As Jimmy McMillan's party famously put it: the rent is too damn high. In California’s 46th Congressional District, anchored by Santa Ana, a year of the median rent—$2,232 a month, utilities included—comes to 65.5 percent of what the typical worker there earns in a year. Nationally, the same calculation yields 38 percent.
No House district in the country is more squeezed. That gap underpins Newsweek’s new Rent Belt Index (see at the bottom of this article), which scores all 436 House seats, including Washington, D.C.’s delegate. In 182 of them, rent claims more of a typical paycheck than the national norm, and the norm is already punishing.
A record 22.7 million renter households, 49 percent of the total, spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities in 2024, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Higher rent and utility costs are eating an ever-growing portion of incomes, leaving renters with less to cover essential expenses, such as food and health care, putting greater financial pressure on households. With the midterms just over a week away, the rent belt is where the argument meets the ballot.
The left’s surest wins this year—two democratic socialists in New York—came in the belt’s middle ranks, where most households rent. The hardest-hit districts at the top of the index are held mostly by long-serving Democrats, and two of the top five by Republicans. In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), unseated 10-term Representative Joe Crowley on a platform that called housing a human right.
Her district in the Bronx and Queens scores 124.2, just shy of the belt’s core, and 72 percent of its households rent. Last year, Zohran Mamdani won New York’s mayoralty promising to freeze the rent. In June, a Rent Guidelines Board on which he had appointed six of nine members voted 7-1 to do just that for about 1 million stabilized apartments.
Mamdani called it “a historic victory for New York City tenants.” The Real Estate Board of New York countered that the board had “ignored its own data.” Both New York winners followed that template. On June 23, Assembly member Claire Valdez took 56 percent in the open 7th District’s primary, and community organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier ousted five-term Representative Adriano Espaillat in the 13th, 49 percent to 46 percent. And both districts sit in the belt, at 115.2 and 114.5, and both are overwhelmingly renter: 78 percent of households in the 7th, 87 percent in the 13th.
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