On August 24, the tenants of two buildings near the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles received letters from their landlord notifying them of a rent increase of over $800 a month. The increase was not a result of repairs or tax increases but rather, the letter said, of the upcoming election in November.

The section of the ballot in question is Proposition 10, which, if it passes, would repeal a 1995 state law prohibiting local governments from enacting rent control on apartments and homes built after that year (or even earlier in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco). According to the letter: “Although you don’t want higher rent and we did not plan on charging you higher rent, we may lose our ability to raise rents in the future. ... Therefore, in preparation for the passage of this ballot initiative we must pass along a rent increase today.” If the ballot initiative failed, however, the landlord, Rampart Property Management, promised to “revisit the rent increase with a desire to cancel it.”

For Maria (who prefers not to use her real name out of fear of retaliation by her landlord), waiting to find out was too big a risk. An immigrant from Guatemala, she pays $600 a month to share a bedroom with her 11-year-old son in a two-bedroom apartment—another family lives in the second bedroom, with a fifth tenant taking the living room. A couple hundred dollars extra in rent would not be feasible for Maria, who lives off welfare after losing her job last year. A month later, Maria received a second letter billed as an “olive branch”—a reduction of the increase to $238 a month. When Maria and several other tenants went to the property manager to ask for an explanation, he told them that so many tenants had threatened to leave that the landlord had no choice but to lower the proposed rent hike.

As the vote on rent control approaches, tenants across California have been harassed, served with eviction notices, and forced to pay more rent. In Concord, an entire building of 29 families was given 60-day eviction notices, with landlords explicitly citing Proposition 10 as the cause. In Modesto, tenants of a single-family building were not only notified of a rent increase, but also encouraged to vote against Prop 10, which the landlord said would “eliminat[e] the current availability of single family homes to rent.” Shanti Singh of the California renters’ rights organization Tenants Together says these are not isolated incidents: “This is punishing renters for participating in the democratic process. And we’re expecting to see a lot more of this in the coming month.”

These efforts are part of a massive attack corporate landlords have been waging on rent control across the state. And though they claim to be speaking for the mom-and-pop landlords of California, the leaders of this campaign are some of the largest property owners in the country. Blackstone, the world’s largest real estate management firm, has spent nearly $7 million to defeat Prop 10. Other top donors include Equity Residential, the third-largest apartment owner in the country, and AvalonBay Communities, the twelfth-largest property owner. These mostly Wall Street–based moguls have pooled as much as $60 million (with as much as $2 million raised in the last week alone) primarily to fund an enormous advertising blitz, eclipsing the $22 million raised by the coalition of over 150 housing advocacy, community, political, and faith-based organizations that, along with the California Democratic Party, has rallied around the ballot initiative.