About the event

Abstract

Current housing policy debates focus on America’s supply shortage and the need for tenant protections. These areas are important, but the bedrock of the housing crisis is the sizable portion of renters who do not earn enough money to be profitably housed. A fortunate minority of these households receive a subsidy, but the American state has otherwise abdicated its responsibility to millions of others who struggle to pay rent. In its place, the low-end market relies on for-profit landlords who are expected to provide decent quality housing to the lowest income households.

The talk, based on a forthcoming book American Landlord with Eva Rosen, uses in-depth interviews and observations with 166 landlords and property managers in Baltimore, MD, Dallas, TX, Cleveland, OH, and Washington, DC, to recenter the spotlight on landlord-tenant conflict to highlight the absent state. Landlords in the low-end market almost universally employ strategies that are inequitable, at best, or harmful, at worst. Our data suggest that these strategies are not aberrations, but the inevitable result of landlords’ fundamental dilemma: how to profit from those who cannot afford to be profited from. Or, as landlords put it, how “to get blood from a stone.”