Jonathan Gray, the president of the largest corporate landlord in the U.S., is a big Kamala Harris donor and is helping Harris court his Wall Street colleagues.
In late July, speaking to a crowd of more than 10,000 people at her first campaign rally in Atlanta, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris vowed to go after corporations that buy up homes and jack up rent.
“We will take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases,” Harris said to great applause.
The Harris campaign has made taking on corporate landlords a major plank of its plans to help make life more affordable for the middle class, and it has become a common theme at her rallies. In her Aug. 16 plan for an “opportunity economy,” the campaign outlined the steps Harris would take to go after these real estate investors during her first 100 days in office.
“Community after community feels taken advantage of by Wall Street investors and distant landlords,” the campaign’s plan says. “Vice President Harris is calling on Congress to pass the Stop Predatory Investing Act, to curtail these practices by removing key tax benefits for major investors who acquire large numbers of single-family rental homes.”
The Harris economic plan also calls for banning rental property owners from using services like RealPage that collect housing data and processes it with algorithms to recommend rent prices or lease terms.
While she campaigns on the issue, the Harris campaign is being backed by the president of the largest corporate landlord in the country, a company that her longtime political advisors are currently helping to defeat a California ballot measure that would expand rent control.
Jonathan Gray, the billionaire president and chief operating officer of investment firm Blackstone, donated $413,000 to the Harris Action Fund in late July, just after President Biden dropped out of the race. Gray also donated $50,000 to the fund last June, while Biden was the nominee, plus $6,600 to the Biden campaign—funds that are now controlled by the Harris campaign.
“These ties to the largest corporate landlord in the US and anti-rent control interests raise serious questions about the sincerity of Harris’s proposal,” said Rob Galbraith, a senior research analyst at the Public Accountability Initiative.
Blackstone, a massive alternative investment management company with over $1 trillion in assets under management, is the largest landlord in the country, owning and managing almost 350,000 units of rental housing, according to a report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP).
For Blackstone, the combination of high mortgage rates and a slowdown in new housing constructions over the past few years has been a golden opportunity to collect more rent—at some of the company’s apartment buildings in San Diego, California, rents were increased by more than 70% from 2021 to 2024, a far larger increase than the market average of about 20%, according to the PESP report.
Gray was a bundler for Biden in 2020, but the Harris campaign—as well as the Trump campaign—has not disclosed its bundlers this election cycle, breaking with tradition, so it’s impossible to know if he is also helping Harris raise money from his wealthy colleagues and friends.
The Harris campaign voluntarily restricts contributions from certain classes of donors that could be perceived as attempting to curry influence with the campaign. Fossil fuel company executives, corporate PACs, registered federal lobbyists, and others are not allowed to donate, according to the campaign’s website.
According to a recent report from the Financial Times, Harris has corralled Gray and other prominent Wall Street Democrats such as Centerview Partners co-founder Blair Effron and Lazard President Ray McGuire to help her broker relationships with other powerful figures in the financial industry. According to the Financial Times, Harris has been trying to reassure finance industry executives that she would be a moderate in office as part of what the news outlet called her “Wall Street charm offensive.”
The Harris campaign declined to comment for this story.
After instating an eviction moratorium during the Covid pandemic, Blackstone resumed evictions in late 2022, allowing it to more quickly increase rents in places like California where there are caps on how much a landlord can increase rents for current tenants, but not on how much they raise the rent for new tenants.
In March of last year, the head of Blackstone’s real estate division Nadeem Meghji highlighted the company’s evictions strategy on an internal company call that was leaked to Insider. “We’re […] seeing a meaningful increase in economic occupancy as we move past what were voluntary eviction restrictions that had been in place for the last couple of years,” Meghji said, according to Insider.
Harris’ close political advisers at the California political consultancy Bearstar Strategies are currently working on behalf of a campaign to kill Proposition 33 in California, a measure on the November ballot that would prohibit the state from preventing local jurisdictions from enacting stronger rent control laws. Bearstar Strategies, formerly called SCRB Strategies, served as a general and media consultant for Harris’ successful campaigns for California Attorney General and U.S. Senate, as well as for her 2020 presidential campaign.
