Gothamist
A non-profit newsroom, powered by WNYC.
Gothamist
Listen Live
News
Real estate donations to Ciattarelli place rising rents at center of NJ governor’s race
By
Mike Hayes
Published Sep 26, 2025
Share
FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
Never miss a story
Email address
By submitting your information, you're agreeing to receive communications from New York Public Radio in accordance with our Terms .
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
By
Mike Hayes
Published Sep 26, 2025
Share
FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
We rely on your support to make local news available to all
Make your contribution now and help Gothamist thrive in 2026. Donate today
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
It was a simple question, but the answer was revealing.
During Sunday’s debate between the two candidates vying to become New Jersey’s next governor, an audience member stood up and asked how they planned to lower skyrocketing rental prices.
Democratic nominee Mikie Sherrill went on the attack. And her response has drawn attention to a wealthy real estate family that’s poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into backing Republican nominee Jack Ciattarelli and how the family’s company has used a price-setting algorithm to determine rents for thousands of tenants across the state.
“We know Jack's not going to do anything about it because one of his biggest donors is actually being taken to court and sued on this very issue,” Sherrill said on the debate stage.
Although she didn’t mention the donor by name, she was referring to the Kurtz family and its company, the Kamson Corporation, which owns and operates over 10,000 apartments in New Jersey. The company is one of 10 real-estate firms — along with the software business RealPage Inc. — that state Attorney General Matthew Platkin likened to a cartel. In a lawsuit his office filed in April, it argues that the companies’ use of RealPage’s algorithm amounts to collusion in driving up rent prices, though they are contesting the accusation.
The Kurtzes are among Ciattarelli’s biggest donors. Family members have donated more than $750,000 to Ciattarelli’s multiple bids for the governor’s office since 2021, according to campaign contribution data reviewed by Gothamist, including a $200,000 contribution to a political action committee in June that’s running attack ads against Sherrill.
Affordability issues are at the center of what is becoming a tight race for governor, and political experts said Ciattarelli’s ties to the Kurtz family could be seen as being at odds with the interests of New Jersey’s roughly 1.2 million renter households. Kamson has also faced fines from state regulators over a slew of building violations at one of its apartment complexes in South Jersey where two small children were killed in a fire in 2023.
While Ciattarelli has primarily focused on lowering property taxes and energy costs for homeowners and landlords as a way to make the state more affordable, Sherrill has pledged to crack down on negligent landlords and the type of rent increases identified in the attorney general’s lawsuit.
Jack Ciattarelli and Mikie Sherrill on the debate stage at Rider University on Sept. 21.
Peter G. Borg/Rider University
Micah Rasmussen, director of Rider University's Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics who formerly served as a press secretary for Gov. Jim McGreevey, said her stance shows a willingness to tackle concerns about possible collusion in the rental market head on.
“If one candidate is addressing these marketplace failures and the need to fix the rental marketplace and one candidate isn't, then you need to take note of that as a voter. And you also need to ask yourself why,” Rasmussen told Gothamist. He was a panelist in Sunday’s debate.
Jeff Kurtz, president of Kamson Corporation, said his firm’s use of the algorithm was justified in setting market-rate rents and that it makes efforts to ensure safety across its portfolio apartments. RealPage declined to comment. In a previous statement, it said its software is legally compliant. The companies filed a motion in July to dismiss the case, calling it “baseless.”
“We'll fight the lawsuit. We feel we're completely in the right using their product,” Kurtz said, adding that the family is backing Ciattarelli because it believes he’ll do a better job as governor than Sherrill.
“ The people of New Jersey are important to us. The businesses are important to us. The services are important to us. All of it. So we back who we believe is the best person to be in charge of our state,” he said.
Ciattarelli’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the family’s donations.
A long list of donations
Richard Kurtz, the family’s 85-year-old billionaire patriarch who once sold New Jersey’s most expensive home, founded Kamson in the 1970s. He and his son Jeff now run the company, which owns large apartment complexes across the state, including a 699-unit development in Blackwood, New Jersey and multiple complexes in towns such as Clifton, Piscataway and Lumberton that contain 300 to 400 dwellings.
The elder Kurtz has personally donated $4,900 to Ciattarelli since 2021, the cap on individual donations at that time. Records show he also donated $250,000 to the conservative political action committee Kitchen Table Conservatives, which is backing Ciattarelli.
In 2022, Politico reported that Kurtz was behind another pro-Ciattarelli political action committee, Garden State Rescue. Records show Kurtz injected $487,500 into the group in 2021.
Jeff Kurtz has donated $16,500 to Ciattarelli since 2021. Records show his wife Sharon also donated $5,800 to Ciattarelli in 2024, the maximum allowed that year.
The family has also donated $25,600 to Democratic NJ Rep. Josh Gottheimer since 2021, according to campaign finance data.
Matt Hale, associate professor of political science at Seton Hall University, said that, while it’s normal for politicians to have big donors, voters could be turned off by Ciattarelli's connection to the Kurtzes, given the allegations against them.
“One of the ways that you judge a candidate is by the company they keep. I think that that one way voters look at it as [he’s] buddies with rich people that aren't me. And I don't know that that's a great message,” he said.
Jack Ciattarelli at a campaign event in Roxbury, New Jersey
Mike Hayes
In total, Ciattarelli’s campaign alone has received over $250,000 from real-estate industry donors in this year’s gubernatorial campaign. Industry advocacy groups that have also received donations from the Kurtzes have fought statewide legislation that would ban the use of rent setting algorithms like those offered by RealPage. They’ve also lobbied against rent-control measures.
Sherrill’s campaign has received its own share of real-estate donor money — more than $100,000 this year, though far less than Ciattarelli. That includes a $5,800 contribution from developer Steven Plofker, who also owns The George hotel in his hometown of Montclair with his wife, makeup mogul Bobbi Brown.
NJ developer Chris Yegen also gave Sherrill the maximum $5,800. In 2015 his company attempted to terminate tenants’ rent-stabilized leases in a Union City building he purchased after it was damaged in a fire that displaced 20 families. His company wanted to rebuild the property and charge market-rate rents but later lost in court.
The pro-Sherill political action committee One Giant Leap received $25,000 from a construction industry association that endorsed President Donald Trump and is opposed to federal rules that require contractors to accept union agreements. One Giant Leap returned the money in March, according to the New Jersey Globe.
Sherrill’s campaign declined to comment on the donations.
Safety concerns
The three-alarm fire that killed two small children in May 2023 damaged more than a dozen apartments at the Kamson Corporation’s 1,492-unit Fox Meadow complex in Maple Shade, New Jersey.
A year after the fire, the state’s Department of Community Affairs conducted a five-year routine inspection of the Fox Meadow property in October 2024. The agency’s report found 1,044 violations. These included 287 marked as “life safety” issues. Of those, 276 noted that smoke and carbon monoxide detectors were missing in apartments and the buildings’ hallways.
Months earlier, the father of the children who later died, Alan Marles, had told ABC6 Action News that the family’s apartment had an “infestation” of mice and falling drywall. Other Fox Meadow residents told ABC6 that their requests to fix problems went unanswered and that some had moved out over safety concerns.
The Fox Meadow apartment complex in Maple Shade, New Jersey.
Mike Hayes
Maple Shade Police investigated the fire that killed the Marles children. The department denied an open records request for the findings of its investigation citing a criminal investigation exemption. Efforts to reach the Marles family for this story were unsuccessful.
Jeff Kurtz told Gothamist that the company ensures that every unit at Fox Meadows has a working smoke and carbon monoxide detector before any resident moves in.
“I can't go through those apartments on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. A lot of times when the smoke detector chirps, rather than people replacing the battery, they'll take that smoke detector down, they'll take that carbon monoxide detector down,” he said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Community Affairs said that a reinspection in August 2025 found zero violations at Fox Meadow.
Kamson has paid $21,250 in fines from the state over property violations at Fox Meadow since 2022.
“ Health and welfare of a resident for us is most important. It's paramount to everything else,” Kurtz said.
He did not rule out that the family’s hefty financial support for Ciattarelli could change as the campaign continued.
“ We think Jack right now is the better person. And by the way, that may shift. We may hear something out of Mikie Sherrill’s mouth that makes us feel she's the right person for the job,” he said.
Tagged
Politics
election
housing
new jersey
Mike Hayes
Mike Hayes covers equity and access to opportunity in New Jersey. He joined WNYC and Gothamist in 2023. Before that, he worked as a freelance journalist writing about policing and criminal justice. He has written for ProPublica, CNN, HuffPost, BuzzFeed News and The Appeal. He is also the author of the book, “The Secret Files: Bill De Blasio, The NYPD, and the Broken Promises of Police Reform.” In 2019, he was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists.
Read more
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
MORE news
Dump truck driver hits and kills cyclist on 34th Street in Midtown, NYPD says
It's the latest in a string of hit-and-run deaths in the city in recent months.
By
Liam Quigley
Published Sep 28, 2026 at 4:15 p.m. ET
New ingredient mandated for Latin American kitchen, restaurant plates in NJ
The Garden State now requires that corn masa dough and flour made and sold in the state be fortified with folic acid.
By
Arya Sundaram
News
New ingredient mandated for Latin American kitchen, restaurant plates in NJ
The Garden State now requires that corn masa dough and flour made and sold in the state be fortified with folic acid.
By
Arya Sundaram
A Brooklyn jail cell filled with smoke. The emergency button failed, a lawyer said.
By
Samantha Max
Crews launch tunnel machines to dig first new Hudson River rail tunnels since 1910
By
Michael Sol Warren
NYC nor’easter dries up after weather service reports minor flooding
By
Ramsey Khalifeh
Never miss a story
Catch up on the most important headlines with a roundup of essential NYC stories, delivered to your inbox daily.
Sign upEmail address
By submitting your information, you're agreeing to receive communications from New York Public Radio in accordance with our Terms .