Populist Candidates Need More Tech Policy—Reforming Tenant Screening Is A Good Start

The American public's feelings towards the tech sector appear to have established a direction of travel. Positive views of the 'internet industry' fell from a 2015 peak of 60% to 41% in 2025, having bottomed out around 35–36% in 2021–2024. A survey conducted in March indicated that a meaningful chunk of the electorate would choose a nuclear power plant over an AI data center near their home, suggesting that the movement is transcending traditional NIMBY anxieties. A 'techlash' is gathering steam, and barreling into an election year replete with insurgent congressional candidates—many of whom are defying conventional wisdom and unseating incumbents with votes to spare. Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders's (D-Vt.) $7 trillion AI public ownership overture has raised the ambition watermark for tech policy.

To meet the moment, 2026's cohort of upstart candidates need bold, substantive proposals that explain precisely how they'll rein in a hitherto unbridled tech sector.

In this article, we argue that the intersection of housing and technology—specifically, the regulation of tenant screening software—presents a tailor-made policy opening for 2026's outsider slate. Rife with algorithmic discrimination, erroneous background checks, extractive fees, and 24,000 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau complaints to boot, tenant screening has hardly ingratiated itself to working class voters. Its adjacency to populist platform pillars, such as affordable housing, confers out-of-the-box credibility on the topic. And for challengers in renter-heavy metropolitan districts, tenant screening is a rare tech issue that is actually on home turf.

Still, political messaging on the impact of automation hardly writes itself. Even with sentiment towards Silicon Valley at a generational nadir, politicians are rightfully wary of bewildering voters with a complex solution to worker displacement or AI safety. But in the housing context, algorithmic malpractice is far more graspable. Ask any of the ~110 million US renters how they felt (or would feel) being denied a home based on faulty scoring and incorrect criteria, buried in proprietary screening software. Ask any housing applicant if it's fair that following a rejection, the re-screening fee falls again on their shoulders. Another denial, another $40, another draining apartment search back to square one. This scenario is all too common; tenant screening is a billion dollar industry influencing tens of millions of approvals and denials annually. At least 2,000 domestic vendors offer some form of algorithmically mediated report on applicants' housing-worthiness, and nine out of ten landlords employ an automated tenant screening service to filter out "bad" tenants, with over a third following the recommendation without any human review.

The industry's shortcomings are eye-watering. Following tens of thousands of complaints, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau concluded that screening reports are “filled with largely unvalidated information of uncertain accuracy or predictive value". This is in part due to the source data procured from data brokers to score applicants. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) has reintroduced a bill that would chip away at this problem, by restricting the use of criminal background data as an input. However, the incorporation of eviction filings into scoring remains unregulated at a federal level. A Princeton-affiliated study of 3.6 million administrative eviction records across 12 states found that roughly 22% of records contained ambiguous information about how the case was actually resolved. In some locales like D.C., 94.5% of eviction filings don't lead to evictions, but unfortunate tenants remain tainted by the mere presence of a case in the public record. Landlords, when surveyed, do not typically distinguish between successful evictions and those dismissed, settled, or in which the tenant prevailed. With most screening providers failing to make this distinction either, the result is an underclass of renters unable to shake a life-long digital stigma, reinforced by crude, black-boxed algorithms.

The harms are not evenly distributed. Median credit scores, another input into screening algorithms, break sharply along racial lines. Black households appear in eviction filings at nearly twice their share of the renter pool. In the most prominent litigation of tenant screening, Louis v. SafeRent, it was alleged, and deemed plausible by the court, that SafeRent systematically lowered scores for Black and Hispanic applicants intending to pay rent with federal housing vouchers, in part because the algorithm did not credit the 73% of rent that the voucher reliably covered. The screening company paid out millions of dollars and accepted a five year injunction against using its scoring model without third-party validation. An illuminating case that temporarily curbed the unjust practices of a single firm, but did little to regulate tenant screening at large.

Existing federal laws and their enforcement have also proven inadequate. The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) gives consumers the right to dispute inaccurate information in tenant screening reports, but does not require the vendor or landlord to provide a copy of the report to the applicant, so escaping a cycle of unfair rejections is far harder than it appears on paper. Nor is there much motivation to meaningfully improve scoring; the FCRA's $100-$1,000 damages range does not seem to be sufficiently punitive to move the needle. For its part, the Fair Housing Act is supposed to prohibit discrimination in access to housing. However, the most direct enforcement levers, the FHA's Disparate Impact liability and HUD's screening discrimination rule, have been weakened by executive orders. HUD has formally proposed rescinding its disparate impact regulation, and in a sign of things to come, the Department of Justice fully eliminated Title VI's disparate impact provisions. That leaves a private plaintiffs' bar that recovers modest damages case by case, while the tenant screening industry continues unabated.

A substantive proposal to reform tenant screening—dictating what source data is legitimate and non-discriminatory, codifying screening companies as housing providers under the FHA, and forbidding application fees—would slot neatly amongst existing housing-related pledges. It also materially supports an affordability agenda, given that renters spend millions of dollars in aggregate on application fees annually, and far more through the immeasurable opportunity costs of missing out on a first-choice home.

A hypothetical bill can materially address these problems, while remaining understandable, achievable, and common sense. Building on Pressley's April 2026 legislation, the bill could close out the remaining error-prone and racially biased data sources still being used as inputs to deny housing. It could force the disclosure of all sources to applicants, such that they can correct the record and/or sue for damages in the case of discrimination (e.g. rejecting voucher holders) or non-compliance. Provisions that codify screening vendors as housing providers under the Fair Housing Act would officialize their effective role as gatekeepers to stable housing. Simplest of all, the bill could prohibit application fees, which function as a regressive tax on working class renters, and hitting those regularly moving home—e.g. those displaced by automation—the hardest. The fiscal cost of this regulation could be relatively low, and therefore perceived to be more realistic, if the enforcement mechanism is a private right of action with statutory damages, which mostly finances itself through contingency fees. This and other defensible elements have already been proposed by the National Consumer Law Center, Upturn, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

Regulating the PropTech industry is not without precedence, nor is it particularly partisan. The Eviction Crisis Act of 2021, which amended the FCRA to address tenant screening accuracy, was a bipartisan vehicle. States and cities across the country have enacted Fair Chance housing and eviction-sealing laws to blunt the effects of automated discrimination. Late last year, New York Assemblymember Karines Reyes Tapia (D-87) pushed a landmark bill that would force landlords to disclose screening criteria to applicants.

The political case is equally strong. The tech-skeptical constituency is a broadening tent, as demonstrated by the pluralist movement advocating for data center moratoria. That said, as a supply-side instrument, a pause in construction would not protect renters from already-deployed, non-generative,predictive analytics—indeed, tenant screening does not rely on heavy compute at all. What housing and data center debates share is salience and sensitivity. In both cases, even pro-business legislators seem uneasy defending corporate playbooks. The stakeholders aren’t particularly sympathetic; a coterie of private equity-owned companies, lobbyists protecting the interests of landlords, and a PropTech sector that has spent decades minimizing tenant economic power. Conversely, the victims are discernable and close to home; anyone who's paid multiple application fees, anyone who's been denied housing based on an eviction case they won, and anyone who's seen a voucher undermine their search for stable housing.

For a 2026 congressional challenger yet to stake out a concrete position on tech, tenant screening is a highly credible starting point. It signals to voters, volunteers, unions, and community groups that constraining Big Tech's overreach is a priority. It tells the electorate, in no uncertain terms, that their representative will not sit idly by as automation continues to undermine and impoverish working households. It shows they won't align with, nor be the beneficiary of, mailers funded by Silicon Valley super PACs. The legislative scaffolding is halfway there, drafted across various white papers. All that's missing is a champion, willing to broach the tech policy conversation with a formal proposal.