Jackson Brody was combing Craigslist for work when he stumbled across an ad for a paid gig in the East Bay. Pocket $250 for one evening close to home? Seemed almost too good to be true.
Hours after replying to the ad, the 27-year-old got a late-night callback. The guy on the other end of the line was vague: He was looking for people concerned about the cost of living in Concord to attend an upcoming City Council meeting to advocate for “a thoughtful approach” to rent control.
As a renter in Concord, Brody thought it sounded reasonable. So he signed on.
When he showed up the afternoon of March 25 to a park near Concord City Hall, he started to get the sense that something more cynical was afoot.
“You could tell they hadn’t conducted a very selective hiring process,” Brody recounted. Of the few dozen people enlisted, several needed translators, and some wore ragtag ensembles of ripped jeans and torn shoes. “But it was really when they started talking that I realized this was pretty much agitprop for landlords.”
The organizers who hired Brody and the others turned out to be from the California Apartment Association, the nation’s largest state landlord lobby. For 80 years, the CAA has worked to advance policies that align with the interests of investors, developers, and landlords of rental properties — including California’s landmark tax-revolt law Prop. 13.
In April 2024, Concord — a suburb of 120,000, where median gross rents increased by 62% from 2011 to 2011, according to city data — joined a wave of Bay Area cities enacting stronger tenant protections, requiring landlords to establish “just cause” to evict anyone and extending price controls to about half of its rental stock. Like ordinances in San Francisco, San Pablo, Pittsburg, Antioch, Richmond, and Oakland, the regulations in Concord capped annual rent hikes at 3% or 60% of regional inflation — whichever is lower — for apartments built before 1995.
Landlords failed to gather enough signatures for a referendum in the immediate aftermath. It was Councilman Pablo Benavente who delivered a clear counterstrike just weeks after he was sworn into office. The first-term lawmaker, whose 2024 campaign drew more than 10% of its funding from donors associated with a controversial property management company and the California Association of Realtors, proposed a measure that would more than double the annual maximum rent increase, to 7%.
‘It was really when they started talking that I realized this was pretty much agitprop for landlords.’
Jackson Brody, activist hired by the California Apartment Association
Ahead of the March 25 council meeting, CAA reps handed Brody and the rest of the group T-shirts and signs with “Repeal rent control” and other messages — decidedly less nuanced than the “thoughtful approach” Brody said he was pitched. Then they walked over to the council chambers for a populist show of mercenary solidarity with the landlord lobby.
As the five-hour meeting drew to a close, several of the hired activists took turns at the podium to echo lukewarm support for Benavente’s proposal. Some couldn’t remember his last name, and most didn’t provide theirs. “My name is Shantal S.,” one said, “and I’m here to support Pablo’s … thing.”
Whether swayed or not by CAA’s hired activists, the council voted 3-2 for a compromise measure to raise allowable rent increases to 5% and provide just-cause eviction exemptions for some homes and condos. Benavente told The Standard that he had no idea so many of his supporters were paid actors.
Pervasive influence
The CAA’s political influence extends to virtually every jurisdiction in the state, where it has helped defeat initiatives like Prop. 33, the Justice for Renters Act, a measure on the 2024 ballot that would have expanded rent control protections by repealing the Costa-Hawkins Act.
On the local level, the CAA has fought municipal ordinances on rent control, both openly and behind the scenes, throughout California, including in Concord, Alameda, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Burlingame, Santa Rosa, and Sacramento.
Pro-tenant activists say the CAA’s tactics are reflective of its pervasive political influence. According to a report by renters rights groups, the lobbying association has donated to 70% of California legislators and spent more than $121 million between 2018 and 2020 to defeat statewide ballot measures aiming to protect tenants.
Much of the CAA’s political influence is funneled through obscure political action committees such as Keep California Golden, A Pipeline Project, Golden State Voices United, and the No on Prop. 33 PAC, which donated $10,000 to San Francisco YIMBY. Those PACs, in turn, donate to YIMBY-backed candidates in the Bay Area and beyond.
For people who spent years advocating for stronger tenant protections, revelations that a significant number of those speaking out against rent control at the March 25 City Council meeting were paid actors stoked tensions to the point of physical confrontation. Concord police had to intervene when the two sides came to blows inside council chambers. The CAA seized on the incident to cast pro-tenant organizers as aggressive, while renters rights activists accused the other side of provoking a fight.
The CAA didn’t deny hiring people to show up to the meeting and included a photo of the paid supporters in a March 26 newsletter celebrating the council vote. A spokesperson said the opposing tenant activists deserve more scrutiny.
“These so-called ‘renters activists’ constantly recruit and incentivize interested activists to attend council meetings,” said the CAA’s senior vice president of local public affairs, Rhovy Lyn Antonio. “They offer free food, child care, free T-shirts, premade posters and banners, and prewritten scripts to recite, as well as other compensation to supporters to pack the City Council chambers to create an illusion of support.”
Shamelle Salahuddin, whose PR firm recruited people on the CAA’s behalf, said that just because she paid them doesn’t mean their support wasn’t genuine.
‘I took careful measures to recruit from the community and to showcase real people with real and valid concerns. … Being compensated for their time is a nice incentive to assure we will have voices heard.’
Shamelle Salahuddin, public relations CEO and activist recruiter
“All participants in the town hall meeting were all Bay Area residents, primarily Concord constituents who supported the cause of commonsense housing reforms,” she said. “I took careful measures to recruit from the community and to showcase real people with real and valid concerns. Many took off from work to be able to attend the very long meeting. Being compensated for their time is a nice incentive to assure we will have voices heard.”
A self-described “human rights activist since high school,” she said she has long advocated for activists to get paid.
“This notion that activists need to show up and spend energy for free is ridiculous in this ever-growing capitalist society we all live in,” she said.
Strictly speaking, Betty Gabaldon — a veteran tenant organizer on the opposite side of the debate on rent control — would agree. The 50-year-old renter pockets a modest paycheck from the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, which organizes renters to show up to public hearings like the one in Concord.
The difference is that it took eight years of tireless, uncompensated activism before she became a full-time organizer. During that time, she lost her apartment and nearly lapsed into homelessness as the single mom of a young daughter.
The issue is less about the direct cash payment than the authenticity of support, Gabaldon said. Someone responding to a Craigslist job ad to advocate for a cause they know little about in exchange for quick cash is in no way comparable to the kind of educated activism that brought her to the March 25 council meeting.
“I tried to talk to some of these paid ‘activists,’ and it seemed like they didn’t even know about the amendment,” she said. “Some of them didn’t even live in Concord. They responded to an ad because they needed the money. The CAA took advantage of that.”
Conflicted about his role in the covert astroturf campaign, Brody took it upon himself to document what happened behind the scenes — most notably when the CAA-recruited activists collected their payments after nightfall in a nearby parking lot.
“It’s not a good look to have people who care about this issue all gathered and getting cash and somebody catching that,” Salahuddin is heard saying on one of Brody’s secretly recorded videoclips. “They’re going to take a picture of that, and it’s going to go viral.”
It was hardly the first time a special-interest group paid for the illusion of grassroots support, but it was a rare instance when the orchestrators were caught in the act.
‘A dangerous trend’
Renters advocates say what happened in Concord reflects a growing trend of compensation distorting genuine civic involvement.
“This strategy of using cash incentives to influence political outcomes — whether it’s the CAA paying people to oppose rent control or [Elon] Musk giving massive cash rewards to potential voters — represents a dangerous trend where wealthy interests attempt to literally purchase public support rather than earning it through legitimate advocacy,” said Anya Svanoe, a spokesperson for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, which supports the renters activists in Concord.
When Donald Trump launched his first presidential campaign, he was widely mocked for descending an escalator to a throng of cheering fans who turned out to be actors hired for $50 a pop.
In 2018, a New Orleans energy company lobbying for a new power plant copped to hiring a PR firm that in turn worked with a subcontractor called Crowds on Demand to recruit “supporters” to pack public meetings and advocate for the controversial facility.
In 2019, America’s largest gas utility tried to stymie a push to limit natural gas in California by establishing a consumer group advocating for “balanced energy solutions.”
An ad on Craigslist this month offered compensation for “Trump-supporting, Tesla-loving patriots” to rally outside a Tesla dealership in Placer County. “For the past few months, protesters have gathered there every Saturday,” the post read. “Now, it’s our turn to rise, to show the Red Wave of Placer County, to demonstrate that true freedom still has warriors willing to defend it.”
Yet another ad offered $60 to participate in a three-hour union-led protest April 9 in Sacramento against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s return-to-office mandate for state workers. “We’re looking for passionate, energetic individuals to support an important rally protest!” the ad read. The job description included using “megaphones to lead chants and energize the crowd and film on your iPhone,” helping “create a dynamic and impactful presence” and supporting “a meaningful cause by amplifying our message.”
It’s unclear how many times the CAA has offered cash to people for taking up space at a public hearing — or whether it plans to use a similar tactic when the Concord rent-control amendment comes up for a second reading April 22.
Tahirah Dean, an attorney for renters rights group Public Advocates, said the fact that the CAA is paying mostly people of color as hired activists seems like tokenization.
“It’s really just shocking that they’re targeting Black and Latino people to do this,” she said. And they didn’t even need to, she added: “The crazy part is that the landlords are already winning, too.”