Who Owns American Housing? Uncovering the Hidden Role That Landlords Play in Urban Social Life

Abstract

This dissertation draws upon political economic theories that view cities as owned spaces wherein social processes reflect profit making and class conflict, empirical work on which has often been stymied by a lack of data. The first chapter details a computational methodology for tracing through landowners’ shell companies, elaborating their corporate structures and operationalizing a range of characteristics to describe them. Methods for solving this “LLC problem,” and piercing the corporate veil have been an active area of methodological research in recent years, and this chapter presents the most sophisticated and scalable approach yet developed. I draw on these data in the subsequent two chapters, showing the range of analyses that it opens, including aggregate estimates of landlord composition and detailed analyses of individuals’ holdings. In the second chapter, I contribute to the body of scholarship showing how racialized housing markets have created racial wealth disparities, arguing that we have underestimated the full import of these processes by not considering the racialized ownership of rental housing. I show that in majority-Black neighborhoods, more than twice as many rental units are owned by White as by Black landlords and that this ownership gap has only increased in recent years. This results in nearly three billion more dollars being paid every year from Black tenants to White owners than would be expected in the absence of this racist history. The third chapter identifies and analyzes the characteristics of the top evictors in three metro areas, showing that even over a seventeen year period filings are highly concentrated among a small number of landlords, at geographic levels ranging from Census tracts to entire metro areas. I present this as a novel, “investigative” approach to studying social problems, which identifies and analyzes the small number of elite actors who disproportionately contribute to and benefit from poverty, in contrast to conventional approaches that frequently focus on the aggregate characteristics of disadvantaged individuals. These chapters make distinct contributions to (1) computational methodologies, (2) the sociological study of racial inequality, and (3) our understanding of the eviction crisis and urban social problems more broadly.