The landlords had seen Governor Tony Evers’ budget proposal, and they were fuming.
It had been over a decade since Evers’ predecessor, Scott Walker (R), and the state’s Republican legislature had begun to lay waste to basic protections for renters – even prohibiting local governments from enforcing rental inspections and safety disclosures and policies that banned evictions during winter months. Now, in early 2023, Evers was proposing to reverse those landlord-friendly policies, which – among other things – had contributed to a rash of electrical fires across the city of Milwaukee threatening the lives and property of renters.
This wasn’t the first time Evers had tried to re-enact tenant protections lost during the Walker years. He had made the same pitch in prior budgets – only to be rebuffed by the Republican-controlled state legislature. But he hadn’t given up. In fact, answering the call of Assemblyman Ryan Clancy, a newly-elected Democratic Socialist from Milwaukee, Evers had added a $60 million statewide right-to-counsel, aimed at helping tenants facing eviction find legal representation.
But the landlords weren’t budging. If anything, they seemed more determined than ever to defend the Walker-era regime that had elevated their immense power over renters. More importantly, they had a legislature filled with fellow landlords who were more than willing to help.
In a terse update to members of the Apartment Association of Southeastern Wisconsin (AASEW) — which advocates for landlords in the state’s most populous region — Heiner Giese, the association’s legal counsel, seethed at Evers’ budget documents. Yet “most concerning” to Giese was the proposed right to legal counsel. “So lawyers would earn millions in fees,” the lawyer said, “Couldn’t that money be better spent providing rent relief for the over 90% of tenants in eviction cases who have fallen behind on their rent?”
The suggestion was not evidently a sincere one. After all, AASEW had not supported funding for rental assistance in the biennial budget. But it was the kind of bad-faith claim landlords had become accustomed to making over the last decade.
A few weeks earlier, Giese had appeared at a Milwaukee Common Council committee hearing to denounce a modest proposal that rental property owners carry insurance. The proposal followed revelations that a recent string of electrical fires in Milwaukee’s poorly-regulated rental housing were frequently misclassified as accidents and not thoroughly investigated, leaving renters with no legal recourse. Requiring landlords to carry insurance, tenant advocates suggested, would at least ensure a full investigation.
AASEW objected to the proposed rule, Giese said. Why? The proposal would require landlords to file annual “proof of insurance” forms. Carrying insurance would also be particularly costly in “lower valued neighborhoods.” If landlords didn’t carry insurance , the lawyer argued, it was only because they couldn’t afford to.
Yet while Giese’s arguments hardly won the day, the Common Council proposal died anyway. At the root of the problem was the city’s own finances – depleted by years of dwindling shared revenue from the state legislature. A new program, said the city’s commissioner of building inspection, would “drastically increase” the city’s workload and would be “very difficult to manage with existing resources.” In the last budget, her department had been cut by 10 percent.
Without adequate resources, there was little the cities could do with the authority that the state had not yet taken away.
Under different circumstances, the failure of even this modest proposal might have cast the spotlight back onto the state legislature. Yet it was there that advocates of tenants’ rights faced some of their most formidable foes. Landlord organizations like AASEW had not dismantled tenants’ rights on their own, after all. Over the last decade, they had joined with their allies, the Wisconsin Realtors Association (WRA), to undo generations of renter protections. The Realtors’ annual legislative reports to members are replete with celebrations of legislative victories, including the passage of legislation to prohibit local governments from requiring inspections on units at the time of sale.
There is little indication that the WRA’s power has waned. Between 2021 and 2022, the Realtors Association was one of only four organizations that spent over $1 million on lobbying state lawmakers. And while the realtors’ preferred candidate for Supreme Court justice, Dan Kelly, lost by double digits to Janet Protasiewicz in the spring election, they can (at least for the moment) rely on a gerrymandered state legislature, which tilts control of Wisconsin’s state government to Republicans.
Control of the legislature matters because Republican members of that body are often landlords themselves. According to a Leader analysis of 129 Statements of Economic Interest, 28 percent of Republican members of the Wisconsin state legislature list rental properties as one of their primary “business activities.” 26 percent of Republicans also declared non-commercial real-estate interests. Democrats’ ranks include far fewer landlords. Only 16 percent of Democrats in the legislature report rental properties as one of their business activities; 9 percent report a non-commercial real estate interest.
The overrepresentation of landlords in state legislatures is not limited to Wisconsin. As the Boston Globe reported last month, Massachusetts’ state legislature – long a Democratic Party stronghold – is filled with landlords hostile to local rent-control measures.
In Wisconsin, however, what matters is not just how many landlords hold legislative seats, but which positions of power they control. It bears mentioning, then, that the member of the state legislature with the largest number of rental properties to his name is none other than Robin Vos (R – Rochester), current speaker of the State Assembly.
Most of Vos’s properties are located in the college town of Whitewater, Wisconsin. A 2019 investigation revealed Vos’s motivation for rolling back renter protections. “They were terrible landlords,” said one of his tenants, “When we turned a blow-dryer on in the one bathroom … it took out the TVs in the living room, I think it took out some of our kitchen appliances and then it took out the back unit’s kitchen and their refrigerator and their microwave.”
Property owners evidently place a high value on having a fellow traveler in the Speaker’s office. As Heiner Giese’s March 2023 message assured the members of AASEW: “The Governor wants to eliminate landlord/tenant measures which were enacted since 2011, which the Republican leadership in the Assembly and Senate is bound to reject.”
The landlords may have been fuming, but — at least for now — they had nothing to worry about.
