As Americans cast their votes in an election dominated by debates over inflation and the cost of living, a ballot measure in Vice President Kamala Harris’ home state is dividing the Democratic Party on the issue of how to address skyrocketing rents.
Proposition 33—dubbed the Justice for Renters Act—would repeal the state’s controversial Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which for decades has restricted local governments’ ability to cap rent increases. Currently, Costa-Hawkins blocks counties and cities from imposing rent controls on apartments, condos, and single-family homes built after a certain date—1995 in much of the state, but years earlier in some cities, such as San Francisco. It also prohibits vacancy control, meaning that even landlords who are subject to rent controls can raise rents up to the market rate when a new tenant moves in.
Some cities have already enacted new rent control plans in anticipation of Prop. 33 passing. In October, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve legislation that would expand rent control to approximately 16,000 additional units if the initiative passes.
In some ways, Prop. 33 is similar to President Joe Biden’s proposal this past summer to cap annual rent increases at 5 percent over the next two years for large landlords who want to obtain federal tax breaks. Two weeks after it was rolled out, speaking to a crowd in Atlanta, Harris appeared to voice support for the president’s plan, vowing to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases.” But since then, according to the Nation, she has largely left promises for direct tenant protections out of her public statements. The outlet observed that instead of renters, Harris seemed to be focusing on homeowners, pushing policies like tax incentives for developers to build for first-time homebuyers.
Harris’ reluctance to embrace rent control may mark a small victory for YIMBYs, the “yes-in-my-backyard” pro-housing movement that first emerged in San Francisco in the 2010s as a more market-based approach to the housing affordability crisis. YIMBYs, many of whom are Democrats, have largely opposed Prop. 33, arguing it would cause new rental construction to grind to a halt. An analysis by California YIMBY, an advocacy group focused on ameliorating the state’s housing shortage, argued that passing the measure “will likely worsen housing affordability by empowering NIMBY jurisdictions to block new housing.”
NIMBY, a largely pejorative label meaning “not in my backyard,” describes locals who oppose construction and redevelopment in their neighborhoods—ranging variously from affordable housing, to homeless shelters, to luxury condos, to public transportation infrastructure. According to Matthew Lewis, the communications director at California YIMBY, NIMBYs include residents from across the political spectrum. While conservative NIMBYs might oppose new buildings to maintain the status quo or inflate property values in their neighborhoods, many left-aligned NIMBYs strongly oppose market-based development out of fears over gentrification or ideological commitments. Between those poles lies a significant group of mainstream liberal NIMBYs, who, as New York Magazine’s Curbed puts it, “believe in affordable housing until it’s in their neighborhood.” In 2022, Barack Obama called them out, specifically arguing that resistance to “affordable, energy-sustainable, mixed-use and mixed-income communities” contributes to the housing crisis.
“When you have very right-wing NIMBYs agreeing with left NIMBYs that we should do all the things necessary to prevent more homebuilding, it kind of makes you go, huh?” Lewis said.
For Lewis, the story of a rent-controlled city like San Francisco characterizes the debate. According to the city’s housing plan, about 70 percent of San Francisco renters live in rent-stabilized units, built before June 1979. But this hasn’t helped the affordability crisis, as the percentage of the city’s households who were rent-burdened—that is, who spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent—increased by roughly 15 percent from 1990 to 2015 for residents making 50 to 80 percent of the median San Francisco income. And according to the Public Policy Institute of California and the California Housing Partnership, in 2024, over half of all renters in the state—roughly 3 million residents—are rent-burdened.
“I think our opponents on the left misconstrue that rent control is this mechanism of broad affordability,” Lewis said. “But what it’s supposed to do is provide stability and security of tenure for lower income tenants. In a city like San Francisco, what you end up with is millionaires living in rent-controlled housing.”
To get it right, Lewis suggests that the city first has to “unleash a building boom” by constructing housing and renting it out at market rate so developers can recoup investment costs and continue to build. “Then when those buildings become eligible for rent control—after 15 or 20 years—you have this abundant supply of rent-stabilized units because you’ve never stopped building,” he argues.
Many housing justice advocates reject that argument. In a 2021 article for Housing is a Human Right, a prominent group now backing Prop. 33, Patrick Range McDonald wrote that such market-based strategies resemble the real estate industry’s failed “trickle-down housing policy” that has led to the ongoing crisis. Comparing it to giving tax cuts to the rich, McDonald wrote that “corporate landlords and major developers will generate billions in revenue by charging sky-high rents for market-rate apartments, making massive profits off the backs of the middle and working class.”
In a May 2024 analysis charging that California YIMBY has sided with corporate landlords to defeat Prop. 33, McDonald wrote that this YIMBY proposal of “filtering” actually “fuels gentrification and displacement in working-class neighborhoods, including communities of color,” since, he says, developers will only build luxury housing to maximize profits.
For his part, Lewis contends that many of Prop. 33’s leftist supporters are acting in direct opposition to affordability by arguing that only government-funded social housing projects can solve the problem. “I think that this is where YIMBYs really part ways with the left,” he said. “The market can just move substantially faster than the government can, if you let it.” While Lewis concedes that the government should play a substantial role in providing subsidized housing for low-income residents, he says that “you can’t have a functioning system where the government is basically shutting down housing production for most of the market.”
Rent control, Lewis says, contributes to the housing shortage. He points to New York City, which has an estimated 26,000 older, rent-stabilized units that are empty, according to findings from the 2023 survey, because limits on rent increases make it difficult for landlords to keep up with maintenance costs and building codes.
The debate is raging among economists, too. A University of Chicago poll found that an overwhelming 81 percent of economists surveyed opposed rent control. But in 2023, 32 prominent economists signed a letter supporting nationwide rent control. The document referred to a 2007 study following rent control policies for 30 years across 76 cities in New Jersey. It found “little to no statistically significant effect of moderate rent controls on new construction.” There is also research connecting housing supply reductions to systemic loopholes, such as exceptions that allow landlords to evict all tenants in a building to convert their rental units into market-rate condos.
Shanti Singh, the legislative and communications director at Tenants Together, a coalition of local tenant organizations in California, argues that rent control and new development can work in concert. “We fight for housing that folks can afford. Millions and millions of people’s wages simply are not anywhere close to meeting market rates,” Singh says. “We’re fighting for people living in crowded conditions, people who are homeless, and people one step away from being homeless.”
It’s not tenant advocates but current laws restricting rent control that are the real problem, Singh claims: “Because of Costa-Hawkins, we are actually bleeding the supply of rent-controlled housing that’s affordable at below market rates. That’s a unit that you’ve lost. That’s the supply loss.”
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there is a shortage of nearly one million affordable rental units in California for “extremely low income renters,” or residents who earn less than 30 percent of the state median income. “There’s a huge issue with folks with disabilities on fixed incomes, including seniors, who need accessible housing,” Singh says. They can’t access rent-controlled housing in places like San Francisco because the units are too old to have the necessary accommodations—they’re all constructed before 1979.
Instead of working on legislation that will solve the affordability crisis, Singh says that many YIMBYs are “leaving a status quo in place that’s untenable” by bringing up “insane hypothetical scenarios.”
Susie Shannon, the policy director at Housing Is A Human Right—which has put over $46 million into its support for Prop. 33—says Tony Strickland is one of these hypotheticals. Strickland, a conservative city council member in wealthy Huntington Beach, is an example of a NIMBY to many pro-development advocates. YIMBYs argue that he would use rent control laws like Prop. 33, if passed, to circumvent California’s affordable housing mandates by setting unreasonably low rent caps designed to stifle new housing development, according to the Orange County Register.
Shannon pointed to an op-ed by Strickland, in which the councilman said his words had been taken out of context and affirmed that he has been “a lifelong opponent of rent control.” He clarified that he does support some language in the ballot measure that stops the state from using the court system to block local rent control decisions. Strickland did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.
Dean Preston, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the number one enemy of several California pro-development groups, says the amount of money backing the campaign against Prop. 33—over $120 million according to the Los Angeles Times—is telling. The two largest opposition donors are the California Apartment Association at nearly $89 million and the California Association of Realtors at $22 million.
“What has sucked up a lot of the debate from [Prop 33] opponents is discussing…what impacts rent control has on construction financing,” Preston says. “But what’s really driving the opposition is vacancy control”—the possibility that with the repeal of Costa-Hawkins, local governments would limit the amount a landlord could increase rents between tenants.
Preston believes that without vacancy control, cities are essentially powerless to regulate rents. “That’s why it is worth it for the California Association of Realtors, the California Apartment Association, and the landlord lobby to invest,” he says.
While more than 650,000 people in the United States experience homelessness on any given night and living without shelter has increasingly become a crime, everyone I talked to maintains that there is a way to solve the housing crisis.
For Lewis, it’s expanding funding for programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which offers developers incentives for making a portion of their construction affordable for low-income residents. He also favors upzoning to increase housing density by allowing more multifamily units in areas previously reserved for single-family homes.
For tenant advocates like Singh and Preston, it’s about the increased dialogue around housing on the national stage, as well as the repeated attempts to create a federal social housing authority.
“I think there’s a sense within the tenant movement in California that it is inevitable at some point that Costa-Hawkins will be repealed because most people support rent control,” Preston says. “I hope Prop. 33 passes, but if it doesn’t, I expect it’ll be back on a future ballot and in future legislative efforts.”
