The youngest person ever elected to Congress says he was denied an apartment in Washington DC due to his bad credit history.
Maxwell Frost, a 25-year-old Democrat from Florida, said in a Twitter thread this week that he was apartment hunting ahead of his swearing-in ceremony next month.
The Gen-Z congressman-elect shared that he notified the landlord of his poor credit history, which he said was due to quitting his job to campaign full time, and was told it wouldn’t be a problem.
“He said I’d be fine. Got denied, lost the apartment, and the application fee,” Mr Frost wrote in a tweet.
Mr Frost, the first Gen Z member elected to Congress, tweeted that he ran up “a lot of debt” after quitting his job as an Uber driver while running to replace Val Demmings in Florida’s 10th district.
“For that primary, I quit my full time job cause 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,” he said.
In 2018, just-elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told the New York Times she too struggled to afford an apartment in Washington DC.
She quit her job as a waitress at a New York taqueria to run for Congress, and explained that during the period between election day and swearing-in, she was unable to draw an income.
“I have three months without a salary before I’m a member of Congress. So, how do I get an apartment? Those little things are very real,” she told the Times.
Members of Congress earn a base salary of $174,000.
According to property site Zillow, the median rent for an apartment in Washington DC is $2,600 per month.
Mr Frost’s campaign manager Kevin Lata told The Independent it was an “indictment of how bad the housing crisis is in our country when a member of Congress can’t get approved for an apartment”.
