House Winners Must Now Find a Home

They were just getting to the part about House ethics in the new members’ orientation one Friday last month when the South Bay’s new Republican congressman, Steve Kuykendall, had to duck out to attend to a matter of great urgency.

He had to look at an apartment.

It was a 1950s-bland studio in a building called Hill House, where about half the tenants are members of Congress and the manager is a guy named Buzz. It was $750 a month and Kuykendall took it on the spot.

“It’s one room with a kitchenette on one side and a closet you walk through to go the bathroom,” he said. “I lucked out.”

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Every two years brings an army of occupation as the new members of Congress and their staffs invade a crowded capital city in search of a place to live. But this year it’s even worse. The real estate market is going gangbusters and Capitol Hill has morphed into a little Manhattan. Housing is scarce and legislators are paying premium prices.

“Seven-hundred and fifty dollars for an efficiency is outrageous by old Washington standards. But not anymore,” said Peter Tierney, a rental housing consultant at Yarmouth Management on Capitol Hill, where 10% of the current apartment hunters are members of Congress or their staffs.

The 106th Congress convenes in January. Its members all need places to sleep, particularly those from faraway states like California, where home is a miserable seven-hour plane ride away.

Tierney’s specialty is helping lawmakers find rentals. The first thing he tells them is: If you get a lead on something, keep it to yourself. It seems that at a recent cocktail party, the wife of one new member told the wife of another new member about the great apartment she found. The next morning, wife No. 2 rented it out from under wife No. 1.

“And they were both Dems!” Tierney shrieked. “You expect that kind of thing to cross party lines, but this. . . .”

Some new lawmakers just sell their district homes and move to Washington. But many of today’s lawmakers are a different breed, who take great pains to look like Beltway outsiders even though they work here. They keep their main residences in their home states and fly there every weekend.

A weekend for Congress is, of course, quite different from a weekend for the rest of humanity--Thursday night to Tuesday morning. That means members generally spend two nights actually sleeping in Washington. And since a second house or flat means double rent, double utilities and double taxes, many members come up with ingenious ways to survive in the federal city.

Rep. Tom Campbell (R-San Jose) sleeps over at his mother-in-law’s house in Virginia.

Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-San Diego) has a 70-foot houseboat at the Capitol Yacht Club (which, by the way, is right near the dilapidated marina for which he recently helped win $3 million in federal funds to refurbish).

Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) has for more than 20 years run an infamous Animal House, renting beds to three other lawmakers--all Democrats--two of whom sleep in the living room. It has books, Bruce Springsteen albums and a big refrigerator. They go to Price Club and buy large barrels of pretzels, watch late-night television and eat unusual amounts of Italian food.

Californian Leon Panetta lived there until President Clinton appointed him chief of staff. Then he got his own place. “It makes the Washington experience tolerable. Washington can be a cold place,” Miller’s aide, Dan Weiss, said.

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Some members exhibit astonishingly low standards of living in their mission to save a few bucks.

Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), sleeps on an air mattress in his office that he blows up every night and deflates in the morning. Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) curls up on his office couch. When the door is closed, his staff calls first to make sure he is awake.

There was something of a flap three years ago when some members complained that sleeping in the office to avoid paying rent like the rest of us was yet another elitist congressional perk. But House Speaker Newt Gingrich decreed it was OK “unless it becomes a health hazard.” And so it became quite common.

Kuykendall said he saw plenty of evidence of office camping while recently selecting his Capitol Hill office. (Lest he miss a beat, Kuykendall left an aide behind to take notes while he briefly ducked out of the how-to seminar.)

“There were mattresses propped up against the wall and some of the bathrooms looked like closets,” he said. “It’s pretty clear that’s what was going on.”

The wise ones come into Washington the day after the election and grab whatever housing they can find. The unenlightened wait.

Doug Ose, the Republican-elect from west Sacramento, spent a week trying to find a house with his wife and children, 4 and 6. They gave up, deciding it was too big a decision to make in a hurry.

So where is he going to sleep after he’s sworn in? “I have no idea,” he said.

One member who waited too long ended up checking into a Washington bed and breakfast. He liked it so much that the proprietor had a hard time keeping him from taking up residence.

And there’s always the air mattress.

“I didn’t run for Congress so I could sleep on the floor of the Longworth House Office Building, I’ll tell you that,” Ose said emphatically. “My wife and I are going to find a solution to this so we can lead as normal a life as possible in Washington.”

A roof over your head is one thing. But a normal life, too?

Good luck.