Job market paper
Gomory, Henry. Revise and Resubmit. “Racialized rents: How White Ownership of Rental Housing in Black Neighborhoods Perpetuates Racial Inequality.” American Journal of Sociology.
Urban sociologists studying racial inequality have long drawn on the neighborhood effects framework, but in its focus on structural causes this tradition has de-emphasized how inequality is imposed by, and benefits, advantaged elites. I apply a relational perspective to neighborhood disadvantage, analyzing the scale and implications of white ownership of rental housing in Black neighborhoods. I leverage a novel dataset that traces through shell companies to identify the racial identities of the owners of 43 million rental unit-years in four metro areas, finding that, in 2019, white landlords owned over 54% of units in Black neighborhoods, nearly twice as many as Black landlords, and that white ownership has increased since 2005. This results in over $2.6 billion in yearly rent payments to white landlords, or 17% of renter and 6% of total household income in Black areas, demonstrating how unequal control of scarce economic goods creates extractive relationships that reproduce racial inequality.
Dissertation
Landlord data:
As part of my dissertation, I created a large, novel data source on landlord characteristics in four metro areas: Boston, Massachusetts; Baltimore, Maryland; Miami, Florida; and Houston, Texas. The data source consists of multiple linked datasets describing landlord characteristics: including scales of operations, corporate type, constituent entities, home and office locations, imputed racial identities, and more; rental property characteristics: including rental units, valuation, property type, year built, and more; linked addresses; and eviction filings. The datasets describe more than 15 years of data in four full metro areas, consisting of more than 65 million parcel-years. The data source is novel for its ability to trace through anonymous shell companies, identify the true owners of landed properties, and operationalize their key characteristics. This dataset and its construction are described in detail in the third paper in my dissertation.
Paper 1: (Job market paper above)
Paper 2: Gomory, Henry. Working Paper. “Elite Evictors: The Few and Interconnected Landlords Responsible for Residential Insecurity.”
Paper 3: Gomory, Henry. Working Paper. “Piercing the Corporate Veil: Using Administrative Records to Identify Landowners and Their Characteristics.”
Publications
Gomory, Henry, Douglas Massey, James Hendrickson, and Matthew Desmond. 2023. “The Racially Disparate Influence of Filing Fees on Eviction Rates.” Housing Policy Debate. Online (forthcoming in print)
Eviction is a common and consequential event in the lives of tenants and is shaped by the legal environments in which it takes place. In this study, we show that eviction filing fees, or the amounts of money it costs landlords to begin formal evictions, have a large effect on eviction practices. Specifically, fees that are higher by $76 (one standard deviation) lead to lower eviction filing rates by 1.71 percentage points (0.26 standard deviations) and lower eviction judgment rates by 0.49 percentage points (0.19 standard deviation). Filing fees affect not only the rate but also the purpose of filing, as lower fees make landlords more likely to file serially against the same tenants as a form of rent collection. Each of these effects appears to be disproportionately large in majority-Black tracts, suggesting that low filing fees have disparate impacts on Black renters. These findings contribute to our understanding of the legal basis of housing insecurity and the racialization of eviction practices in the United States.
Gomory, Henry, and Matthew Desmond. 2023. “Neighborhoods of Last Resort: How Landlord Strategies Concentrate Violent Crime.” Criminology 61(2):270–94.
Abstract: Studies of crime hot spots have argued that landlords’ management styles, specifically their tenant screening and property monitoring techniques, affect crime. These studies, however, have rarely considered the political–economic contexts in which these actions take place: specifically, how landlords’ behaviors are shaped by, and themselves reproduce, larger rental market structures. Drawing on data pertaining to eviction rates, criminal incidents, housing code violations, and landlord behavior in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this study documents how extractive rental management strategies, such as weak tenant screening, frequent eviction filings, and property disinvestment, concentrate crime at particular properties. In turn, high rates of crime in a neighborhood incentivize these extractive landlord strategies. By showing how landlords’ economic strategies are central to urban crime geographies, this study contributes to our understanding of third-party policing by revealing the limits of market-based solutions to place management dilemmas.
Gomory, Henry. 2022. “The Social and Institutional Contexts Underlying Landlords’ Eviction Practices.” Social Forces 100(4):1774–1805.
Abstract: This article examines how and why landlords vary in their uses of eviction filings. Drawing on over four million property tax records, business filings, and court-ordered eviction documents over fifteen years in Boston, Massachusetts, I show that large landlords file evictions at two to three times the rates of small landlords, and this disparity is not driven by the characteristics of the tenants they rent to. Not only do large landlords file more often, but also over less money owed and more often as a rent collection strategy. Drawing on analyses of the interpersonal conflict during eviction and a range of landlord characteristics, I show that these divergent eviction practices derive from the disparate social and institutional contexts within which landlords make eviction decisions. For small landlords, organizational informality and personal relationships with tenants make eviction a morally fraught decision, while for large landlords, formal decision-making and arms-length relationships with tenants make eviction a routine business practice. By showing both how and why landlords use evictions differently, this article contributes to the sociological understanding of residential instability and of landlord behavior.