California’s affordable housing and displacement crises are wreaking havoc on many low income, working-class, BIPOC people. California accounts for 30% of the nation’s homeless population. About 56% of renters in California are rent burdened, paying 30% or more of their income in rent. All this despite the fact that there is great wealth in California - it has the 5th largest economy in the world and boasts 179 billionaires in residence.
Blackstone is now the largest landlord in the world, as well as in the U.S. They went on a buying spree during COVID, including the purchase of 66 apartment buildings, home to 5,600 lower-income BIPOC, immigrant households, in San Diego County.
Blackstone tenants unions, community groups and unions have come together to push back on Blackstone.
Core strategies of this work include:
New organizing, leadership development and mobilizing of our existing base of workers, tenants and students
Employing “bargaining for the common good” strategies to bring these housing demands into union bargaining, and use these moments as key compression points in the campaigns to win
Engaging with pension funds that are large investors in the Wall Street buy-up of residential rental housing and work to use their significant power and influence
One current campaign is to get our public institutions and pension funds to:
Stop investing in Blackstone,
Establish responsible landlord investment standards,
Start investing in the truly affordable housing we need, and
Act now to use surplus land/property for affordable housing that meets the needs of the state’s low-wage workers and households on fixed incomes.
Housing Justice groups across the state, are campaigning to expand tenant protections, (helping to keep people in their homes) and to secure large-scale public investment in the preservation and production of housing that is truly affordable for California's millions of low-wage workers and low-income households with fixed incomes.
One thing we come up against, time and time again, are the politically powerful big corporate interests blocking tenant protections and the progressive taxation (making those who have more pay more) needed to fund affordable housing. In recent years we’ve seen a stark example around ballot initiatives, where big corporations spent over $70 million twice, first to kill both the expansion of rent control (Prop 10, 2018) and then to kill an increase in commercial property taxes (Prop 15, 2020)
At California Common Good we are going on offense against the corporate forces that are working against us as we seek to keep people in their homes and address the State’s horrific affordable housing crisis. Amongst these giant Wall Street investors, the global private equity firm Blackstone stands out.
