As we head into 2025, Californians and reporters should take a hard look at Housing Is A Human Right’s special report about how the California Apartment Association and corporate landlords deliver millions in campaign contributions to state and local elected officials. Big Real Estate’s political influence is so far-reaching that corporate landlords and its lobbying organization, the California Apartment Association, have shelled out campaign cash to politicians in 51 out of the state’s 58 counties.
The California Apartment Association, funded by corporate landlords, is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in California. It shapes, and stops, housing policies in the back rooms of the State Capitol Building in Sacramento, and kills tenant protections in city halls throughout the state. The CAA’s influence on California politicians has been enormous, but not deeply examined. Our special report changes that.
Housing Is A Human Right pored over state campaign filings of the California Apartment Association’s four political committees. We revealed, perhaps for the first time, that the California Apartment Association shelled out campaign cash to politicians in city, county, and state levels and that several of the nation’s largest corporate landlords used the California Apartment Association as a front group to deliver campaign contributions. Those corporate landlords include Equity Residential, AvalonBay Communities, and Essex Property Trust.
With the CAA and corporate landlords influencing elected officials in every level of government, California’s 17 million renters are not getting the strong tenant protections they need. As a result, the state’s housing affordability and homelessness crises, which are driven by unfair, sky-high rents, are never solved.
Politicians like to say that campaign contributions don’t influence their decisions. If that was true, corporate landlords and the California Apartment Association wouldn’t deliver, year after year, astounding amounts of campaign cash to local and state politicians — it would be a horrible return on investment.
The reality is that money talks, and corporate landlords and the CAA know it. Unless new campaign finance reform comes along or elected officials start refusing to take campaign cash from the real estate industry, Big Real Estate will keep sending big bucks to local and state politicians — and millions of California renters will continue to suffer.
Read the special report: “California Apartment Association’s Deep-Pocketed Campaign to Kill Tenant Protections.”
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