America's renters are emerging as a political movement

By Jillian Berman and Venessa Wong

Housing policy has long prioritized homeownership. As young Americans face the prospect of renting indefinitely, more tenants are seeking political clout.

In central Michigan, voter frustration about the high cost of rent has helped propel William Lawrence into a rare position: Polls show the affordable-housing advocate and Democratic candidate running for U.S. Congress has a strong shot at unseating a Republican member of the House of Representatives in one of the purplest districts in the country.

Lawrence, 36, made a career in activism before running for office as a progressive candidate. He co-founded Sunrise Movement, a youth climate-change initiative, a decade ago. But when rents spiked after the pandemic, the East Lansing native watched longtime friends in the area move out of town. In some cases, their landlords were demanding 30% more. "They just couldn't make it work," said Lawrence, who also rents.

Seeing young adults trying to afford housing turned his focus to the high cost of rent, a problem that impacted their overall financial well-being. Lawrence began local advocacy for affordable housing through the Michigan Rent Is Too Damn High Coalition, a tenant union he founded in 2023. The group tried to push the state legislature to adopt bills aimed at stopping steep rent increases and protecting tenants' rights to organize. Now he's hoping to bring his experience fighting for renters to Congress.

"We have a generation of young people who are increasingly pessimistic about the future because they're locked out of the market for homeownership and renting for a longer period of time," Lawrence told MarketWatch. "I think that's why it's becoming an issue at every level - because people need relief, and we need housing security."

Housing policy has long prioritized homeownership, with politicians and industry lobbying groups securing federal and state tax breaks, government-backed loan guarantees and subsidies, and favorable zoning policies to help people who own homes. But now candidates across the country, like Lawrence, are trumpeting their experiences as renters and tenant organizers, fueling an emerging political movement focused on making renting more sustainable.

William Lawrence, right, a renter and affordable-housing advocate running for U.S. Congress, said housing security has become an urgent issue both locally in his part of Michigan and nationally.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who promised during his campaign to freeze rent, is the most well-known in this category, and there have been wins for renter-candidates in cities like Cambridge, Mass., and Seattle. In Los Angeles, Nithya Raman, one of the two leading candidates for mayor, is touting her record pushing for renter protections as a city councilperson and vowing to expand them if she's elected.

The political focus on renting isn't just limited to progressive, urban enclaves. In localities including South Carolina; Kentucky; Bozeman, Mont.; and Kansas City, Mo., tenants are increasingly organizing politically to secure collective-bargaining agreements with landlords and to push for broader protections like guaranteed access to counsel for renters facing eviction.

Even in these early days, the rental industry is taking note. "The proliferation of tenant unions across markets," as well as proposed laws to protect their rights to organize, may "have significant impacts on property operations," the National Apartment Association, the rental lobby, said.

The activity is a political response to the fact that more millennial and Generation Z voters are forced by the unaffordable cost of buying a home to rent for longer than ever. The median age of renters is now about 42, according to U.S. Census data. At the same time, elevated rents have made it difficult for many in this group to manage the rest of their finances.

"A lot of people really feel like they're locked into renting, and they're not going to be able to make that shift to homeownership at a point when previous generations probably would have been doing that," said Jenny Schuetz, vice president of infrastructure and housing at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropic organization focused on research and policy. The "sense of being shut out of a possibility previous generations" had "is going to have some political implications," she added.

How renters lost their political voice, and the movement to bring it back

Grant Samms thought he would have been out of his rented apartment in Rockville, Md., and own a home by age 30. But today, at age 35, he continues to face housing prices in the Washington, D.C., suburb that put that dream just out of reach.

A $135,000 apartment he had been eyeing in 2019 was taken off the market during the early part of the pandemic, then relisted and eventually sold for $305,000. Meanwhile, his rent crept up from $1,850 in 2019 to $2,500 today. Samms is mentally exhausted by not knowing whether he will be able to afford the new rate every time his lease is up.

"I'm really sick of somebody having that power over me," he told MarketWatch.

After the city council in Rockville refused to consider a rent-stabilization measure that the rest of the county had adopted in 2023, he helped launch Rockville Renters United, an organization that advocates for tenants' rights and renter-friendly policies in his city, a bedroom community transformed by the boom in renters, which have grown to 47% of the population, according to government data.

Samms connected with parents whose kids had to switch schools multiple times after rising rents pushed them out of their homes. He spoke with a neighbor in his mid-40s who lived in the same rental apartment for 16 years before being able to afford a home purchase.

Grant Samms is organizing tenants in Rockville, Md., where the renter share of the local population has grown rapidly.

"We have a huge group of people here that are all vulnerable and all in the same way," Samms said. "Having a collective voice to be able to put pressure on our elected leaders and to bring things to the attention of the public ... is really, really important."

Tenant groups like Samms's are trying to bring "tenant power, and tenant political engagement, more in line with homeownership," Mallory SoRelle, associate professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, told MarketWatch. In the mid-20th century, homeowners gained political power and renters lost it, a dynamic that hasn't really shifted since.

Renters became a larger part of the U.S. population after the Great Depression, with 56% of households renting in 1940. Following a wave of tenant organizing over living conditions in urban areas in the 1920s, federal rent control was passed to contain inflation during World War II, placing a ceiling on rent, until it was gradually lifted in the late 1940s.

After the war ended, though, renters' needs fell out of focus among lawmakers. Homeownership boomed as the economy grew, residential building increased and financing became easier for veterans through the G.I. Bill. The share of renters declined to 38% of households by 1960, and it stands at 35% today.

Another wave of tenant advocacy followed in the 1960s and 1970s, when workers faced stagnant wages and high inflation and rising energy prices, "a lot of the same sort of things that are happening right now," SoRelle said. Many cities adopted rent stabilization and other controls, but no "big gains" were won nationally for tenants as the real-estate industry fought back against these efforts.

"With a few notable exceptions, like during the war, generally speaking, it has been the case that federal policy in the U.S. is focused on homeownership, and states and cities have done most of the policymaking around rental properties," she added.

As the renter population shrank, its political voice also weakened with renters voting at lower rates than homeowners. In 2024, 52% of eligible renters voted compared with 70% of homeowners, resulting in "housing policy that is skewed toward homeowners," according to a report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Looking ahead, it's possible that, "over the longer run, we will see a narrowing of that [voter] turnout gap" as affordability hurdles make the average renter older and higher-income - characteristics that are typically associated with greater political engagement - Chris Salviati, chief economist at Apartment List, told MarketWatch.

When renters do turn out, they have tended to vote for Democrats, although Salviati noted the party's lead with renters has narrowed in recent elections, in line with broader political shifts among young men, working-class voters and nonwhite voters.

Renters fighting for protections - and for candidates

After moving into a roach-infested apartment in Hartford, Conn., Rhett Tock came across the Connecticut Tenants Union, a group that organizes tenants in buildings across the state and advocates for renter-friendly policies with state and local lawmakers. The organization, which has 2,000 members, has 28 chapters, up from nine when it launched in 2023.

Tock, an audio engineer and teacher, has distributed flyers and talked to tenants about organizing. He's also attended protests and other events focused on housing at the state capitol building. This past legislative cycle, the union worked to expand just-cause eviction protections to younger renters, which bans landlords from evicting tenants without citing specific reasons, like property damage or not paying rent. Currently, Connecticut's just-cause eviction laws only cover senior citizens and people with disabilities in buildings with more than five units.

"When we're thinking about how costs rise, part of the problem is that you can just cycle out tenants," Tock, 32, said. "Every time you get someone out, you just raise the rent. You should be able to have a living space and not be thrown out on a limb."

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