In early December, Maxwell Frost tweeted that he had been denied an apartment in Washington, DC, because of “really bad credit.” This is noteworthy only because the twenty-five year-old Florida Democrat was elected to the United States House of Representatives in November. In subsequent comments Frost engaged in a denial of responsibility for his past choices.
In the Twitter thread, Frost wrote that,
I knew that to win at 25 yrs old, I’d need to be a full time candidate. 7 days a week, 10-12 hours a day. It’s not sustainable or right but it’s what we had to do.
As a candidate, you can’t give yourself a stipend or anything till the very end of your campaign. So most of the run, you have no $ coming in unless you work a second job.
What we have is a young man who made a conscious decision to quit his full-time job to run for Congress. He then made the decision to run up credit card debt to finance his campaign. Despite these choices, he now bemoans the fact that a landlord views his credit history as a negative. He went on to imply that he will use his new power to address the issue, writing, “We have to do better for the whole country.”
Housing activists have successfully been working to get “ban the box” laws applied to rental housing. Such laws typically prohibit a landlord from considering an applicant’s criminal history prior to making an offer for housing. It is not a stretch to believe that this will soon be extended to credit history.
Despite the claims of activists, committing a crime or having bad credit are the result of an individual’s choices. A landlord wants some assurance that a tenant will not engage in criminal activity, be a threat to other tenants and neighbors, and will pay his rent on time. Both criminal history and credit history provide valuable information regarding an individual’s trustworthiness and dependability.
Landlords must be discriminating when choosing a tenant. Housing activists want to eliminate a crucial tool for making rational decisions. In the process, tenants and their political supporters are engaging in a denial of responsibility for past choices.