Housing costs form a significant proportion of any voters monthly expenditure. While a growing literature has studied the political implications of house prices and house ownership, much less is known about the political economy of housing in countries dominated by rental markets. Starting from the observation that renting property follows a fundamentally different market experience than owning property, we develop an original argument that highlights that the political implications of rental market exposure reach well beyond pocketbook considerations. Changing rental prices create an imminent source of insecurity, which threatens individuals far beyond the poorest strata of society and may make affected voters susceptible to the promises of anti-system parties. We rely on a novel data source containing unusually detailed information on cost and quality of local rental markets over time in Germany, the country with the highest share of citizens living in rented apartments in the entire European Union. We merge this data by postcode with individual-level panel data. Our analysis is based on a rigorous set of fixed-effects specifications and provides strong empirical evidence for our guiding hypothesis on both the household- and the neighborhood-level.