Richard “Tod” Spieker was an All-America swimmer at UCLA, but today, he's swimming in money he acquired through rent gouging tenants as a corporate landlord in Palo Alto. Spieker has leveraged the wealth against Prop 21, a ballot measure to keep families in their homes and is one of the leading donors in Big Real Estate’s multi-million-dollar campaign to kill Proposition 21.

Tod Spieker owns and operates 2,900 multifamily units, mostly throughout the Santa Clara and San Mateo counties (Silicon Valley). As a multi-millionaire corporate landlord, his response to the state’s ongoing housing affordability and homelessness crises, which have worsened due to the financial devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, is to fight all efforts to get rent control passed.

Tod's history of fighting efforts to extend tenant protections and stifle rent control goes back years. Here are just a few:

• Spreading misinformation campaigns to repeal renter protections in El Cerrito and Mountain View.
• Sits on the "executive committee" of the Big Real Estate Executives  formed by CAA with other rent gaugers to oppose Prop 21: CAA CEO Tom Bannon, Equity Residential xecutive and CAA board president Barry Altshuler, and Essex Property Trust executive and CAA board member John Eudy.
• Spieker is purchasing TV ads this fall smearing Prop 21. The cabal of millionaires who are working behind the scenes to scare and confuse California voters.
  
• Spieker has a disturbing history of opposing rent limits and rent control policies, particularly in Mountain View — In 2018, Spieker Companies contributed at least $55,000 to a Mountain View ballot measure that would have overturned the city’s rent control law. The initiative, however, failed to get enough signatures to be placed on the ballot. Tod Spieker also delivered, in 2018, at least $2,000 to a Mountain View City Council candidate whose entire campaign revolved around his opposition to rent control.
• This year, Spieker plunked down another $50,000 for another local ballot measure in Mountain View that again attempted to change the city’s rent control law. That lost, too — and resoundingly: nearly 69 percent of voters opposed the initiative.
• In 2016, this time in San Mateo, Spieker shelled out $50,000 to successfully stop a rent control ballot measure.

  Spieker Companies gave a hefty $1.1 million to the victorious No on Prop 10 campaign in 2018, which utilized a statewide TV ad campaign, funded by real estate power players such as Spieker, to trick voters.

• Tod Spieker worked the system to bend it in his favor during the COVID-19 pandemic, grabbing between  $1 million and $2 million in federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds.

Judging from his track record, Tod Spieker doesn’t care about seniors on fixed incomes and working-class families struggling to make ends meet because of astronomical rents. He just wants to keep making millions — no matter who gets hurt.