After years of punishing rent increases, activists across Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area are pushing a spate of rent control proposals, driven by outrage over soaring housing prices and fears that the growing income gap is turning middle-class families into an endangered species. Those campaigns, if successful, would lead to the largest expansion of tenant laws since the 1970s.

“In the national picture, tenants’ rights and housing advocacy for the poor has been pretty sleepy for several decades,” said Michelle Wilde Anderson, a law professor at Stanford. “California is starting to wake up, and it may lead to national change.”