” nationwide.

But there’s an open secret about the nation’s go-to affordable housing program: It’s rarely actually affordable. Because allowable rents are pegged to area median incomes, not tenants’ actual incomes, more than 40% of LIHTC residents are cost-burdened, according to program data. From the program’s early days, analysts warned that tax credits were a fundamentally inefficient way to subsidize housing. A 1992 analysis by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the program was ​“more suited to the needs of investors than poor renters.”

Supply-side housing solutions are also a difficult sell politically. ​“Telling people about hundreds of thousands of units that are going to be built years from now, that’s not good politics,” Raghuveer says. ​“That doesn’t resonate with people who can’t pay their rent today.”

That doesn’t mean that those urging stronger renter protections shun supply-side measures. A burgeoning social housing movement seeks to resolve what its proponents see as a key contradiction in the debate over housing supply: Rents are set, in part, to satisfy the returns expected by for-profit housing financiers, so when rent growth begins to slow, financing for new housing may start to dry up. Expanding options for public financing, development and ownership of housing could help fulfill the promise of building our way to greater affordability.

Alongside boosting supply, tenant organizers — and a growing number of economists — are continuing to make the case that the federal government must play a role in protecting tenants from landlord price gouging.

In 2023, more than 30 economists signed a letter to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, backing tenant organizers’ call to attach rent caps to federal financing. ​“At its core, rent regulations are aimed at rebalancing the power dynamics between tenants and landlords, which disproportionately favor landlords,” the letter read.

Neoclassical economists have been nearly unanimous in their rejection of rent control. But the signatories also argued that the debate over rent regulation is reaching the same inflection point as the one surrounding the minimum wage in the 1990s, when a series of empirical studies concluded that wage hikes were not leading to job losses, as both mainstream economists and business lobbies had predicted they would.

In July, Mark Paul, an associate professor at Rutgers University and one of the letter’s signatories, proposed a framework for national rent control that would limit annual increases to 3% or three-quarters of the local Consumer Price Index, whichever is lower — and apply those limits to all rental housing nationwide, including single-family homes and manufactured housing.

Paul also proposed establishing regional boards to enforce the policy and assess whether additional increases are needed to maintain housing quality.

The standard economic objection to capping rents is that it distorts markets, ultimately harming renters by discouraging new construction. Anisha Steephen, a former Biden Treasury Department adviser and current fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, contends that something closer to the inverse is true: Housing markets are already distorted by the kind of rampant speculation that helped drive runaway rent increases during the pandemic. Rent regulation doesn’t just protect tenants; it can also act as a form of financial regulation important for broader economic stability.

That’s because rents aren’t set according to what prospective tenants can afford; they’re determined by the cash flow landlords need to pay off their often-risky mortgage loans. Similar to ability-to-repay rules for home mortgage lending enacted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, ​“rent regulation exposes where lending has overpromised on the ability of landlords to increase rents in perpetuity,” Steephen says.

Absent financial regulation, Steephen says the apartment market could be at risk of the same kind of calamity that occurred in owner-occupied housing after 2008. Take the 2023 collapse of Signature Bank, the fourth-largest bank failure in U.S. history. The bank had become an aggressive lender for some of New York City’s most notorious landlords, with many of the loans ​“predicated on plans for displacing rent-regulated tenants,” according to then New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who reviewed the bank’s portfolio after it collapsed and the city intervened.

Beyond staving off disaster, rent regulation can also open up opportunities for ownership by the public sector, cooperatives or nonprofits otherwise unable to compete in an environment of aggressive speculation.

When you have a limit on speculation, Steephen says, ​“you allow a broader universe of actors that may meet more mission-aligned goals to participate in the housing market.”

In early August, a billboard unveiled in New York City’s Times Square pronounced Mayor Zohran Mamdani the ​“Florida Economic Developer of the Year.” The ad winked at a favorite narrative of the business interests that paid for it: that Mamdani’s economic agenda — first and foremost, a recently approved two-year rent freeze — would send taxpayers running toward the more predictable politics of the Sunshine State. 

But just a week later, supporters waving ​“Freeze the Rent” signs broke into cheers as Angie Nixon, a member of Florida’s House of Representatives, notched a stunning victory in the state’s primary to become its Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. 

Outspent 13 to one — a jaw-dropping margin even in a record-shatteringly expensive election cycle — Nixon ran a campaign laser-focused on affordability, calling for a national rent freeze, Medicare for All and universal childcare. That message found fertile ground in the state’s lowest-income and least college-educated counties, according to a Washington Post analysis, defying the trends that have often beleaguered progressive candidates. 

Nixon’s full-throated endorsements of national rent stabilization may have been an especially easy sell in a state whose renters are the most cost-burdened in the nation, thanks to a combination of rising rents and flat wages. 

She ​“speaks about affordability in a real way, the way that our members have been asking about for such a long time,” says Cynthia Laurent, a housing justice campaigner with the nonprofit Florida Rising.

In 2022, the group was part of a coalition that attempted to enact emergency rent stabilization in Orange County, Fla., where rents were rising sharply despite ample housing supply. Voters approved the measure overwhelmingly, but it never took effect thanks to a lawsuit brought by landlords. The following year, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law preempting local passage of rent stabilization and most other tenant protections. Florida Rising’s 501(c)(4) arm has endorsed Nixon.

Nixon is now among a handful of congressional candidates testing the strength of their affordability message against Republican opponents in November, after making federal rent caps and tenant protections key tenets of their primary campaigns.

In Tennessee, after Republicans redrew electoral maps to carve up the state’s last blue district covering Memphis, State Rep. Justin Pearson is pitching the white, rural voters he must now appeal to on his vision for affordability — including a data center moratorium, federal minimum wage increase, rent caps and massive federal investment in affordable housing.

And in Michigan, tenant organizer Will Lawrence is running in a district where Trump won by just one point in 2024, making it a top pickup prospect for Democrats. A co-founder of the youth climate group Sunrise Movement, Lawrence also spent the last several years helping to build tenant unions and win new renter protections through the statewide coalition Michigan Rent Is Too Damn High.

Under the state’s Democratic trifecta from 2023 to 2024, the coalition hoped to pass a suite of new housing affordability measures, including removal of the state’s ban on rent control and a $4 billion allocation for social housing as part of a state push to build tens of thousands of new homes. While the coalition did win some new tenant protections and funding for affordable housing, Lawrence says it was a ​“drop in the bucket” compared to the scope of the crisis.

If elected to Congress, Lawrence says he would push for a federal tenant bill of rights and ​“a new generation of public housing for the 21^st century,” modeled after the success of publicly financed, mixed-income developments in Montgomery County, Md.

Lawrence’s approach to running on affordability is to get specific. ​“No voter says, ​‘I have an affordability problem,’” he notes. ​“They say, ​‘the rent is too damn high.’ Or ​‘this energy bill is outlandish.’ Or ​‘I just paid $17 for three chicken breasts at the grocery store.’”

That framing echoes the takeaways of an August poll that found that while 70% of 2026 Democratic candidates are deploying some form of populist rhetoric, certain messages work better than others. In a survey of more than 6,000 adults, conducted by the Center for Working-Class Politics and the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, kitchen-table populist messages that led with concrete costs, not abstractions about a fair economy, were far more persuasive.

By front-loading housing and defining the terrain of affordability, campaigns like Pearson’s and Lawrence’s are helping to create a new political common sense, says the Tenant Union Federation’s Raghuveer: ​“You have to talk about housing, you have to talk about tenants, and maybe more specifically than anything, you have to talk about the rent.”

“This is a pain point for everyday Americans in every community in this country, and that’s every congressional district, whether urban, suburban or rural,” she continues. ​“It’s a winning issue.”