Michigan State Sen. Sean McCann built his congressional campaign on a promise to crack down on negligent landlords, but city records show his own rental properties racked up code violations for fire hazards and dangerous electrical systems that took months to fix.
McCann, the newly minted Democratic nominee in Michigan's Fourth Congressional District, owns two rental homes in Kalamazoo through a company called McLam Properties LLC. Federal financial disclosures show he collects between $15,001 and $50,000 a year in rental income from those properties. And while he was pushing legislation in Lansing that would force landlords to make emergency repairs within 48 hours, his own tenants were living with expired fire extinguishers, missing smoke detectors, and wiring problems city inspectors flagged as dangerous.
The gap between McCann's public rhetoric and his private record as a landlord is not a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of city inspection records, reviewed by the New York Post, that document violation after violation at properties he owns and profits from.
One of McCann's Kalamazoo rental homes failed a city code inspection in January 2025. Inspectors cited fire hazards including crowding around gas heating units, an expired fire extinguisher, missing smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, and what the city described as "excessive" use of extension cords substituting for permanent wiring. Those violations took four months to resolve.
The second property was worse. City inspectors flagged at least 11 violations in August 2024, including "dangerous" electrical systems, another expired fire extinguisher, a missing carbon monoxide detector, and peeling wall coverings and paint. Those violations were not fully resolved for 17 months.
Seventeen months. For dangerous electrical systems and missing carbon monoxide detectors in a home where people pay rent to live.
McCann's campaign spokesperson, Simone Archer-Kraus, told the Post that the senator and his LLC "follows the law and fully complies with the City of Kalamazoo ordinances." And technically, that appears to be true, the violations were resolved within the timelines current law requires. But that defense only sharpens the contradiction at the center of McCann's campaign.
Since June 2024, McCann has championed what he calls the Tenant Empowerment Package in the Michigan Senate. The legislation would force landlords to make repairs within 48 hours for conditions deemed "hazardous to life or imminently hazardous to the health and safety" of renters. Other violations would require fixes within seven days. Tenants who don't see repairs could withhold rent, depositing the money into an escrow account released to the landlord only after the work is done.
By those standards, McCann's own proposed standards, his properties would have been in serious trouble. A 48-hour deadline for fire hazards and dangerous electrical systems is a far cry from the four months and 17 months his properties actually needed. The bill has sparked what the Post described as bitter debate in Lansing. It has not become law.
So McCann proposed a standard he could not meet himself, then campaigned on it as proof of his commitment to tenants.
None of this slowed McCann down in the Democratic primary. He defeated Diop Harris, a former legislative correspondent for ex-U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, by more than 30 percentage points. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has identified Michigan's Fourth District as one of three Republican-held Michigan seats it hopes to flip, and the party has publicly touted McCann's commitment to tenants' interests.
McCann will face Rep. Bill Huizenga, the Republican incumbent who was first elected in 2010 and is seeking an eighth term. Archer-Kraus framed the general election as a contrast in priorities:
"Sean has a history and voting record of siding with Michigan families to stand up to slumlords and in Congress he'll keep pushing for safer and more affordable housing, because while Bill Huizenga sells luxury condos and lines his own pockets, Sean works to make life better for regular people."
The accusation that Huizenga "lines his own pockets" is a McCann campaign claim, not an independently verified finding. But it is worth noting the irony of that particular line of attack coming from a candidate who collects up to $50,000 a year from rental properties that city inspectors found riddled with fire hazards and dangerous wiring.
On July 16, 2025, McCann posted on X what amounted to a campaign manifesto:
"I've been delivering for this region for the last 30 years from cracking down on slumlords to passing important tax relief for seniors and working families. I'm not afraid to stand up to bullies and people who vote to increase costs for hardworking families."
Cracking down on slumlords. That is the phrase McCann chose to define his public career. Meanwhile, his own LLC let a property sit with 11 code violations, including dangerous electrical systems, for nearly a year and a half before making them right.
McCann is not the first elected Democrat to face scrutiny for a gap between public moralizing and private conduct. When the standard a politician sets is high enough, even legal compliance can look like hypocrisy if the politician's own behavior falls well short of the rules he wants to impose on everyone else. Colorado state Rep. Steve Lebsock's expulsion from the state House after sexual misconduct allegations showed what happens when a party's proclaimed values collide with a member's actual conduct, though the circumstances were far more severe, the underlying pattern of saying one thing and doing another is familiar territory for Democratic officeholders.
McCann's campaign insists he complied with the law. That may be true under the current rules. But McCann himself argued those rules are not good enough, that landlords who take too long to fix fire hazards and dangerous wiring are failing their tenants. He proposed legislation to force faster action. He called it cracking down on slumlords.
Then he took months, and in one case, more than a year, to fix the same kinds of problems in his own properties, while collecting rent the entire time.
Voters in Michigan's Fourth District will have to decide whether a man who writes the rules for landlords but cannot follow his own proposed standards deserves a promotion to Congress. The record speaks plainly enough.
