Renters’ Rights in “Reagan’s Backyard”: Housing Policy and the Politics of Urban Growth in Coastal California

This paper will consider tenant organizing in the late 1970s and 1980s as an expression of left-wing populism. In particular, I intend to analyze housing activism through the lens of a development that I call antigrowth politics. Beginning in the sixties, an unlikely, complex, and often inadvertent movement of liberals in wealthy coastal cities began to question the previously unassailable idea that prosperity demanded the unmolested expansion of the urban areas in which they lived. By the 1990s, many core constituencies of the Democratic Party had become much more skeptical of—and in many cases downright hostile toward—not only growth itself, but also the idea that growth was in any way compatible with their idea of liberalism.

Many of the most prominent elements of antigrowth liberalism emerged from wealthier segments of the Democratic Party. As the concept of “gentrification” gained currency in the 1970s, however, urban growth also came to be associated with displacement of working-class residents and the dissolution of communities of color. This association, in turn, prompted a new populist focus among community organizers on tenants and the “right to stay put.” Before long, a consensus emerged on the left around rent control as the main way to protect the working class from the ill effects of urban growth, and perhaps even as a tool that might prevent growth itself.

Focusing on two rent control efforts in Southern California—Santa Monica in 1979 and West Hollywood in 1985—my paper will analyze the changing rhetoric of tenants’ rights activists in this time period. It will also examine the partnerships that emerged between community organizers, politicians, and a group of new “social justice” philanthropies—alliances that I will argue were crucial to the continued salience of tenants’ rights in a party whose base was increasingly suburban and upper-class.