The Real Dirt is a monthly column by award-winning advocacy journalist Patrick Range McDonald that exposes the real estate industry’s lies, scams, and other unscrupulous acts, which impact the lives of millions.
UCLA delivered a whopper of a study in May, finding that predatory landlords are targeting Black tenants for eviction in the Los Angeles area. On top of that, three of the largest corporate landlords in the country were cited among the worst offenders: Equity Residential, AvalonBay Communities, and Essex Property Trust.
If those companies seem familiar, that’s because they’ve shelled out millions in campaign contributions to kill three ballot measures that would have ended statewide rent control restrictions in California: Prop 10 in 2018, Prop 21 in 2020, and Prop 33 in 2024. (AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the parent organization of Housing Is A Human Right, sponsored those initiatives.)
Equity Residential, AvalonBay Communities, and Essex Property Trust have also been huge contributors to the California Apartment Association’s political action committees, which are used to send campaign cash to state and local politicians in California. And top executives at those companies have sat on the CAA’s board of directors, calling the shots.
In addition, Equity Residential and Essex Property Trust have been investigated and sued for using a RealPage software program that helped them to collude and wildly inflate rents in cities across the United States.
So the latest charge – targeting Black tenants for evictions – comes as no surprise, unfortunately.
For more details, you can read our piece: “Predatory Corporate Landlords Target Black Tenants for Eviction, Says New UCLA Study.”
Speaking of the California Apartment Association, it used its deep-pocketed influence (cash from such companies as Equity Residential, AvalonBay Communities, and Essex Property Trust) to delay a very important pro-tenant bill called AB 1157, authored by Assemblymember Ash Kalra.
The bill would have strengthened tenant rights in California, including lowering the rent increase cap of the Tenant Protections Act of 2019 and extending tenant protections to all single-family homes. That last bit is important because corporate landlords are buying up single-family homes and turning them into rentals. So tenants of those homes need protections, especially when dealing with unscrupulous corporate landlords.
The California Apartment Association, of course, was thrilled about delaying the bill, but it was another blight on the tenant rights records of numerous state politicians, who routinely cave to Big Real Estate. Many of them also accept huge amounts of campaign cash from the CAA and corporate landlords.
The interesting thing about the delay of AB 1157 is that the CAA thanked California YIMBY and YIMBY Action for their work on stopping the bill for now. It’s interesting because those YIMBY groups also teamed up with the CAA and corporate landlords to kill Prop 33 in 2024 – like we mentioned before, the initiative would have ended statewide rent control restrictions.
So California YIMBY and YIMBY Action are clearly foot soldiers for Big Real Estate.
They try to cast themselves as progressive organizations, but that’s the Big Lie they’re pushing these days. California YIMBY and YIMBY Action are doing the bidding of corporations, and not just any corporations, but companies that target Black tenants for eviction; use RealPage software to collude and wildly inflate rents across the country; and use the California Apartment Association as a blunt instrument to kill any kind of tenant protection in any jurisdiction in California.
That old saying comes to mind: “You are the company you keep.”
It’s why many housing justice activists call them, rightly, Corporate YIMBYs.
We often mention the California Apartment Association and California YIMBY and YIMBY Action in this column, and that’s because they lead the charge against tenant protections, and they also push “trickle-down” housing policies, which fuel gentrification in middle- and working-class communities, forcing people out of their longtime neighborhoods.
And, recently, California YIMBY and YIMBY Action have taken a very public stance that any kind of tenant protection that, they believe, hurts housing production must be stopped. Never mind that economists and housing experts keep saying that rent control and other tenant protections do little, if anything, to harm the construction of apartments.
It makes one wonder: What are California YIMBY and YIMBY Action getting out of their public alliance with the California Apartment Association and corporate landlords? Big Real Estate certainly has lots of cash to throw around for political favors, but California YIMBY and YIMBY Action have been very careful about publicly coming clean about its largest contributors.
We wrote a special report about California YIMBY years ago called “Inside Game: California YIMBY, Scott Wiener, and Big Tech’s Troubling Housing Push.” We also wrote an article titled “Trickle-Down Housing Is A Failure. Here’s What You Need to Know.” Both are still relevant and worth a read so you can understand what major YIMBY groups are all about.
We also recommend reading “Special Report: California Apartment Associations’s Big-Money Schemes to Kill Prop 33 and Pass Prop 34.”
Those are exposés that you won’t read anywhere else because, for whatever reason, mainstream media outlets rarely, if ever, take a long, hard look at California YIMBY and the California Apartment Association – even though they are major players in the housing arena in California, the fourth largest economy in the world. One would think they’d be more thoroughly examined by reporters.
Until next time…
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