We must help California's largest minority: renters – Capitol Weekly | Capitol Weekly

OPINION – The largest minority group in California is not an ethnic group or an age group: It is renters. Renters make up 45 percent of California's population and are arguably the least represented.

There are only five renters in the ranks of the Californian legislature. Their number is significantly higher than the 25 percent of landlords among the representatives.

But those numbers only tell a small part of the story. While it is a problem that there are so few tenants in decision-making centers who understand the pressures and hardships tenants face, the much bigger problem is that billion-dollar landlord corporations have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into fighting pro-tenant laws.

It's not a fair fight. Tenant organizations have to scrape together every penny to advocate for the interests of renters – a huge, underrepresented constituency – while billionaire landlords write checks to buy representatives and fund anti-renter campaigns.

In California, a historic transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to billionaire real estate investors has taken place over the past generation. Money has been taken directly from the pockets of lower-income renters and transferred into the bank accounts of notorious robber barons like Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, whose net worth is more than $43 billion (and rising).

Today, more than 50 percent of renters pay more than half of their income on rent. People have never been so “rent-burdened.” Such a drastic imbalance can only be maintained if the real estate cartel in California controls all levers of power.

There are several factors that have led to California's affordable housing crisis, but one stands out in particular: corruption. Corruption is dishonest or fraudulent behavior by those in power. Corruption, in its simplest form, is money stuffed into a garbage bag, and we have plenty of that in cities like Los Angeles. New York Times The reporting has confirmed this once again.

Then there's the campaign money that buys our politicians' votes. It works like this: You donate to my campaign, and I give you lucrative zoning and permit exemptions. If that doesn't work, billion-dollar real estate companies threaten to end your career by spending money against you in the next election if you don't stand up to the renters. And the renters lose – again.

Politicians and their big real estate brokers will go to extremes to cover up their corruption. They will come up with silly explanations for how their exorbitant rents actually help tenants, or they will try to push their hackneyed theory that building luxury housing will also benefit low-income people. If that doesn't work, they will resort to outright lies that homeowners' property values ​​will collapse. And as if even that lie isn't enough, billionaire landlords and their political allies will threaten to let their buildings fall into disrepair if they can't extort a fortune.

California's “liberal” politicians are indifferent to the suffering of 17 million renters as long as the money keeps flowing. And if the renters don't have money to organize, the die is cast for further suffering and a worsening of the crisis.

Fortunately, this November offers voters a rare respite from California's corruption. Renters can skip the politicians. Rent voters and their supporters have a chance to push through rent control by voting “yes” on Proposition 33, the Justice for Renters Act, which would repeal California's ban on rent control and expand it community by community.

We cannot allow our beloved California to become a third world state where only the super rich and the poor supported by the government can survive while the rest have to leave. We can do better.

Michael Weinstein is President of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest global HIV/AIDS organization, and AHF's Foundation for Healthy Living.