🏡💚 "We are outraged" - legislature kills tenant bill
On Tuesday, the Affordable Rent Act (AB 1157) failed to get enough votes to pass through the Assembly Judiciary Committee, effectively killing it for this legislative session. While the bill sponsors were bracing for this as a potential outcome, it is nonetheless a stunning result, one that reveals a lot about the current politics within the legislature.
AB 1157 was a statewide bill that would have expanded tenant protections by making changes to the Tenant Protection Act (TPA). Thanks to the TPA, current law includes a rent cap that prevents landlords from increasing the rent more than 10% every year (or 5% plus inflation), as well as a set of protections against eviction. But those protections don’t apply to single-family homes, and all of them are set to expire in 2030.
Introduced last year in response to the ongoing housing crisis, AB 1157 would have done three things:
Lower the rent cap to 5% in allowable annual increases
Expand all of the protections to include single-family homes
Make the protections permanent by eliminating the 2030 sunset date
The bill stalled last year, and Tuesday was the first time bringing the bill back this year, starting in the Assembly Judiciary Committee. Hundreds of community members had traveled from all across the state to testify — when the time for public comment came, long lines formed to give testimony, with the overwhelming majority in support. Many told deeply personal stories about their experience with housing insecurity, their fears that another 10% rent increase would mean they won’t be able to keep over their head.
Of course, there was also the expected opposition from the realtors, the California Apartment Association, and other landlord groups. They raised the familiar objections to rent regulations, saying that it would be too hard on landlords, that landlords would take housing off the rental market altogether, and that developers would be discouraged from building more housing.
The following discussion among the Committee members felt like a snapshot of the current politics on housing in Sacramento (if interested, you can watch here starting at the 2:59:13 minute mark). A few Committee members gave spirited defenses of the bill. Isaac Bryan emphasized how little renters are represented in the legislature, and how we need to do more to help keep people in their homes. John Harabedian and Damon Connolly also spoke up in support, highlighting how this can address affordability, and appreciating the good faith efforts by the author to move the bill forward (more on that in a minute).
There was also dissent from Republicans, no surprise there. More telling, I thought, were the comments made by Democrats Rebecca Bauer-Kahan and Rick Zbur. Of course, they acknowledged that the high costs of housing were hurting our communities. But, in the words of Bauer-Kahan, they feared that “this protection butts up against production.”
In her comments, Bauer-Kahan made it clear that she believes increasing housing production should be the first and foremost housing strategy for the legislature. Anything that might be in tension of that, as well-intentioned as it may be, is ultimately a hinderance.
You can see how this puts the real estate industry in such a dominant political position. Anytime they don’t like a policy, all they need to do is make the case that it might hurt production — conversely, policies that they do like are labeled pro-housing, even if they might also be at the expense of environmental protections, workers, community participation, or any number of other social benefits.
My point is not to weigh the pros and cons of housing production, but to point out how unassailable the primacy of production has become. The legislature has always been unrepresentative of Californians — there are currently 10 renters in the legislature of 120, which is actually double the number there were in 2022. In fact, there are way more landlords than renters. That includes Bauer-Kahan, who in her comments on AB 1157 took pains to make clear that she is a mom-and-pop landlord that cares about her tenants. Interestingly, the bill’s author, Ash Kalra, is also a landlord.
But more than just a symptom of underrepresented renters, the dominance of housing production over all else reveals a shift in the politics of housing. It shows the success of the constellation of groups that have been pushing for production — developers, YIMBY groups, and the real estate industry at large (not all for the same reasons or with the same values). It’s a case study in the strategy of elite persuasion: on Tuesday, hundreds of personal testimony from people saying they might become homeless could not alter legislator’s preconceptions that production must be the main objective, and protections for tenants only stand in the way.
In the end, needing 7 votes, AB 1157 only received 4 votes in support. Five Democratic members refused to vote: Assemblymembers Pacheco, Papan, Stefani, Bauer-Kahan and Zbur. These non-votes (“No Vote Recorded”) are essentially “no” votes — usually legislators don’t want to go on the record as being opposed to a bill if it came from someone in their own party. But make no mistake, those Democrats were the ones that killed the bill.
This is even more remarkable than you might initially think. The bill’s author, Ash Kalra, is actually the Chair of that Committee. In general, it is very rare for a Committee to go against the recommendation of the Committee Chair (what’s called “rolling the chair”). It is even more extraordinary to go against the Chair’s own bill. As Kalra pointed out repeatedly in his defense of the bill, this bill is only in its second Committee, still in its House of Origin. Even if legislators have some reservations about a bill, they will usually pass it through to allow for more discussion and dialogue if they think it’s an important issue.
Kalra even went the extra mile, voluntarily offering to drastically amend the bill in his own Committee, an amendment that would have taken out the provision that extended tenant protections to single-family homes. But even that good faith measure was not enough, and the bill is dead.
It’s a shocking result, one that sends a deeply discouraging message that the legislature is unlikely to even entertain bills pushing for stronger tenant protections. In a statement after the vote, Christina Livingstone, Executive Director of ACCE, said, “Today’s vote is nothing short of betrayal. At this moment, when Californians desperately need housing stability, our legislators chose to side with corporate landlords instead. When given the opportunity to solidify basic tenant protections, they failed, and we are outraged.”
This is the current political terrain we’ll need to navigate as we continue building the campaign and demand for green social housing. The thing is, social housing actually offers an alternative framework to the dominant narrative in Sacramento. Part of the big problem with the existing politics of housing is that it automatically cedes supremacy to the market. In this understanding, the only thing that government can do is to try to tweak the laws to cajole the market into doing socially beneficially things. If we want there to be more housing built, we need to give developers the right incentives, and remove barriers that stand in their way. If we want landlords to not kick out their tenants, we have to make it profitable for them to stay in business.
Like many other sectors, this completely ignores the possibility of the public sector playing an active role in creating the things we want to see. A strong social housing system could lead to a dramatic increase in production, with public developers leading the way and setting the standard. Likewise, we could establish state-supported manufacturing of key materials and technologies needed for the clean energy transition.
All of this takes work to change the decades-long erosion of trust in government to a place where people believe government can actually do things. And of course, the Trump administration is only reinforcing the justified fear of the federal government as an instrument of violence, oppression, and corruption.
The only way to make people believe that the public sector can do things is to start doing things. This is the premise and promise of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral administration. It’s part of the growing call of interconnected demands for public utilities, green industrial policy, public banks, universal health care, public education, and public transit.
The truth is that, left to its own devices, the market is not going to solve the housing crisis. As legislators realize they need to do more, we have an opportunity to intervene with a system built on the premise of housing as a human right. That includes stronger protections for existing tenants, even while we are pushing aggressively to build more housing — housing that is actually affordable.
After Tuesday’s hearing, AB 1157 is not moving forward. Supporters are regrouping to consider next steps, and whether there might be another way to lift up the need for stronger tenant protections during this legislative cycle. In the meantime, we will be working to organize and build a new consensus around green social housing and a public sector for the public good.
Rally on Tuesday in support of AB 1157 Source: Housing Now
WHAT WE’RE READING
Tenants ‘Crushed’ After California Renter Protections Bill Stalls in the Legislature (KQED)
What Justice on a Burning Planet? (The Nation) – great conversation with Andreas Malm and Thea Riofrancos about the state of the left and the climate emergency
All the Walls Came Down (Short Film) – a short documentary about the effects of the Eaton fire on the Altadena community. Shortlisted for the Academy Awards Best Documentary Short Film
Feel free to reply any time! I always enjoy hearing from people and getting any feedback/questions/additional thoughts.
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