Maxwell Frost made history last month when he won election in Florida’s 10th Congressional District, becoming the first Gen Z member of Congress at just 25 years old. But that historic win didn’t come easy — and now, the financial toll of the campaign is making it difficult for him to secure a home near the House.
In a Twitter thread on Thursday, Frost said that he had just applied to rent an apartment in Washington, D.C. During that process, he told the person taking his application that his “credit was really bad.”
“He said I’d be fine,” Frost said. “Got denied, lost the apartment, and the application fee. This ain’t meant for people who don’t already have money.”
He went on to say that he has bad credit because he “ran up a lot of debt running for Congress for a year and a half.”
During his campaign, Frost told Politico that he had quit his job to focus on campaigning. He drove for Uber to pay his bills, a “sacrifice” he said he made because “I can’t imagine myself not doing anything but fixing the problems we have right now.”
But that money didn’t go far enough, Frost said on Thursday, saying he “didn’t make enough money from Uber itself to pay for my living.”
“It isn’t magic that we won our very difficult race. 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 tweeted. “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.”
Members of the House and Senate earn $174,000 a year, but that salary will not begin until Frost is sworn in on January 3. In the meantime, he needs to find a place to live in D.C.’s pricey housing market. According to Apartment List, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city is $1,786, well above the national average. Zillow shows an even higher cost of living, with a median rent of more than $2,300 for a one-bedroom apartment, slightly over $300 more than what the price was last year.
Frost noted that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez faced something similar when she was elected in 2018.
“I have three months without salary before I’m a member of Congress. So, how do I get an apartment? Those little things are very real,” she told The New York Times. “…I’ve really been just kind of squirreling away and then hoping that gets me to Janaury.”
Four years later, “it’s still a problem,” Frost said Thursday.
“We have to do better for the whole country.”
