Episode 29: Landlords, Discrimination, and Eviction with Eva Rosen and Philip Garboden

Garboden and Rosen, "Serial Filing: How Landlords use the Threat of Eviction"

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Episode Summary: Landlords don’t have a great reputation. But despite the central role that landlords play in the housing market, there is surprisingly little research into how they operate. Eva Rosen and Philip Garboden interviewed more than 150 landlords in Baltimore, Dallas, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. in an effort to better understand the motivations behind their actions — in their own words. On the one hand, they see real problems with the actions of landlords. This includes frequent use of eviction threats and filings, reframing the landlord-tenant relationship into one of creditor-debtor, and application processes that seek to proactively identify “good” tenants — and which often violate fair housing laws, intentionally or not. They also see stark differences between small “mom-and-pop” and larger, more “professionalized” landlords, though perhaps not in the ways one might expect. On the other hand, they observe a system of housing provision that asks more than landlords can necessarily offer, while society as a whole shirks its responsibilities to many of those who need housing assistance. Eva and Philip join us to share their findings and discuss possible solutions.

Serial Filing: How Landlords use the Threat of Eviction

  • “Recent research has drawn attention to eviction as a primary cause of involuntary residential mobility (Desmond 2012; Hartman and Robinson 2003; Purser 2014), with detrimental consequences for children and families (Dong et al. 2005; Oishi 2010; Pribesh and Downey 1999; Sampson, Morenoff, and Earls 1999; Sharkey and Sampson 2010; Ziol–Guest and McKenna 2014). However, while the execution of an eviction notice—along with the physical removal of a family from the home—is endemic in the lives of the urban poor, its frequency pales in comparison to the number of poor families who face the threat of eviction each month. In Baltimore, for example, about 6,500 evictions are executed per year, while landlords file for eviction approximately 150,000 times, more than once for every renter household in the city (PJC 2015; Purser 2014).1 An enormous number of poor families live under constant threat of eviction, even when they are not forced to relocate.”

 

  • “Eviction is typically theorized as a discrete action serving a purely punitive function: putting a tenant out and marking their record. But given that the extended process results in the removal of a tenant in only a minority of cases, we ask: How does the eviction process operate beyond this terminal moment? This paper draws on interviews and observations with 127 randomly sampled landlords and property managers in Baltimore, Dallas, and Cleveland to examine landlords’ strategies related to eviction, with a particular focus on the extended process of evicting rather than the discrete, and relatively rarer, instance of eviction. We define evicting as lasting from the time the landlord informs the tenant that she is late on her rent until she either pays off her debt or leaves the unit—a process that can range from just a few days to a nearly perpetual cycle of arrearage.”

 

  • “We find evidence that landlords serially file for eviction on the same tenants in the same units, with the goal not of removing them, but rather of collecting rent (see also Immergluck et al. 2019). Thus, eviction matters not just as a cause of involuntary mobility, but represents a fundamental aspect of the rental experience for poor families. We argue that the process of eviction should be theorized not just as a moment of expulsion, but also as an ongoing set of relations between landlord and tenant (see Burawoy 2017) … Building off recent theoretical work on indebtedness (Graeber 2014; Joseph 2014; Lazzarato 2012), we argue that the process of eviction shifts the landlord–tenant relationship from owner–renter to creditor–debtor, with important consequences for the parameters of exchange. Not only does this shift have the potential to directly increase rental profits through late fees and fines, but its core advantage is also to amplify the imbalance of power, opening up profitmaking strategies that might otherwise be resisted by renters.”

 

  • “By redefining renters as debtors, filing assists in rent collection by leveraging the police power of the state to materially and symbolically support the landlord’s collection efforts. As economic actors, landlords describe their approach to the eviction process in terms of profit maximization and economic rationality. For them, eviction solves a worst–case problem—a non–paying tenant—but it comes with a variety of additional costs related to vacancy and property turnover. For this reason, landlords in all three cities work hard to avoid executing an eviction, with exceptions mainly in cases of property conversion or sale. But more broadly, we show that landlords see initiating the eviction process as a type of behavioral corrective designed to produce constrained consumers.”

 

  • “The process of evicting reframes late rent payments as the tenant’s moral failing rather than a structural reality, legitimating alternative and sometimes extra–legal strategies of financial extraction (cf. Lazzarato 2012). This means that it can be beneficial for landlords to house tenants in small amounts of arrearage, even beyond what is necessary for legal eviction. This phenomenon is particularly common for tenants with housing vouchers whose rent is paid in majority to the landlord directly by the local Public Housing Authority. In these cases, trivial debts instigate the threat of eviction and loss of the voucher—a devastating outcome given the long waitlists for housing subsidies in all three of our sites and across the country. Landlords understand that tenants who are behind on their rent are less likely to advocate for their legal rights regarding housing quality and code enforcement. Moreover, if a late rent case is active against a tenant, a landlord is able to use that debt as a “slam–dunk” cause for eviction if they wish to remove the tenant for reasons not typically supported by housing court judges. This means that landlords can skirt other responsibilities without fear of reprisal.”

 

  • “[E]mergent literatures have greatly improved our understanding of the role the affordability crisis plays in maintaining the “circle of dispossession”—the periodic cycles of involuntary mobility and wealth extraction faced by poor renters (Purser 2014).We add to this work by addressing two key and interconnected gaps. First, is that despite a few rough sketches, there has been little attempt to understand eviction from the supply–side. If, as Desmond suggests, “the relationship between nonpayment of rent and eviction [is] anything but straightforward” (2016:128), then how do landlords decide how, when, and whom to evict? Second, the literature has generally focused on the actual moment of removing a family from a home, both the most visible and most measurable step in the eviction process. But, as described above, the execution of eviction occurs only in the minority of cases in which an eviction process is initiated, meaning that focusing on the terminal outcome may underestimate the impact of the eviction system on the lives of the poor.”

 

  • “While landlords speak about rent indebtedness in concrete profitmaking terms, their actions fit into a larger theoretical framework on the ability of debt to define and redefine social relations through economic exchange (Graeber 2014; Joseph 2014; Lazzarato 2012). The renter–owner relationship has been characterized as an unbalanced struggle over “the property rights of control and benefit” (Allen and McDowell 1989), which is generally resolved in favor of the owner (Harvey 2017:37). Nevertheless, the contractual nature of this relationship, as manifested in the lease agreement, allows both parties to exercise their legal rights, at least theoretically. When this contractual relationship is reshaped as debt it “constitutes the subject as dependent as inevitably located in asymmetrical relations” (Joseph 2014:21; Roitman 2003). By introducing issues of morality and dependency into an already imbalanced economic process, the monthly transformation of rent into debt is designed to limit renters’ access to legal means of resistance (as paying customers), housing them at the discretion of the landlord (Graeber 2014; Lazzarato 2012).”

 

  • “While understudied in the literature, there is evidence to suggest that debt–induced insecurity may have significant consequences, even when involuntary relocation is deferred. Desmond documents how tenants offer labor to work off debt (Desmond 2016). Less benignly, recent research documents how landlords may wield the threat of eviction to exact sexual favors from tenants (Tester 2008). Furthermore, tenants facing the threat of eviction may fear calling the authorities for issues such as domestic violence (Desmond and Valdez 2012). Among subsidized renters, the threat of eviction (synonymous with voucher loss for a voucher tenant) can be used to encourage desirable voucher tenants to stay, rather than move and take their subsidy with them (Rosen 2014). More understanding is needed of how the threat of eviction may be used to wield coercive power over tenants.”

 

  • “For landlords, executing an eviction solves a nonpayment problem, but simultaneously creates a vacancy problem. A landlord’s decision to execute an eviction involves weighing the estimated likelihood that a tenant will pay their rent arrears with the anticipated amount of time a property will sit vacant while repairs are made and a new tenant found (which is largely dependent in the tightness of the market in which the landlord is operating). While rarely explicit, this basic decision calculus means that landlords execute evictions only when they believe the tenant will not pay their back debt—a worst case scenario for which eviction is the only solution. While this fact does not prevent landlords in our three cities from executing evictions at rates deleterious to poor tenants, it does mean that they work hard to avoid executing evictions when other options are available. Moreover, landlords described the process as burdensome, time consuming, and emotionally difficult, adding additional deterrents.”

 

  • “While a tenant is in a unit, the landlord can still exert a combination of carrots and sticks to collect back rent; but once a family leaves, all our landlords agreed that the probability of collecting on any rent debt drops to zero. Landlords can, of course, pursue the debts in civil court even to the point of wage garnishment, but most believe this is futile. Those who did file did so out of a desire for revenge and professional solidarity—they wanted to damage the tenant’s credit history and warn off other landlords, but had little expectation of actually collecting the money at this late stage in the game.”

 

  • [T]he process of repeated (“serial”) filing for eviction and charging late fees, even on tenants who are expected to eventually pay their rent, is used by some landlords as an additional revenue source … An eviction filing serves to align the financial position of the landlord with a larger apparatus of civil justice, which deprives the tenant of any recourse short of payment.”

 

  • “While the monthly threat of eviction serves landlords as a blunt instrument for reducing nonpayment rates, the more experienced landlords in our sample used serial eviction filings as a process designed to shape tenant behavior and coerce resources from a tenant who must pay her debt or become unhoused. Renting an apartment is theoretically a choice, rooted in the logics of contractual exchange, but the conversion of rent to debt fundamentally reshapes this dynamic. As Graeber points out, “during the time that [a] debt remains unpaid, the logic of hierarchy takes hold. There is no reciprocity” (2014:121). Landlords gain the upper hand, with important effects for tenants’ ability (or perceived ability) to advocate for their own rights.”

 

  • “While Mark’s [one of the interviewed landlords] theory is based on an uninformed understanding of his tenants’ spending, his practice of filing for evictions regularly is very effective at reducing his lost rent. Mark owns and manages about 400 single–family units in Baltimore. When we interviewed him, he shared his spreadsheets tracking rent receivables with us. Like many landlords in his market niche, he had a high incidence of late rent—about 20 percent of his voucher tenants and 30–45 percent of his market tenants did not pay their rent on time in any given month (totaling about 100 late tenants a month). Nevertheless, Mark executed only a handful of evictions each month because, he claims, his tenants know that they will be held to the terms of the lease and thus pay him on time. Focusing on the filing rather than the execution turns the punitive action of evicting into a threat that can serve as a corrective action.”

 

  • “In several cases, landlords noted that when a tenant is late on their rent, even if only a small amount, they are able to use that as a pretext for an eviction motivated on grounds that would be otherwise unallowable … Neither threatening to sue a landlord, cussing him out, nor being the family member of a criminal are legal grounds for eviction. However, because these tenants were under threat of eviction due to rental arrears, it was a simple matter for Charlie [a landlord] to get them out of his units when the time came.”

 

  • “We find that landlords use serial filing to create the threat of eviction—often stopping short of the actual act—for two reasons. First, there are economic reasons: Eviction is expensive, whereas the threat of eviction can often generate revenue … Second, the threat of eviction both reflects and leverages the hierarchical relationship of debtor–creditor, rather than merely tenant–landlord … In these ways, serial filing for eviction to create a threat rather than an expulsion turns a purely punitive action into a “corrective” one.”

 

Racial Discrimination in Housing: How Landlords Use Algorithms and Home Visits to Screen Tenants

  • “In this article, we move beyond two simplifying assumptions of racial discrimination research. The first assumption is that housing applicant pools are heterogeneous with respect to race, limiting discrimination to the act of favoring White tenants over non-White tenants (Turner et al. 2002; Turner et al. 2013; Wienk 1979). The second simplifying assumption is that race represents a phenotype that can be experimentally manipulated by changing a single signifier (e.g., skin color or name [see Gaddis 2017]), rather than an intersectional, socially constructed category that is both ascribed and performed (Kohler-Hausmann 2019; Lacy 2007). We push beyond the limits of these two assumptions by describing how landlords screen prospective tenants in predominantly homogenous rental markets, and how landlords’ racial constructions of their prospective tenants shape these strategies.”

 

  • “We draw our data from interviews and observations with 157 landlords who rent in lower-cost housing markets in Baltimore, Maryland; Cleveland, Ohio; Dallas, Texas; and Washington, DC. We find that landlords face a predicament: they aim to select tenants based on a fundamentally unobservable characteristic—tenants’ future performance as “good” or “bad,” that is, whether they will pay rent reliably and cause minimal property damage. Because landlords cannot observe this future behavior directly, they use two sets of proxies to attempt to predict the profitability of a particular tenant: algorithmic proxies and gut proxies. In both approaches, we find race plays a key role, both implicitly and explicitly, and only rarely operates in isolation; race also intersects with other stigmatizing factors such as gender, social class, housing subsidy status, and family size.”

 

  • “Our fieldwork suggests approaches to tenant screening cleave by landlord type and market niche. More professionalized and resourced landlords tend to rely on formal screening techniques: legal and superficially objective algorithms that calculate a prospective tenant’s eligibility based on income, credit report, criminal history, and residential history. In contrast, smaller-scale landlords more often make “gut”-level decisions based on highly subjective—and sometimes illegal—tenant signifiers, including appearance, demeanor, family status, and expressed and ascribed racial identity. These landlords use a range of informal screening mechanisms, such as home visits, visual inspections of children’s cleanliness, and idiosyncratic questionnaires to weed out “problem” tenants they judge to have messy homes, unruly children, and poor self-management skills. While these informal tests increase landlords’ willingness to overlook a red flag in a tenant’s history (e.g., a previous eviction or rent debt), they simultaneously require that tenants conform to landlords’ expectations of deservingness, expectations that are formed at the intersection of gender, class, and race.”

 

  • “These two approaches—algorithmic screening and gut proxies—operate very differently and define exclusionary boundaries in meaningfully different ways. Both techniques increase the burden on tenants as they seek to find housing, and they differentiate between tenants in ways that reflect predominant racist narratives of respectability. Landlords—professional and amateur, Black and White—recounted common narratives of the Black underclass and the so-called culture of poverty. These beliefs, in turn, shaped how they evaluated their tenants. Thus, their distinction between a “good” and a “bad” minority tenant is based on the degree to which that tenant conforms to (or defies) modes of behavior and algorithmic metrics that align with these insidious cultural narratives.”

 

  • “A nascent body of research examines how purportedly race-blind algorithms—used in employment, criminal justice, and even self-driving cars—can reinforce racial inequality … Algorithms streamline discrimination, facilitating and justifying racial stratification (Benjamin 2019). Despite the “magical thinking” Broussard says algorithmic technology leads us to, algorithms do not do much to prevent racism or dismantle racial inequality.”

 

  • “The literature from labor economics on algorithmic bias examines what gatekeepers do when they lack key information about applicants during the screening process. Findings show that when such information is removed, employers fall back on other knowable data points, such as race, that may be correlated with criminal background … This body of work sheds light on the manner in which employers—and possibly professionals in other sectors, such as landlords—operating in low-information environments use observable signals in place of unobservable signals, with adverse outcomes for marginalized groups.”

 

  • “Prior research supports the importance of taking an intersectional approach to housing discrimination. For example, an audit study finds that low-income Black women who spoke “Black English Vernacular” experienced the most discrimination during their housing search and were asked to pay more per rental application (Massey and Lundy 2001). A housing search study among voucher recipients finds that tenants, in particular women, engaged in emotional labor such as weeping to get landlords to “take a chance” on renting to them despite blemishes on their rental records (Rosenblatt and Cossyleon 2018). Tenants who decline to negotiate their way into a lease through these gendered performances stand at a disadvantage. Other research shows how the affordable housing crisis makes Black women especially vulnerable to sexual harassment by landlords (Cahan 1987; Karafin and Tester 2007; Reed, Collinsworth, and Fitzgerald 2005; Tester 2008).”

 

  • “More professionalized landlords with larger portfolios tend to rely on systematized screening software algorithms designed by third-party companies such as Corelogic, RealPage, LeaseRunner, and Online Rental Exchange. When we asked their property managers how they decided whether to accept a tenant, they explained the simple process: “we just put their information into the computer and it tells us whether they qualify.” These algorithms account for legally-observable traits such as income, credit, criminal background, and eviction history, and they allow large property owners to make systematic decisions that protect them from fair housing lawsuits … When asked to reflect on these systems, property managers emphasized the importance of “fairness” to avoid running afoul of fair housing law. But theirs is a very limited view of fairness, one that means treating everyone exactly the same regardless of circumstance.”

 

  • “One reason why landlords screen so carefully is to avoid what they think of as the “professional tenant,” an imagined tenant who is out to get the landlord, who moves in with the intent to stay as long as possible without paying rent, and then moves on to the next unwitting landlord. In Roger’s words: “The professional tenant . . . they know that they’re more savvy than you. Since they’re on Section 8, sometimes they may not be as eloquent or have the look that you think they should have. [But] the professional tenant is more savvy than the landlord.”

 

  • “Our findings regarding racial stigma are especially intriguing given that the landlords in our sample were majority non-White, with many having the same racial appearance as their tenants. Yet we find little significant difference in the way Black, White, Asian, and Latino landlords screen their tenants. Similarly, in previous research with this sample, we found no differences in the frequency with which Black and White landlords talked about their tenants using a “culture of poverty” framing (Rosen and Garboden 2020). But it would be wrong to interpret this finding as suggesting that landlord race does not matter—only that it does not matter in a crude way, based on skin color alone. As we argue, screening is based not just on an applicant’s skin color, but on the landlord’s racialized, gendered, and classed evaluations of the tenant’s value.”

 

  • “As we seek to understand why and how discrimination happens, we must look not only to the proximate actors who maintain this system—landlords—but also to the larger context that allows this to happen. The question of how landlords should screen is itself limited by a world in which housing is not a right. When housing is a right, the question shifts from focusing on “who is the best tenant?” to “how can we provide housing for everyone?” The fact remains that there is not enough affordable rental housing in this country, we do not have enough tenant protections, and we do not guarantee housing assistance. We must hold landlords using discriminatory screening practices to account, but our research also points to the larger problem: rental assistance for low-income families in this country is not sufficient to meet the demand. Private landlords are left holding the bag. And one way they attempt to mitigate risk is by using imperfect—often racist, sexist, and otherwise discriminatory—screening tools to judge tenants’ worth.”

Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello, this is the UCLA housing voice Podcast. I'm Shane Phillips. We've got two guests for this one professor Eva Rosen of Georgetown University and Professor Philip Garboden with the University of Hawaii, Eva and Philip are co authors on a bundle of research articles about how landlords operate based on more than 100 Landlord interviews across four cities. As we discuss, these were fairly intensive interviews that were accompanied by eviction court visits, ride alongs with sheriffs who are executing evictions, and following along with some landlords in their day to day work. This is very much a qualitative body of research with an emphasis on learning how landlords think, in their own words. What they found is fascinating, and in some cases really surprising to each article takes on a different aspect of landlording. First is the use of repeated eviction threats and filings, but not necessarily executed evictions that actually forced tenants to vacate as a tactic for collecting rent, and also simply to gain leverage over tenants. The second is about how landlords choose their tenants and the legal as well as illegal methods that they use to discriminate between applicants and find quote unquote, good tenants. The third article is how landlords see themselves and their tenants in moral terms, paternalistic terms, we unfortunately run out of time before talking about that last one, but you'll pick up on that theme throughout this interview. I do want to note that we jump right into talking about evictions without ever really explaining the whole eviction process. That's partly because it varies quite a bit from place to place, which is itself a big problem for researchers interested in comparing eviction rates and outcomes in different states. But for anyone interested, we've included a general overview of how evictions work in our show notes. The housing voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and we've received production support from Claudia Bustamante and Olivia Urena, send me your feedback or show ideas at shanephillips@ucla.edu. And don't forget to give us a five star rating and review if you're a fan. With that, let's talk to Eva and Phillip.

Michael Lens 2:29
Eva Rosen is associate professor at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy she does a lot of great research on poverty and US housing policy. She is no stranger to the UCLA Lewis Center, as in the very early pandemic times, we hosted her to speak about her book, The Voucher Promise: Section Eight Housing and the Fate of an American Neighborhood. It's a great book and is the winner of Book Awards for both the American Sociological Association, and the Association of Collegiate Schools of planning. We're also joined I believe it's a first time we have a double guest. So this is a special episode. Second time, second time, second time, okay, two for two. We're also joined by Phil Garboden is He is also an outstanding scholar on poverty and US housing policy, and a frequent collaborator of Eva's. Phil is the ACRC, professor in affordable housing, and Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization and Department of Urban and Regional Planning. He has done a lot of great work on housing, including issues of housing, mobility, and landlords, which we'll talk about today. And hello, Shane. Shane Phillips, our illustrious host, I kick it to you.

Shane Phillips 3:46
Hey there, Mike, and welcome Philip and Eva,

Eva Rosen 3:50
thank you so much for having us.

Phillip Garboden 3:52
Yes thank you.

Shane Phillips 3:53
So as we always do, we will start with a tour here or two. In this case, we'll ask that you keep things brief, since we got a lot to go through here. And two guests just add a bunch more. But if you were giving us a tour around, say your hometown, a place that you have lived and loved, and you wanted to show it off, where would you want to take us? I think we could start with Eva here.

Eva Rosen 4:14
Sure. So um, DC is not my hometown, but it's where I currently live. And this might be cheating, but I'll be honest, one of my favorite ways to tour a city is through housing tour. Phil actually gives a great housing tour of Baltimore, if you ever need one of those. DC DC is a really interesting place when it comes to housing because it's sort of a city of extremes. So it has a lot of tenant protections, but it's also really very developer friendly. And of course, it has this dual population of the typical Capitol Hill Washington type who has a fair bit of money to spend and may not even live in the city full time but then also a long standing black middle class and working classes, who have been historically sort of confined to certain areas of the city and are now being pushed out to areas like In George's County, and whenever I want to show students what racial segregation looks like on a map, I show them Washington DC, because the black white dividing line is just so stark. But despite these divisions, I think it's an incredibly diverse place where people really do come together from all different walks of life to try to solve problems, both through formal channels, but also informal ones. And so it's of course known for it's like Washington with a capital W politics. But the local politics are really fascinating to watch and be a part of, and I think that's especially true when it comes to housing, which which we'll talk about a bunch today.

Shane Phillips 5:36
And Philip?

Phillip Garboden 5:37
Yeah, I My hometown is a lovely place called Framingham, Massachusetts. It's commuting suburb of Boston, it exists and continues to exist, and how's my mother, but beyond that, I don't have much to say about it. So I'll I'll focus on the two cities I know best, which are Baltimore and Honolulu. I moved to Honolulu a few years ago from Baltimore. And I think what's been really interesting about that transition is you have two cities that really could not be more different from a housing market perspective, right? Baltimore has 16,000 houses that nobody wants that are abandoned. And in Honolulu, a, you know, a postage stamp sized piece of land is worth, you know, a million dollars at this point. So And yet, the sort of struggles that low income and poor families face in both places are astoundingly similar. So it's been a really interesting lesson sort of personal comparative urbanism, to see to see the ways in which very different causes create strikingly similar outcomes for certain populations, to the one large difference. And the one I think it's always very interesting to talk about in Honolulu, is the role that Native Hawaiians play in land use and politics here. You know, in Baltimore, it's very easy, and I think, all too easy to forget the indigenous peoples of Central Maryland. But here, due to a lot of historical factors, those issues are much more pressing. And before I came here, I hadn't really thought much about the possibilities of sovereignty and sovereignty movements in the ways that make make land use even more complicated, and certainly make the role of a researcher from the east coast all the more complicated. So it's been it's a fascinating place to do housing work.

Shane Phillips 7:19
Yeah. And I feel like if Framingham is looking for a new motto, "it exists". Reinforcement if there ever was one,

Michael Lens 7:28
Put that on the sign.

Shane Phillips 7:31
Welcome to Framingham. It exists. We're discussing two papers in this episode, the first in the journal, city and community and authored by Eva and Phillip titled "Serial filing: how landlords use the threat of eviction". The second article is in American Sociological Review and titled "racial discrimination in housing: how landlords use algorithms and home visits to screen tenants". And this one has an additional author, Jennifer Castiglion. There is actually a third paper by Eva and Phillip about landlord paternalism, which we may be able to touch on, but will at least include in the show notes. In any case, the first and third papers draw from 127 interviews with a random sample of landlords and property managers in Baltimore, Dallas and Cleveland, and the one on racial discrimination ads 30 interviews in Washington, DC. So that's part of why we're packaging all of these together in this conversation. To summarize really quickly, the first paper looks at how landlords and property managers use the threat of eviction much more frequently than they actually evict tenants, often as a way to strengthen their position in the landlord tenant power dynamic, and especially as a way to collect late rent. The second paper evaluates the landlord tenant relationship at an earlier stage during the application process to move into a rental unit. It focuses on the ways that landlords discriminate between potential tenants in various ways, including by race, but also how screening methods differ between landlords with large portfolios and mom and pops who own maybe just a few units or a few dozen units. The last paper is about landlord paternalism, how landlords see their tenants and themselves in moral terms, how they use different strategies, most of them punitive to, quote, train their tenants to become more responsible and self reliant and in the process more profitable, ultimately to the landlord. So that's a loaded topic of course, we will kick things off with the serial eviction paper, and I think a good place to start is the distinction you make between evictions and evicting. Phillip starting with you. Tell us what you mean by those terms, and why the distinction is important for understanding the landlord tenant dynamic. And maybe what we miss by focusing so much on evictions themselves, the point when the tenant is actually removed from their home. We've discussed the harms people can suffer from eviction in Episode 12 with Elizabeth Delmelle, and somewhat also in Episode Seven with Kristin Perkins. But I think a quick overview of what we know of the harms of both eviction and evicting would be really helpful here.

Phillip Garboden 10:14
Wonderful. Yeah, I think that's a really important distinction that we were trying to get across the paper between the sort of moment of eviction, right the sort of removal of a family from a home involuntarily. And what we see as for some families really a never ending cycle of evicting, which has very meaningful but different impacts on on their well being. You know, when we, when we wrote the article, in some ways, it was a response to a lot of eviction research, this was very early on in the in the days of evicted research, which was only a few years ago, that a lot of papers were sort of conflating the two, they were sort of assuming that every filing, more or less resulted in an executed eviction. And that's just fundamentally not the case. And I think the literature has moved very well in the direction of really seeing them as connected, obviously, but distinct phenomenon. The study that really made it the most obvious to us, this sort of cyclical process was Baltimore. So Baltimore has a somewhat unusual eviction process insofar as the first formal warning between the landlord and the tenant, which usually happens, basically, through a certified letter and a lot of other places actually creates a paper trail administrative paper trail in Baltimore. That pretty much creates logistical problems for the court, but allows you to sort of see a part of the eviction process that is often invisible to researchers through conditions traditional surveying means. And so I think, assume the numbers have changed somewhat recently, with with the chaos of the last few years. But prior to the pandemic, Baltimore was seeing about 180,000 eviction warnings happening every year. And there's only about 110,000 rental households in the city of Baltimore. So it was really clear that not every renter household was getting formally removed from a unit and the importance of sort of taking that whole process as the state. So you know, in Baltimore, that there's a, you know, 180,000 warnings, and then 30 to 40,000. Court adjudications, and then about 7000 8000 families are sort of formally evicted each year, although, you know, the degree to which those that result in mobility that hasn't already occurred is still an open question. And so even though that last number is still shockingly high, we felt like a lot of what's going on within the eviction world is happening in those initial stages of landlords using the threat to eviction, essentially as a form of rent collection of forcing tenants to prioritize rental payments over other financial needs, that household might have at that given moment.

Eva Rosen 12:40
Yeah, I would just add that this sort of interestingly, in the popular well, as Phil said, I think the academic literature has moved to really make this clear distinction between the process of filing for eviction, and the actual executed eviction itself. I think, surprisingly, among local politicians, certainly in the city that I know, well, there's really still just a huge conflation between the filing and the actual executed evictions, and like an incredible misunderstanding. Therefore, if you are only considering actual evictions, a far fewer people are affected by the process. Whereas if you take into account some of these earlier stages, whether it's the official filing, which is documented everywhere, or in the case of Baltimore's FFO pointed out, the pre filing notice, there's just a much larger population that that is affected. And of course, while eviction itself has, you know, all kinds of very well researched effects on households, like, you know, kids doing less well in school or parents losing their jobs or mental health effects. I mean, the latest paper during during COVID. Right, the big paper that that shows that eviction was associated with a much higher death rate during COVID times, right. So we know that eviction itself has all of these really tangible effects. But the emotional toll, I think of knowing that your that your housing situation is unstable is is really tremendous. And beyond the emotional toll, we know that the eviction that the filing record, right, the fact of having your name in the court database, whether or not it resulted in an eviction is really, really bad for tenants, it results in a much more difficult process of finding housing in the future. So and this is something that directly came up in our interviews with landlords and has been sort of established and other ways since then. Landlords when they look at a tenants residents, residential history, they do not distinguish between a past filing versus a past eviction. It's sort of like, you know, in the criminal context, being charged with something versus being convicted of something as if those were the same things, right. So this is a huge problem. And then if you take a city like DC, which has a very high filing rate, it can tell us a lot I think about how broken the eviction system is. So something like one in nine renter households in DC gets filed on every year. But 95% of those filings never make it to an eviction and 70% are dismissed by the judge outright. And most of the time, this is because the tenant has actually paid in between the time the filing was made and the time they get up in front of the judge. So, as Phil pointed out, this sort of tells us that landlords aren't using the court as a debt collection agency. And this is not the best use of our judicial system, clogging up the cases with courts where tenants have actually paid by the time they get in front of the judge. And that allows the court less time for the more complicated cases that actually do need adjudication. So it's not until you make this distinction between evicting and eviction, or between eviction filing and executed evictions, that you can actually see some of these processes that are so important for all kinds of different policy reasons.

Michael Lens 15:47
So that's the makes me think about how different it is in the California context, in some ways, right? Like, as I understand it, in California, if you have an eviction petition filed against you, but you successfully fight off that petition, or it's dismissed, your record is sealed, and therefore, you know that that's not going to come back to haunt you as you're searching for housing down the road. I mean, is it is it kind of that simple that some states have those protections? Some states don't, and therefore, the paper trails is is very different in that way?

Eva Rosen 16:27
Yeah, what I what I will say is that I think even and I don't know exactly how it works in California, but I know that DC has been has recently passed a Record Sealing law that in theory is supposed to do the same thing. So of course, there's so cases that are dismissed in theory, get essentially sealed. The problem is that the way this works functionally is that landlords are not actually looking in the court databases to get this information. Most of the time, they're subscribing to software that these third party aggregators put together. And those third party aggregators are scraping websites constantly, all day long every day. And so if that record appears as a filing, even for five minutes, and the system, maybe not five minutes, but if it's there, for some chunk of time, it's going to get into that third party database, and landlords are going to be able to use it to make decisions about who to rent to. So my sense is that even in the California case, unless that record was sealed from the get go and then unsealed in the cases where it was dismissed, then we actually still have a problem. And this is exactly what I meant when I said that politicians don't quite get this distinction. They're still in many cases, I think missing, how to actually do Record Sealing in a way that would really durably protect tenants,

Phillip Garboden 17:42
I think your question and also speaks to just how hyperlocal eviction policies have been historically in this country before the last 10 years or so. And folks were starting to think nationally about eviction, as as a national crisis. States and even specific jurisdictions, specific court systems were really doing it on their own and not really communicating across violence. And so anything that's true of eviction in California is going to look very different in Georgia is going to look very different in Baltimore, in ways that certainly make data analysis much more complicated, because even what is a filing and what shows up as a filing is going to be very different between those different places. So there's definitely a lot of data cleaning involved in this work.

Shane Phillips 18:27
So as I said earlier, this first paper on serial eviction filings centers on the role that rent debt plays in the power dynamic between landlords and tenants, and how threats of eviction are used to kind of assert that power. That leads us to another distinction that you make between the owner renter relationship and the creditor debtor relationship and how the relationship shifts from the former to the latter. Once rent debt is introduced. The owner renter relationship is fairly symmetrical, at least in theory, both parties have duties and responsibilities to the other. The owner has to keep the building and common areas in good repair and can't make demands of the renter not spelled out in the lease. And the renter has to pay rent on time and not damage the property or disrupt, you know, the common areas or the lives of their neighbors. Just for a few examples there. The creditor debtor relationship also imposes duties on both parties, but in different ways. Eva, why is the shift from owner renter to creditor debtor so important in your view?

Eva Rosen 19:34
Yeah, so when tenants know that they are financially indebted to landlords, and this could be because they've had a formal eviction filing against them or it could be just that they've talked to their landlord and they know that they're in arrears, but once they're in that situation, and especially once there's this sort of legal, you know, name on that situation. Tenants may be less likely to report problems in the home so anything from a lead He faucet to like something much worse like a broken each vac system, they may not tell the landlord or they they may be worried about reporting that to the city for fear of being put out because they actually owe rent, right. And then from the landlord's perspective, this power that they then have allows them to defer these costly maintenance expenses, because they know that the tenant might be afraid to report the problems. So this fact of indebtedness, and especially the legal situation of having that eviction filing against, you can really change the dynamic between the landlord and the tenant. And it does so in ways that benefit the landlord and can compromise the tenants housing situation.

Phillip Garboden 20:39
I think one of the interesting ways to think about this, this question is to look at the rent and rental context in which it doesn't occur. So the example that comes to mind our landlord to rent is sort of young professionals in the District of Columbia, right, you have folks who are renting not because they're low income, not because they couldn't afford to buy but because they're transitory, right, a lot of folks go in and out of DC work for a political candidate for a few years and, and leave. And when we talk to those landlords, they're not thinking about their tenants as debtors, I mean, of course, they expect the tenants to pay rent on time. But yeah, they're focused on customer service, they're focused on getting their tenants to renew their leases, they're focused on getting their tenants to, to, you know, tell their friends that this is a good building to live in. And I'm sure those tenants have all sorts of micro complaints about the particular landlords in that particular buildings. But, broadly speaking, we see much more balanced power dynamics in markets like that. But in the lower low end market and lower end market, you have landlords who are essentially competing with all the other needs that a low income family has, and the very limited and highly volatile income they have with which to make those needs. And so it's very important to landlords in those contexts to shift that relationship, to sort of try to unbalanced that power dynamic through the threat of eviction, essentially, to ensure that they're getting rent income, and that that's prioritized over the broad set of needs that that families have when they don't have enough money to cover to cover all of them. So I think it's interesting to look at those negative cases, as well.

Shane Phillips 22:15
So in those in those lower income markets, the landlords are competing for, you know, getting the rent before the tenant might have to pay utilities, or for food, or their car payment, those kinds of things.

Phillip Garboden 22:27
Yeah, any number of needs that a family has for investments in their children, investments in their family, other things that they might need to spend money on in a given month, you know, there isn't enough to go around. And so the landlord has to make sure that they are the number one priority, which is largely true. Anyway, you know, rent needs first. But having that debtor relationship with your landlord definitely enforces that dynamic.

The filing cannot can also prompt tenants to go to their social networks or their kin networks and asked for money, or to go to local charities or apply for emergency rental assistance. And so in some cases, it's not reprioritizing the expenses they have, but sort of tapping into other resources that they for all kinds of reasons might not want, might not have wanted to tap into.

Michael Lens 23:17
Yeah, this is maybe getting to a spoiler part of the episode. But the landlords frame it quite differently a lot of the time, right in terms of prioritization. I mean, they, I think they're also thinking about prioritization, but they're more describing their tenants as irresponsible, and, you know, financially, making poor choices. And, you know, I don't know if now's the time to talk about that. But, you know, it strikes me that that's kind of what we're, we're talking about it in one way. And the landlord's talking about it in a in a much more loaded way. Right.

Phillip Garboden 23:57
Yeah, I think that you know, there are very pervasive pervasive narratives around poverty in this country and internationally. That, you know, people believe, poor folks, if they get some kind of income, spend it on luxury goods, on, on recreation on things that aren't a priority. And my sense of literature is those those ideas don't hold up to rigorous scrutiny, right? When you look at what actual low income folks are spending money on, it's not that they never spend any money on anything pleasant for them. But that they're spending the vast majority and prioritizing rent prioritizing food and prioritizing investments in children as the bulk of what they're spending money on. And I think we saw that during during the pandemic, right, when folks lost jobs. When renters lost jobs. They didn't immediately stop paying their rent, right? A lot of folks did everything they could including, as Eva pointed out, leveraging their social networks, pulling money from where they could to make rent. And so and so yes, landlords very much embrace this idea of a need these things to help their tenants make sensible finance decisions. But ultimately we see those cases as more the exception than the rule and the rule. Any rental market or any any, any housing market is folks doing everything they can to afford rent. And the reality is this there is enough money to go around in some cases.

Eva Rosen 25:14
Awesome, Mike, to your point, I think what landlords would say is, well, if a tenant is late on rent, why wouldn't I file for eviction? As soon as I'm allowed to do so knowing that they may pay and then I can just go ahead and cancel the filing no big deal. But why would I not initiate that process immediately, so that I have the best chance of getting the money that is owed to me as soon as possible. And there's definitely a logic there, right. There's a there's a strong logic there. I think the problem is that, and this is where the data is really, really helpful. And in in a in a separate project, looking at these numbers for DC, we sort of were able to confirm a lot of our suspicions on this. But what the data show, right is that tenants are paying most of the time, some of them are paying late, some of them are paying late every single month, maybe they get paid on the 15th of the month instead of the first and they're just two weeks behind, right. And so what I say to, you know, in situations where I'm asked to, hypothetically respond to those landlords, as I say, well look like from a policy perspective, if the issue is just that people are paying late, which is what the data shows not that they're trying to shirk responsibility for their rent, then you know, why not knock on their door and just check in with them before you go ahead and make that filing. Now that we know how detrimental these filings are? Let's let's check in with people and see if there's a way to get that money before doing that official filing. And then we have the added sort of positive side effect of not clogging up the courts with these basically frivolous cases.

Shane Phillips 26:46
For all three of these articles, as I said, You're you sort of have the same or overlapping sample of landlords, could you tell us a little bit about the sample itself? I don't think we need to get into the methodology of how all of them are selected, we can suffice it to say that you just saw a diverse sample of landlords in all three or four cities. But is there any way that you would group these landlords together any trends you saw? You know, in terms of their assets, their background? What kinds of neighborhoods they rent in anything like that?

Phillip Garboden 27:17
Yeah, we have a lot to say about methodology. But at the, at the basic level, our goal was to avoid type of sampling that gets a subset of each market, right? What we did was try to get landlords in all different market niches, all different types of neighborhoods, all different levels of assets, types of buildings, and things like that, to really try to capture that full heterogeneity. We did explicitly understandable landlords of luxury units. So we just spend our resources on the on the places where the policy problems exist, and so high, the highest end rental units are not not not considered in our findings. But generally, I think we've achieved that heterogeneity really well. And landlords are very diverse the diversity and gender then person race, they are everyone from somebody who owns a property that used to live in and moved and didn't want to sell or sort of renting it out. Very importantly, to a large corporation that owns 800 unit rental development in some places like Dallas. You know, we have written a lot about how different types of landlords do different may differently act differently among the tenants, really the biggest vector that divides landlords and are in pretty much all of our studies is, is professionalization. Right, so the degree to which, you know, you are a, an individual operator who's owning and sort of managing your own unit, sort of doing it on your own, versus a large company that has professional sometimes third party, sometimes in house management of the units. And the the differences are just very stark. I'll give you an example from the screening paper that I know we'll talk about in a bit. When we talk to the professional property managers of these large apartment complexes. Their lives are incredibly routinized. And incredibly formal, often in ways to specifically avoid any sort of fair housing, lawsuits, but but also just in general, that's how they do their business. And so we have property managers talking about everyone who visits they have to fill out a visit card, they have to monitor how they greet the tenants and the prospective tenants who walk through the door. Everything is very formal, and by the book, and on the other side, we have landlords, even if they own, you know, 2030 rental properties. Were just incredibly informal. You know, these are the folks who collect rental application fees and never actually file base their opinions on whether a tenant is useful on sort of chatting with them, sort of evaluating how they look how they act. And so we really get that strong distinction. And so most of our findings break down pretty heavily along that line. You have professional management on the one hand, and the sort of more idiosyncratic, some people use the term Mom and Pop although that always has a bit of a Having a normative feel to it smaller sort of DIY landlords,

Michael Lens 30:05
among other problems, yeah.

Shane Phillips 30:10
And I do want to note here, just the incredible amount of effort that must have gone into this data collection, you say in the papers, you know, these are with each of these landlords were talking about roughly two hours per interview, ethnographic observation of a subset of these landlords in their day to day activities, time spent in housing courts riding along with the sheriff's during their evictions, it's just seems like this must have taken many months, if not years to accumulate all this data, right, and then to, you know, clean it all up and put it all together. So kudos to you just on on that aspect of this, in addition to everything else,

Eva Rosen 30:46
Definitely took a few years, a number of years.

Shane Phillips 30:51
That was my assumption.

Eva Rosen 30:52
But I just wanted to add to that, when it comes to sort of thinking about different kinds of landlords and different sort of clusters of approaches. One of the interesting things we found was whether it was around professionalization, or around different strategies related to eviction or approaches to engaging with the voucher program, like all of these different topics that we were engaging with, we found sort of all the types of landlords and all of the four cities, even though they're very different cities, they just sort of existed in different amounts in different cities. So if we take like, the folks who really specialized with the voucher program, like you see the most of those guys in, in Baltimore, where the voucher program can be very profitable for a lot of reasons that we shouldn't even get into here, because it's a whole other topic. But we also see them in DC, they're just in certain neighborhoods, and certain places and certain kinds of markets. And so having the four different cities with very different political and social context sort of allowed us to think really carefully about how these different approaches varied.

Michael Lens 31:51
Yeah, I mean, I can't help but to think of some of the work that we did in Los Angeles, you know, along this distinction between, you know, more professional landlords or larger landlords and this goofy Mom and Pop, cuddly moniker that we bestow upon a very select group of landlords that always comes up when you're trying to do something about landlords or renter protections. But that's another conversation. And you know, it's interesting, because, especially in recent years, like, with really large financial, or companies getting access to a lot of property, a lot of rental property being really, really big landlords, etc. Like, that seems to be kind of a demon, in a lot of the stories and like, you know, during COVID, and in Los Angeles, like to the extent that our survey data was was good, it was certainly a lot lower work rates, data that then you all collected in your work, but we found that it was much, much more likely that you're going to have an eviction or other kind of negative outcomes pushed against you as a renter who's late or not paying rent, if it's somebody, you know, if it's somebody who's like this quote, unquote, mom and pop, you know, if it's somebody that owns just a couple properties, or whatever. And you know, I think that just gets to kind of, you know, what I think Phil was talking about, which is that these large institutional landlords do things very much by the book, right. And, and by the book, during a lot of COVID was like, you're not supposed to evict people. So they didn't threaten eviction, because that was supposedly not on the table. So, you know, it's just kind of interesting that they work like yours, especially like really kind of changes the frame a little bit about, not necessarily who's like a good and bad actor, but like, at least as a whole lot of nuance to, to this, this, at least this dichotomy as we usually see it in politics.

Phillip Garboden 33:47
Yeah, that's a really important thing that I think is starting to come out in the literature more and more. Yeah, there's lots of good work that shows that these large corporate landlords are much more likely to file for eviction and much more likely to execute evictions tend to be much more strict around behavior and a unit. There are, as you say, real trade offs there, though, in terms of, they also mostly follow the law, right. And if you can create a law that is tolerable and enforceable, they will implement it as part of their practices. You know, all of the cases where we saw direct discrimination, for example, you know, explicit not implicit, not in any of the complicated ways that we think about discrimination these days, but direct discrimination, direct ignorance of rules around eviction directed punitive approaches, illegal punitive approaches, and these are all in the small landlord category, just because they're invisible to most of our enforcement mechanisms, and they can do these things. And it's, so there really are complicated trade offs. And that's why I try to avoid taking that sort of normative approach of these landlords are better these lens rewards. It's what do these landlords do? How does that impact tenants what are these other types of landlords do? How do they impact tenants and and what can we do from a policy perspective to bring them all into one Is that a benefit? feasible? So it's an absolutely important point as well.

Eva Rosen 35:06
Yeah, there's there's two things I would say. One is that if you look at this, the separate study that I've been working on with with Brian McCaBe on the on the DC eviction data, it shows really clearly that larger landlords are more likely to file but smaller landlords when they file those filings are more likely to result in eviction. So smaller landlords are filing less frivolously and they're in their filings are more likely to actually kick the tenant out which which may indicate that there was a good reason to file. But at the same time, to Phil's point, I think what you see with the smaller landlords is that it's it's all over the map, you've got, you've got your do gooders who grew up poor, who really want to help people and provide housing for poor folks. And then you've got, you've got folks who, who are breaking the law, we're doing lots of discriminatory stuff. I mean, those were those were the people who admitted to us their biases, I admitted is not even the right word. Like they had no qualms about being discriminatory and sharing that with us. For the most part.

Shane Phillips 36:09
I feel like those those do gooders, too, they get used as like a political meatshields, when tenant protections or any kind of reform is proposed, where it says, Well, what you're going to do is you're going to make it impossible for these do gooders to operate in the way they've been operating, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of people do not have these, you know, do gooder landlords not even saying that they're bad, just like they're not doing more than they need to, in most cases, because it's a business like like any other ultimately. And that's always been a frustration for me is is this idea that a few do gooders means that we just shouldn't regulate this market any more than we do now,

Eva Rosen 36:48
For sure, I've heard that come up again and again, in these local political conversations. And it's really hard to figure out where to go from there.

Shane Phillips 36:57
This is maybe a good transition. But I feel like this is probably coming out as we're talking here, landlords mostly don't come across in a very positive light in your articles. And it's not really that you're attacking them or anything, you're just kind of communicating the things they've said and that they do. But you spend a lot of time with them. And I wonder if you developed any sympathy for their perspectives in one way or another. One thing that I was thinking about is how landlords mostly seem to be acting rationally within a system that rewards a kind of heartlessness and that's a system that we set up to be a kind and forgiving landlord within that context. Within that policy context, might also mean being an unprofitable landlord or one who can get taken advantage of you write in your second paper on discrimination. Quote, we are not asserting that better or different landlords would result in fundamentally different outcomes. All landlords racist or anti racist, white or non white exist within a system whereby profitability, and thus housing stability is inexorably linked to processes of exclusion. I'd be curious to hear either of your reflections on that quote, or how you felt about the landlords you spoke to just more generally.

Phillip Garboden 38:09
Yes, is that really important point. And I think we both absolutely developed sympathy and fondness for the task that many landlords face. You know, to me, it comes down to not basing either your social science or your public policy, sort of assessments of our landlords good or bad or behaving sort of altruistically? You know, what we have to think about is incentives and systems and the sort of contexts they're responding to. And I think one of the places where our sympathy comes through is that the United States has really asked landlords, private landlords to do impossible things in our in our social system, right? We know that, you know, only one in four families who are eligible for some kind of housing subsidy are one of the five or the numbers differ slightly, but receive any kind of any any kind of subsidy, right. So that means the vast majority of families who are making very low incomes are forced to find housing in a market in which it is very difficult to supply them housing and rates they can afford. I think, actually one of my first academic papers with Sandy Newman, where we were looking at what are the rental properties that are actually renting and low rents on subsidized but low rents, not who are renting to poor people, but who are renting at low rents. And if you look at those excellent data, it's really sort of a morass. For those things. It's, you know, weird, unstable situations, people running to family, people who are actually renting rental properties at rents that low and poor and low income families can afford, really aren't doing something that's sustainable, right? And they might have other reasons for doing it. And so we're asking our landlording systems to do in this country is to take on all this responsibility that the government should really be a key partner in a variety of put good reasons simply isn't. And now, where I think we come across, as you know, as you say, somewhat less sympathetic to landlords is that often the way to respond to this very difficult task, the way that landlords do respond to this very difficult task is to implement systems of management of screening of eviction that are not beneficial to tenants, right, that sort of result in harms, that tenants experience and often don't necessarily reflect well on landlords ideology and perspective on why and how their tenants are doing or doing. But in some ways, you know, these are somewhat necessary conditions for profit making in some of these circumstances. And so I think it's really important when we talk about landlords, not to engage in the sort of easy, you know, social media conversation of these landlords are misbehaving they're doing bad things, and really think about what is the market that they're responding to what is the problem that we're trying to solve as a society around housing, everybody, and then where are their major gaps. And those gaps do mean, tenant protections, they do mean, regulation, they do mean managing the acceptable behavior of landlords in these markets. But they also mean pretty direct investment in affordable and subsidized housing, in our cities. And you can't just do one and not the other, depending on what which which of those is more politically palatable. At the moment, you really need to be engaged on both sides, if you want this to work for folks.

Shane Phillips 41:28
It does seem like there's, there's a, there's an issue of competitive advantage or disadvantage, where if you're trying to be the good landlord, you're, you're going to kind of lose out. And maybe because of, because you're buying a property from other people who don't want to be as good of a landlord is kind of a landlord, you're going to pay more than you would like to. And that puts you in a position where you almost can't, you know, keep the rent low or as low as he would like in those kinds of things. And, unfortunately, a lot of people will take that, as they'll just use that as an excuse to oppose any kind of, like, stronger protections and these kinds of things. But actually, it's, to me, it seems like, that's, that's the only way this gets better. Because we can't just ask individual landlords to be better, we have to demand that all of them and put them all on the same playing field, and a, you know, more just playing field than the one we have right now.

Phillip Garboden 42:20
Exactly. I mean, if you're if your policy goal is dependent on landlords not exercising the market power that they have to charge high rents, to evict families, any of those types of things, then, as you say, the ones who are doing that, because they have altruistic goals, or just want to make sure they're doing right by their tenants have histories in these communities. They're going to be sidelined by folks who are willing to make those decisions, who are going to therefore have more profitable enterprises, and so forth. And so unless you stabilize and standardize that rule that everyone needs that everyone needs to provide safe and sanitary conditions in the home, everyone needs to have a very formal and fair eviction process. Yeah, you're gonna have a sort of a lowest common denominator problem around profitability. So yeah, absolutely. If If anything, it makes it more more urgent that we have strict and standardized tenant protections.

Shane Phillips 43:13
And the conclusion of the serial filing paper, you discuss the potential for stronger protections that do more to favor tenants over landlords in eviction proceedings. But you also make a very good point that Cleveland and Baltimore already have laws, at least in this direction, and that they don't solve the problem of landlords gaining leverage when renters become debtors, and the things that can do with that leverage. I didn't interpret this at all as an argument against additional protections. And I think this conversation we just had highlights that, but I'd love to hear you talk about that concern. Are there other types of reforms we should be thinking about, that could maybe be more oriented toward alleviating the evicting part of the landlord tenant relationship, rather than only reducing the likelihood that tenants are ultimately evicted?

Eva Rosen 44:03
So, um, yeah, so one of the big interventions that I think flows pretty naturally from this work is in places like DC and Baltimore, is raising the fee to file. So in these two places, it has until very recently been set at about $15, which is the lowest in the country, the average fee to file for eviction across the country is about $100.

Michael Lens 44:29
They might spend more on lunch that day. Yeah.

Eva Rosen 44:33
Yeah, although you wouldn't know it from having conversations with with with folks about this, who really, really have pushed back against the idea of raising the fee to file but but we think this is really important when we look at these very, very high filing rates is just too easy to file. And, and so this is one thing that we think can make a huge difference. We did make this recommendation based on the Uh, the eviction research in DC and and they have passed, they have changed in 55 to $100. Baltimore, Maryland, just this year, I know it was also considering similar legislation. And I have to tell I do not think it passed there, there was quite a bit more opposition to it. So that's one big thing. The other big thing that I've looked at and other work is sort of looking at eviction filings for very low sums. So from our data on on the DC eviction project, we saw that 12% of evictions were being filed for under $600 turns owed under $600. And we're still being taken to court. And we actually pointed this out in a separate report, and the council just banned filings for under $600, which is fantastic. And really,

Shane Phillips 45:50
Are you feeling like you should have you should have given the number for under?

Eva Rosen 45:53
A umber, a totally random number. And then this showed up in legislation, we were like, Um, excuse me, just a minute, we'd like to revisit that. But I'm not sure it would have passed if it had been higher. So it's a good start. So and the eviction lab has also done some really interesting work, particularly with that number of $600, which is why we picked it I think it is just a random number, though. That being said, like things like changing the feet of file, banning evictions for under $600, or whatever amount you want to pick, you know, these things don't fundamentally change the dynamics of housing affordability. They do keep people out of courtrooms. So I think more broadly as Phil was talking, speaking to and in what he was saying before, the biggest implication of our work, I think, is the need to expand permanent supportive housing. And certainly, this is something I've talked a lot about in the voucher promise, how do we do that in a way that that expands access to more people, but that also doesn't, doesn't hurt their ability to make real choices about where they live.

Michael Lens 46:59
So following up a little bit about costs do do landlord, the landlords you talk to? Do they talk a lot about, you know, the cost of retaining counsel, as a big part of what they're doing? You know, and I think about some of Kyle Nelson's work, you know, who I know, you're familiar with Kyle, and you've co authored with Kyle, I've co authored with Kyle, he's a doctoral student, or oh, he just graduated. Just yeah, just graduated from UCLA like in the last week, congratulations to Kyle if you're listening. So he, you know, he's done a lot of work on the institutional life of eviction in the courts in not just Los Angeles, but in California more broadly. And one of the things that I've been struck by when I read his work is like, you know, how much it costs landlords to constantly kind of go to court for, you know, the repayment of rent and like, you know, again, like people are not always super sympathetic to landlords, but those costs end up coming from somewhere, right? And so like, if it's the cost of doing business, it's going to raise rents for future tenants, and what have you. So how much is that part of the equation for lawyers in the cities that are for sorry, for landlords in the cities that we talked about,

Eva Rosen 48:20
Where we see this play out really is in the different habits of smaller and larger landlords again, so for a landlord with a lot of properties, they're going to be retaining a lawyer, that person is going to be going to court in their stead, for the most part in places where that's allowed, and it's going to be pretty marginal cost for them, it's going to be part of the cost of doing business. For a small landlord who's not encountering these problems, all that often it is going to be a significant cost. And I think that's a big reason why landlords who have fewer properties are not filing like every month like clockwork, as soon as the tenant is late, they're only finding other people who they actually have a suspicion are not going to end up paying. And that's why those are the folks who, those that they have a much higher rate of filings making their way all the way to execution.

Shane Phillips 49:07
I imagined that the different costs for smaller landlords versus these larger more professional landlords also plays a role in their in how they screen their tenants and and you know, smaller landlords may be feeling a little more like they need to be more particular. So that's a good transition here for the racial discrimination paper. And in this paper, you note that in many markets due to a variety of structural and historical factors, you often have pretty racially homogenous applicants for housing. Many of us are probably imagining landlord discrimination or racial discrimination in particular, as taking the form of favoring, say, white applicants over black applicants, which of course does happen very often. But in many markets landlords are selecting between different households of the same race. That doesn't mean they don't engage in discrimination. It just means that if the discrimination is occurring, it's often more complicated than the simple model we might have in our heads, and not just based on race. As you put it, quote, in this context, racial discrimination exists not in the categorical favoring of one racial group over another, but in the process by which individuals within a marginalized racial group or adjudicated and quote, tell us a bit more about that. What are we missing when we think about racial discrimination as only operating between different racial groups and not also within them?

Phillip Garboden 50:30
Yes. And I always like to start the answer to this question exactly how you started the question, which is that old school racial gender, family size discrimination absolutely still exists. It's shown by rigorous audit studies, by many, many groups across the country. So when we're trying to sort of nuance and complicate these discussions, we don't very much do not want us to therefore pretend were move beyond the old school version. But the reality and I think, you know, we're building off a lot of social science work here is that a lot of neighborhoods are very homogenous racially, and not surprising truth. And that that means that oftentimes, the applicant pools are particular units will also be fairly homogenous, right when we have neighborhoods that are transitioning in any given city a given point, but most neighborhoods are stably white, the same black. And then depending on your market niche, you might be getting primarily male or female tenants, obviously, if you have large units, you're getting more families, and so on and so forth. And so what we see in most of our data is not landlords, who are usually making meaningful decisions between, say, a white tenant and a black tenant, but landlords who are deciding within an all black or an all white applicant pool, which tenants are going to be most profitable, more like most likely to pay rent, and least likely to harm. And then when we talk to landlords about how they're making those decisions, to be on the obvious sort of credit screening and income lines, well, we heard a lot are ways that they're making decisions that are based in what we believe to be fairly pernicious racist narratives of the black underclass of poor communities, of women, of so forth, right. And so the sort of criteria they're using to distinguish it from one tenant to another, are based on what they think, is the performance of irresponsibility, and that it was performance and responsibility is based in racial and racist narratives that we have in this country. So an example we use in the paper sort of ideologies around black motherhood, and responsibilities around motherhood, you know, these are racist narratives as old as as old as the United States. And what that means is that landlords in many ways will often scrutinize the mothering behavior of their applicants in and these are, of course, the small landlords who are doing sort of informal screening processes, when they're operating in low income, black neighborhoods, right. So looking at whether or not they believe that children to be clean are well behaved as some sort of a symbol of whether or not that tenant is going to pay their rent reliably, and so forth. And so it's not obviously you're not taking race out of the equation, but you're using race in a way that distinguishes within a racial group, rather than between racial groups as also house owners.

Shane Phillips 53:22
And you'll note that larger, more professionalized landlords tend to rely on at least superficially objective screening criteria, like income and credit history, while the smaller and Mom and Pop types more often go off of their gut feelings, and use things like home visits, and kind of more specialized questionnaires to try to get a sense for how good a tenant will be. That strikes me as you know, another barrier for lower income or structurally marginalized populations, it's a lot less of a burden to fill out an automatic screening form than to have this invasive life evaluation by some stranger. But if you don't have a high or reliable income, or if you don't have a good credit history, you're probably not going to score well on that simple form automatic screening. So you're kind of compounding disadvantages here, which isn't a new phenomenon in research about the lived experiences of poor people and other marginalized groups. But to take another side on this, it's probably better to have these alternative screening approaches, rather than relying on just the one size fits all. That doesn't suit a lot of people. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that maybe we can just start by you summarizing these two different approaches, and the reasons that different types of landlords tend to prefer one or the other. And I know I've certainly got some some follow ups and some clarifying in this as well.

Eva Rosen 54:48
Yeah, sure. So first of all, just sort of summarize. You know, what we find is that all landlords are trying to find what they call the good tenant, right, the right tenant for their property. And then it's gonna depend on where it's located, what kind of properties it has, what amenities it has, and also who they think they can reasonably attract, and how much they think they can get. But the things that make a tenant fundamentally good, paying rent on time, not causing the landlord any extra headaches, these things are not really predictable. They're, they're sort of fundamentally unobservable to the landlord at the time that they're really screening the tenant, it's just not possible to know this stuff ahead of time. So what do they do? Well, they rely on what we call these proxies. Right. So when it comes to the smaller landlords, as you said, they're relying on wood, they call it gut checks, which are these sort of informal judgments that they make about how tenants look how they talk, how they present themselves. And this is, of course, when these stereotypes that Phil was talking about stereotypes that are really at the intersection of, in the case of many of our tenants, poverty and black motherhood, they draw on these stereotypes, they do home visits to see how tenants are keeping their homes, they smell the tenants kids, they check to see how neatly their hair is combed, really some some quite invasive and Sidious stuff.

Shane Phillips 56:10
I did want to say to like, as, as a white man, I was kind of shocked to read this, I don't know, I shouldn't have been, but like, I certainly have never had a home visit, you know, in a play in advance of renting a place that was never proposed to me.

Eva Rosen 56:25
Yeah, it was fairly common among a subset of our landlords. And it sort of varied by city, I think, I think it was Baltimore and Cleveland, where it was the most common from our own fill. And then so then you have larger landlords, on the other hand, they're going to be using these formal methods, they're often really trying, as we mentioned, to kind of systemize systematize and routinized their procedures so that they can protect themselves from Fair Housing lawsuits, because they're much more likely to actually be, like, audited by a fair housing check. And so they're relying on things that we think of as fairly standard, like credit checks, criminal background checks, residential history checks, and that's where that eviction history of eviction or eviction filing comes in. And this may seem better, I think, in a lot of ways, it's quite a bit better. But the issue here is that these things, too, are not particularly good predictors of paying rent on time, even credit checks, are not particularly good at predicting someone's ability to pay rent. And on top of that, they tend to correlate with categories of historical inequality. So when we rely on formal algorithms that rely on these metrics to screen tenants, Not we but landlords are actually sort of just reproducing the same pattern thought that sort of created the data feeding into this algorithm in the first place.

Shane Phillips 57:43
Something that came to mind, as I was reading, this was the need to establish alternative fairer systems. And not simply, if we don't like the home visits, or the more kind of gut check approach. We can't just say like, we're going to get rid of that. And because then everyone is just left with this formal screening process that's going to disadvantage people, and maybe it's actually better at least than than that alternative, to at least have that other option, which they might score a little better on, and they can make a personal appeal. You know, I think about when I was younger, I had to use a payday lender several times. And while I 100%, understand arguments against them, I think I'd have been worse off had that option not existed for me at the time, if if nothing else had had taken its place. When it comes to housing, you know, we banned a lot of the more affordable housing typologies in the past boarding houses, single room occupancy, hotels, to say nothing of just, you know, multifamily housing generally in many places. But we didn't do much to make more socially desirable housing actually accessible to the people who lost those other more affordable options. So, I mean, do you have a sense for what you'd like to see in place of these existing screening methods, I found the paper super valuable and illuminating. But it kind of left me feeling like no screening method is going to fix these problems that are ultimately much bigger and more systemic.

Eva Rosen 59:06
Yeah, we really grappled with this question, too, and especially at the urging of the reviewers, like you gotta give us something else. And so I mean, ultimately, you know, we think that it would be better to eliminate screening techniques that seem to serve no other function than as standards for race, gender class, right? So things like home visits and smell tests. These are definitely obviously not measuring tenants ability to pay credit scores to are really just this crude proxy for poverty and racialized exclusion from credit and home mortgages. And algorithms when they are used. We think this is where there's a little bit of room for movement. You can use an algorithm if it's predominantly relying on say income or voucher or receipt in the place of income, right, like, are you getting a paycheck that allows you to pay rent? Yes. Okay. Then You qualify right that we think is a much more immediate proxy for whether or not the tenant is going to be able to pay then whether or not once in the past, they weren't able to pay their credit bill or whether or not once in the past, they had an eviction filing that never went through, right. And, you know, when it comes to these sort of more discriminatory practices, I think there's a whole conversation to have around how to hold landlords to account. And we think that that is incredibly important. But at the same time, we're also sort of pointing to a larger problem, right, which is that rental assistance for low income families in this country just is not sufficient to meet the demand. And we have all these private landlords who are, you know, in many ways, trying to meet that demand, but not always doing it very well. And, and in the process, sort of attempting to mitigate their own risk by using these often racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory screening tools to judge tenants worth. So this is obviously something we can work on making better. But ultimately, we do sort of want to shift the conversation from what's the best screening tool, which is always going to exclude the people at the bottom, whoever they are, and whatever their traits are. And and it can be done in a more fair or less fair ways. But there's always going to be winners and losers, right? And sort of shifting the conversation to figuring out okay, how do we actually make sure that everyone who needs housing has it? And so we didn't want to sort of leave readers without that that central takeaway?

Phillip Garboden 1:01:28
Yeah, I think the reason it seems in some ways, a little hopeless is where really the question to ask is, how do you screen tenants into housing they can't afford, right. And that's impossible, because they can't afford it. And therefore, they're going to present potentially challenges to profitability on the landlord side. And, you know, easy to sort of punt to the labor market as housing researchers to say, Oh, this is something that the labor folks need to solve. But income volatility in the low end labor market is a is a key piece of this story that we don't want to neglect. And I think you know, the system we have now, as you pointed out, is that folks who do well on paper, tend to pursue formal landlords, people who don't do well on paper, but can do well, in sort of a performative sense, go for small mom and pops. And we see in other interview studies with voucher tenants that people are very explicitly taking these techniques and are very aware of what they need to do to sort of get through to find at least one landlord who's willing to take them in a metropolitan region. But without dealing with the fundamental income problem, we're going to have a substantial subset of the population that's going to keep struggling no matter how they're screen. And I think we know from other discrimination literature that when you take away tools that whether it's employers or landlords used to screen tenants, that you have to be really careful about what fills that void, right, and what fills that void is not always, you know, equality, or it's oftentimes other even more deleterious techniques that even more disadvantaged women or people of color, or large families and so forth. And so just to get continued whack a mole, well, you can't screen on this, you can't screen on this, you can't screen on this. While in some cases that even pointed out some of those things we think are probably good ideas to remove from the equation when they really aren't serving a fundamental business process. You know, ultimately, you if you take away everything, you have to be very careful about what comes in and fills that gap. And so just state the sort of boring thing again, right, income support, you know, rental housing subsidies, vouchers, or what have you have to be a part of this conversation as well.

Shane Phillips 1:03:37
I think that focus on the upstream, the structural, the more systemic factors is a good place for us to end here. But I hear that you have a book project coming up. Do you want to tell us about that before we let you go?

Phillip Garboden 1:03:51
Yeah, sure. So even I are currently working on a book called American Landlord. It's forthcoming with Princeton University Press, we'll be writing it over the next year or so. And it's our really goal to think you know, we've written a series of papers that you've so generously queried us about during this podcast. And it's an opportunity to think very holistically about the low end rental market as a space and the role that landlords play within it. A lot of the questions that we talked about today around how do you separate these individual behaviors, from the structural processes that incentivize those behaviors, and how you create a low end market that's actually supportive of the obvious point that everybody needs to be housed by someone somewhere, is our goal for the book. So we're excited to be able to sort of take a step back from these focuses on discrimination of screening of management of eviction and really think think big about these questions.

Phillip Garboden, and Eva Rosen. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

Eva Rosen 1:04:50
Thanks for having us. This is really fun discussion.

Phillip Garboden 1:04:55
Yeah, thank you. I feel like we could have talked for many more hours. This was this is terrific. Thank you.

Shane Phillips 1:04:59
We certainly Good, thank you. You can read more about Eva and Philips research and find a whole mess of shownotes and a transcript of the interview at our website lewis.ucla.edu UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter @shanedphillips, and Mike is there @mc_lens. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

About the Guest Speaker(s)

Philip Garboden

Philip Garboden is the HCRC professor in Affordable Housing Economics, Policy, and Planning at the University of Hawaiʻi Manoa. His work examines how the decisions of supply side actors (landlords, tenants and developers) are shaped by domestic housing policies and how these decisions impact their lives of poor tenants.
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Eva Rosen

Eva Rosen is assistant professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on social inequality in the urban context.
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