Tom Steyer’s real estate holdings add latest wrinkle to his populist pitch
As an avowed progressive candidate running for California governor, Tom Steyer has pledged to build 1 million new homes to address a dire housing shortage. At times, he’s directed some blame at “corporate landlords” who he says profit as Californians struggle to endure skyrocketing housing costs.
“I’m going to stop Wall Street from buying up middle class homes,” Steyer said in one ad.
But as an investor, the former hedge fund manager has earned double-digit returns from a related investment vehicle: residential apartment complexes that have at times raised fees, evicted tenants and suffered major maintenance issues.
The Democrat has roughly $3.5 million invested in several funds run by Walnut Creek-based Bridge Partners, which owns apartment buildings across the country but is concentrated in California.
Many people may be unknowingly exposed to similar investments through their pensions or 401k. As an investor, Steyer didn’t have direct oversight over the properties and would not have been informed about evictions or maintenance issues. A Steyer spokesperson said he invested in Bridge properties because of the firm’s focus on multifamily affordable housing.
And Bridge Partners’ CEO, Julie Gutzwiller, said the firm is committed to residents’ wellbeing, spending up to $30,000 per unit improving its apartments.
But public records, interviews with tenants and online reviews of the properties suggest at the very least, investors and tenants are not always equal winners.
In the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, Bridge Partners sold an aging affordable housing complex earlier this year for over $5 million more than it paid for it in 2019, prompting the company’s Chief Investment Officer Brad Harrington to boast on LinkedIn of a “great result for our investors.”
But some residents say the property was poorly maintained, with one reporting sewage seeping into her bathtub. Bridge Partners also filed more than three dozen eviction cases against tenants in the 100-unit complex, though online court records don’t indicate the reasons for the claims and not all filings end in evictions.
County code inspectors cited another of the company’s properties, Copper Creek Apartments in Carmichael, nine times since 2019, including for a sewer issue that posed such a severe public health risk county officials threatened to take over repairs.
Separately, recent disclosures show Steyer has smaller investments of less than $1 million in Brookfield Corporation, an asset management company whose vast holdings include mobile home parks that have drawn scrutiny from private equity watchdogs.
As the second-highest polling Democrat and only billionaire in the race, Steyer’s financial holdings have become a key focal point ahead of the June 2 primary. He’s faced repeated attacks from rivals like Xavier Becerra, the apparent frontrunner, over Steyer’s previous investments in private prisons and fossil fuels as well as his current holdings in offshore private equity funds.
The real estate investments underscore a central challenge of his candidacy: persuading progressive voters that a billionaire can be a credible populist — and that his days profiting from potentially problematic industries are fully behind him.
Steyer has said he regrets his past fossil fuel and prison investments and removed them from his Forbes-estimated $2.4 billion portfolio. And he has suggested his wealth allows him to avoid being swayed by business and industry interests.
“In a world where politicians serve special interests, I can’t be bought,” Steyer said in February.
Most self-funded candidates have been unapologetic about the sources of their wealth, said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego. Steyer, on the other hand, has spoken extensively about his pivot toward progressive politics and away from his life as a high-flying hedge fund manager.
“That marks him as taking a different approach than other self-funded candidates,” Kousser said. “But it also keeps the conversation going about where he raised his money and what that says about his values.”
Participating in ‘The System’
Bridge Partners isn’t a household name in the world of real estate investing and its footprint is more modest than some of the larger players in the space.
But its funds tout strong returns for investors. One of the firm’s executives said investors in one earlier fund, including Steyer, earned net annualized returns of about 16% over eight years.
Gutzwiller said the company buys neglected properties, spends between $10,000 and $30,000 per unit to improve its apartments and caps rent increases below market rates.
“Our strategy is consistent: We acquire existing multifamily assets with the objective of improving housing quality and long-term viability,” Gutzwiller said in an email.
Still, some residents said the company has fallen short of those goals.
At a complex in Jackson, Wyoming — one of the most expensive rental markets in the U.S. — residents reported rent hikes, fee increases and issues with cleanliness after Bridge Partners purchased what was then called Blair Place Apartments in 2021.
“Under the new management, the building is dusty, trash piles up, and garbage sits out longer in common spaces like the laundry room,” the Jackson Hole News & Guide reported in 2024.
The apartment complex, rebranded as Latitude 43, is one of the few relatively affordable options in the richest county in the U.S. But the News & Guide noted that after Bridge Partners purchased the property, residents must pay eight extra fees in addition to rent, from homeowners association fee to a real estate tax.
“Really unsatisfied with the service we are provided by them with the amount they charge (broken laundry for months on end, flooded parking lots, fallen signs, poor communication),” one renter said in a 2023 government survey of Teton County renters.
Steyer’s tax returns show he invested in a fund created to buy the property. Gutzwiller said the apartments charged below market rate rents and renewal rates, at 80-90%, reflected the fact that it remained an affordable option in the area.
Steyer also invested in a fund that until earlier this year owned Sumner Estates, an older property complex about 20 minutes outside Nashville that includes some tenants whose rent is subsidized by government vouchers. The complex’s website advertises two-bedroom units starting at $1,250.
Chellie Wilson said she moved into the building in 2019 with her two children because it was the cheapest she could afford. She recalled the building’s new owners making a raft of promises, adding new playground equipment and a pool.
Instead, Wilson said the company added a coat of paint to siding, “cheap vinyl flooring” and changed the complex’s signage.
The Waffle House waitress said the building’s management was inattentive to a raft of deeper issues, from sewage backups that crept into her bathtub to mold and a malfunctioning air conditioning unit.
Wilson said she fell behind on rent and, at the apartment managers’ request, successfully sought COVID-19 rental relief funds that the apartment then refused to take and evicted her in 2021 — variations on a theme Wilson said she saw play out again and again in the building.
“It’s an atrocious situation,” Wilson said.
Gutzwiller said the company invested $22,000 per unit during their ownership of the building, including making major repairs to problems they’d inherited with plumbing and HVAC systems as well as overhauling apartments’ interiors. She described evictions as a “last resort” to address tenants who weren’t paying rent, and said they worked with tenants to accept COVID relief funds.
Steyer’s disclosures show he holds less than $1 million in stock from Brookfield Corporation, an unrelated asset management firm whose holdings include nearly 100 mobile home parks, according to the watchdog nonprofit Private Equity Stakeholder Project. The Financial Times reported in September that the company is in talks to grow its portfolio by acquiring more than 200 mobile home parks owned by Yes! Communities
The potential consolidation raised alarm bells with PESP, who’ve noted institutional investors have a track record of sharply increasing rents on their properties.
Steyer’s former hedge fund, Farallon Capital, bet big on mobile home parks in 2007, purchasing a company that owned around 275 mobile home parks. The company sold off those holdings in 2012 and 2013 — including some of them to Yes! Communities — around the time Steyer stepped away from the business.
Steyer spokesperson Anthony York said the Democrat invested in Bridge Partners because of the company’s focus on multifamily affordable housing. York said Steyer co-founded Beneficial State Bank with his wife, Kat Taylor, which York said financed 17,000 affordable housing units.
“We have a housing crisis in California, and across the country, and Tom has spent years committed to building more housing,” York said.
York said Steyer would place his holdings in a blind trust if he wins the governor’s race.
Tim Thomas, research director at UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project, said he was not familiar with Bridge Partners. But he said institutional investors were increasingly purchasing “naturally occurring affordable housing” — often older apartment buildings with relatively affordable rents — with an eye toward increasing margins through deferred maintenance, rent increases, add-on fees and stricter eviction enforcement.
Thomas argued the issue went well beyond Steyer, whom Thomas said shouldn’t be blamed for his investments given how little insight investors have into operations like evictions. He argued for new tenant protections, like the right to counsel for people facing eviction and rental assistance to keep people housed.
“Steyer didn’t say, ‘Hey, jack up the rent’” Thomas said. “He was just literally participating in the quote-unquote ‘system.’”
Campaign cash as character test
Steyer is not the only candidate invested in the housing business. Becerra’s disclosures show he and his wife Carolyn Reyes collected rent on four homes in California, earning nearly $110,000 in 2024, according to Becerra’s tax returns.
Unlike Steyer’s more than 1,000-page tax returns, Becerra’s disclosures and returns show minimal other investments.
Becerra has touted the benefits of homeownership over renting. Asked at a Sacramento rally how his policies would help renters, Becerra said he hoped to turn them into homeowners, touting his proposal to offer down-payment assistance to first-time homebuyers.
“When you just rent, you’re living month to month on your income,” Becerra said. “When you buy, you’re developing wealth.”
The two Democrats have frequently tussled for moral high ground over their connections to industries that voters might see as unsavory. Becerra has accused Steyer of using his profits from fossil fuels and private prisons to fuel his nearly $200 million in campaign spending.
“He has spent more than every other candidate combined in his campaign—using those profits to now try to buy his seat at the governor’s office,” Becerra said at a CNN debate earlier this month.
Steyer has hammered Becerra for accepting a $39,200 contribution from Chevron, and noted an array of corporate interests, including Meta, Airbnb, and California Medical Association, who have in recent weeks thrown large contributions at an independent committee boosting Becerra. Steyer’s campaign also highlighted a separate committee specifically set up to thwart his gubernatorial bid, funded with more than $31 million from groups like PG&E, California Chamber of Commerce and the California Association of Realtors.
“Every corporate check in Becerra’s account is proof he’s part of the problem — and proof that Tom Steyer is the one candidate they can’t get to,” Steyer spokesperson Danni Wang said in a press release last week.
Kousser, the political science professor, said the candidates were speaking to voters’ wariness on how candidates fund their campaigns.
“We have this cliché that money is the root of all evil,” Kousser said. “But I think people have this intuition that evil is the root of all money — that however you earn your money, it probably came from somewhere crooked. And that’s a skepticism that all these candidates need to battle.”
This story was originally published May 27, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
