In recent decades, housing has become increasingly commodified and financialized, while tenants in communities across the country are being crushed under unsustainable rent burdens and a shortage of affordable housing. But tenants have been pushing back, with a recent wave of organizing at the local, state, and federal levels to build power for proven policy solutions that can start to turn the tide.
Real estate has responded with full force. This report analyzes the network of organizations, often backed by corporate landlords, the industry uses to lobby, advocate, and make political contributions. It focuses on which companies and individuals are leading these groups and quantifies the dollar amount of the resources they have at their disposal to fight back against a newly invigorated tenant movement and maintain and exacerbate the housing crisis.
Key Findings
- Between 2020 and 2022, these trade associations had a total of two and a half billion dollars in revenue.
- These associations establish close links between the federal and state level. One and a half billion dollars of this revenue was amassed at the national level, while one billion dollars was assembled at the state level across the 29 states with significant renter populations in their cities.
- Large investors like Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Starwood Capital Group, and CBRE Group Inc., and large apartment owners like Bozzuto, Greystar and Equity Residential appear repeatedly on the boards of these state and national organizations.
- These corporations use this political infrastructure to lobby against core policy solutions to protect tenants, such as eviction moratoria during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Right to Counsel initiatives, legislation to establish Just Cause eviction protections, and rent stabilization and rent increase cap efforts.
- In total, the organizations profiled spent over $402 million between 2020 and 2022 in lobbying at the state and federal level. Associated PACs collected a total of $167 million from 2019 to 2022
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Organizations
