Besides his suit and tie, David Morales had little to set him apart from the other 20-somethings he met as he campaigned over Memorial Day weekend to be the next mayor of Providence, R.I.
He stopped among the deal-seekers at a clothing swap to try on a blue velvet blazer. He leaped before a crowd outside a dive bar where music blared and bubbles blew from a machine on the back of a bicycle.
“We’re building a city all our neighbors can afford,” Mr. Morales, the youngest member of the Rhode Island Legislature, promised the crowd outside the bar, a mayoral candidate’s message that reflected his generation’s most fervent desire, “a city where you don’t find yourself priced out when it’s time to renew your lease, a city that’s not dominated by luxury housing.”
Mr. Morales, a renter himself, is 27 and seeking to unseat a fellow Democrat 20 years his senior, Brett Smiley, who recently vetoed a bill that would have capped rent increases at 4 percent a year.
The issue of soaring housing costs and how to control them goes well beyond Providence. Across the country, from colonial-era cities like Rhode Island’s capital to the sprawling suburbs of the Sun Belt, young politicians have embraced housing as the defining issue of their campaigns and their generation.
As both political parties look for generational change, these candidates believe they have both an issue and their birth dates on their side. And they defy the usual politics. They include Republicans who argue against local control where cities and towns have made it hard to build new homes, and Democrats who argue for lower property taxes and less red tape on developers.
“My friends and colleagues that are scattered around the state, they don’t reach out to me on the hot-button issues,” such as immigration raids in Minneapolis, said Spencer Igo, a 30-year-old Republican state representative in Minnesota. “They reach out to me to say, ‘Spence, what are you doing about housing, because we can’t afford it.’”
Affordability politics dominate the midterm election debate, and polls show that housing is voters’ top affordability concern. Housing shortages hit across age groups, but they hit differently. Young renters who have managed to save for a down payment are staying in their rentals because they can’t find homes to buy. That’s often because older homeowners have remained in the houses they bought as young adults because they can’t find a place to downsize or can’t swap low, fixed-rate mortgages for the higher-interest loans now on offer.
Opponents of the housing policies embraced by the younger generation argue — as Mayor Smiley in Providence does — that rent caps scare off developers of new buildings, only adding to housing shortages. Getting rid of existing zoning laws will increase traffic and density, changing the character of established neighborhoods and driving down real estate values, older political figures say.
But to the younger generation, the housing squeeze is personal, and so is the policy response. While most lawmakers are homeowners — 80 percent, by one count — the youngest politicians are often renters, like the vast majority of Americans under 35. Others still live with their parents, or say their young lives were shaped by seeing their families lose their homes in the financial crisis of 2008.
“For people like me, this is deeply personal,” said Manny Rutinel, a Democratic state legislator who is running for Congress in Colorado.
At 31, he is on the older side of the new cohort of Gen Z and young millennial candidates. Raised by a single mother, he recalled as a teenager watching her open the letter saying their house was in foreclosure. His rent, he said, has been rising 15 percent a year.
“We need people who understand this issue in their bones,” he said.
Burhan Azeem, 29 years old and running for State Senate in Massachusetts, kicked off his campaign with a video extolling the state’s legacy of government-sponsored building: the first public schools, the first underground trains.
“Massachusetts is a great place to live,” he says, looking into the camera, “that no one can afford.”
A campaign video for Olaleye Onikuyide, 28 and running for the Connecticut House of Representatives from the suburbs of Hartford, features him urging the passage of a “Golden Girls” law, similar to one that Mr. Rutinel sponsored in Colorado, which allows homeowners to rent out up to three bedrooms to nonrelatives. He had to explain to his social media director why he wanted to use the theme song from the sitcom of the same name, which went off the air before either of them was born.
Some of the young candidates are democratic socialists who take inspiration from Mayors Zohran Mamdani in New York and Katie Wilson in Seattle, who campaigned on capping rents. But their platforms go beyond “The Rent is Too Damn High,” as an erstwhile political party in New York once had it.
“We can freeze the rent today, but we’ll still need 200,000 new homes tomorrow,” said Juliana Bennett, a 26-year-old Democrat on the City Council in Madison, Wis., who is running for State Assembly.
Policy debates on housing tend to divide along generational rather than partisan lines.
“When I talk with my older colleagues who have been in their homes 20 or 30 years, they say, I remember buying my home for $60,000 in 1992,” Mr. Igo said. “I say: I understand that, but I want you to go on Zillow and look in the communities you represent and tell me if someone a few years out of college making $60,000 a year is going to be able to afford a home in your community.”
Many of the policies supported by younger politicians aim to create more homes in the “missing middle” between single-family houses and large apartment buildings. That means eliminating old zoning laws that dictate minimum lot sizes and the number of parking spaces per unit.
The young officeseekers also target regulations that prevent residential units in commercial zones or the construction of townhouses, duplexes, smaller multifamily buildings and backyard accessory dwelling units — what used to be known as mother-in-law apartments.
Mr. Azeem first ran for Cambridge City Council as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, because he could not understand why the council had rejected a proposal to allow the construction of three-story multifamily buildings. The city’s landscape had long been defined by triple-deckers, but zoning laws made it illegal to build new ones, or anything but single-family homes, in many neighborhoods.
He was elected in 2021 and helped eliminate those laws and pass new ones allowing four-story multifamily buildings, with a percentage set aside for low- and moderate-income housing. The city expects to build more than 3,500 new units over the next 15 years, 10 times the number expected under the old zoning laws.
Mr. Azeem also helped put a “starter home” measure on the state ballot in November that would require cities and towns to allow single-family homes on lots of 5,000 square feet or more. It would override existing laws that allow homes only on larger parcels — one-half to two acres, or 21,780 to 87,120 square feet — in much of the state.
In Montana, where a new influx of residents during the Covid-19 pandemic spiked real estate prices, State Representative Katie Zolnikov, a 28-year-old Republican who owns an ice cream shop, helped sponsor a package of laws that has been called “The Montana Miracle.” Among other changes, it eliminated rental application fees and minimum parking mandates on new housing, and required cities with 5,000 residents or more to allow new residential units in commercial areas, and duplexes on any lot.
“I’m more willing to question it,” she said. “Why do we have parking mandates? Why do we have a housing shortage? And if you want to ask the larger question, why is everyone so lonely?”
Many of the youngest politicians embrace what has been called “the housing theory of everything,” which argues not only that housing shortages are at the root of social crises like income inequality and homelessness, but that where you live dictates everything else about your life: where you work, how much time and money you can afford for fun, whether you can start a family.
“People my age feel rudderless,” said Mr. Onikuyide, the assembly candidate in Connecticut, who lives with his parents. “We are maybe the first generation in recent times that is better educated but worse off than our parents. The economy is incredibly volatile, we can’t find jobs, we’re sending resumes into A.I.-fueled black holes, you drive home in traffic to you and your parents’ house, you’re not seeing your friends as much.”
He paraphrased a joke among young housing affordability activists online: “Do you really miss college, or do you just miss living in a walkable community with housing where you get to see your friends every day?”
