Property Managers, Renter Precarity, and the (Hidden) Hierarchies of U.S. Rental Markets

Conflicts between relatively well-off, male, or White landlords and poor, female renters of color are prevalent across U.S. rental markets. These conflicts have severe, negative consequences for renters, including eviction. But little prior research has examined how landlords’ exercise of legal and economic power relate to property characteristics, renters across the income spectrum, or local ethnoracial dynamics. Moreover, little prior research has examined how other key intermediaries often involved in the rental process shape landlord-renter conflict. Drawing from one year of ethnographic research within the property management industry, 70 in-depth interviews with property managers, landlords, and renters in two mid-size U.S. cities, and supplemental quantitative analyses, I address these gaps by showing how rental housing conflicts and their consequences depend on property and management type. I find that property managers—especially in multifamily apartment complexes—shoulder the burdens of renter interaction and, in the process, obfuscate the sources of exploitative rental practices and renter disadvantage. To minimize interactional conflict with renters, property managers erect physical and social barriers, which in turn exacerbate renter socioeconomic and racial inequality. Finally, I show how the work of rent extraction in these contexts is usually carried by women property managers, especially women of color. Hiding behind and relying on these women are the White male landlords and corporations who not only exploit renters, but also depend on women intermediaries to instigate, manage, and bring this exploitation to fruition.

Elizabeth Korver-Glenn is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico. Her research, which has been published in the American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and City & Community, among other journals, focuses on how housing inequality persists in contemporary urban contexts as well as how such inequality can be mitigated. Elizabeth's book, Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America, is forthcoming in April 2021 with Oxford University Press.