While at any given time these groups may purport to speak for individual homeowners, small landlords of color, or the general public, the board members of the real estate groups behind them are almost exclusively white men who own, on average, five thousand units of housing each. Between 2018 and 2022, these groups collectively donated a combined $8.8 million to political candidates, spent over $2.3 million on legal efforts to overturn rent stabilization, and dropped $7.7 million on lobbying, including hiring the MirRam Group, cofounded by the father of Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.
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The narrative of the “woke” mom-and-pop landlord has since been taken up across the country. During public hearings about a new rent control program in St. Paul, an opponent—on Zoom from a beach vacation, naturally—characterized the policy as a form of redlining. Small landlords seeking to roll back rent control in Portland, Maine, adopted progressive language to do so, with some arguing that their willingness to rent to asylum seekers, those on federal housing vouchers, and other marginalized communities demonstrates notable liberal bonafides. In Seattle, opposition to a local measure was led by a mom-and-pop group called Seattle Grassroots Landpeople. A Democratic city councilwoman in Minneapolis who led the charge to scrap consideration of a rent control program derided tenant advocates as “wealthy beer drinking pants rolled up white men” who need to “get out of mommy’s basement.” In a landlord forum, she described her role as “getting ready, putting my lipstick on, curling my hair and selling our message. [Landlords] are the experts at giving me what I’m selling.”
Outside of New York, this dynamic has played out most notably in California. The successful fight against Los Angeles’s pandemic eviction moratorium was led in part by the Coalition of Small Rental Property Owners, “a California-based advocacy group that mostly represents black and Latinx landlords.” This past February, one small landlord launched a hunger strike to push for the end of Alameda County’s eviction moratorium, calling himself and other immigrant landlords “victims of government abuse.” The moratorium was ended by April.