Landlord and rental market research
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)
Abstract: 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.
Gomory, Henry, Andrew Messamore, Christine Jang-Trettien, and Philip Garboden. 2024. “Beyond scale: Legal, organizational, and economic factors that shape landlord behaviors and tenant housing experiences.” Journal of Urban Affairs. Online
Abstract: While scale is often used as a heuristic to understand heterogeneity among landlords, research demonstrates that broad differences in landlord size are often mediated by, confounded by, and conceal variation in factors that more directly shape how landlords operate. In this article, we draw on existing landlord research to identify legal, organizational, and economic factors that vary at the landlord level and shape landlord practices. Legal factors include the liability protections through which landlords own properties and the varying regulatory scrutiny different landlords face. Organizational characteristics refer to the subjective logics, decision-making processes, and social relationships through which landlords manage properties. Finally, economic factors refer to their sources of capital and income-generating strategies. These factors can be independently studied as vectors affecting landlord behaviors or as building blocks when developing landlord typologies. We conclude by pointing to new possibilities for research enabled by a multifactorial approach and argue that this also provides a targeted framework for regulation of property owners.
Gomory, Henry, and Matthew Desmond. Working Paper. “An Invitation to Investigative Sociology: The Case of Top Evictors in Three Metropolitan Areas”
Abstract: This article issues an invitation to investigative sociology, which reveals how a small number of people or institutions shape a social problem by collecting data that trace the workings of power, applying methods that identify elite influencers, and producing findings that inform tailored interventions. Demonstrating the potential of this approach, we develop novel computational methods that draw on over sixty million administrative records to pierce corporate veils and reveal the true owners of rental properties in the Boston, Miami, and Houston metropolitan areas between 2005 and 2016. Before ownership tracing, evictions appear to be the result of disaggregated social and economic forces. After ownership tracing, we find that just ten individual landlords were responsible for half of all eviction filings in each city. Top evictors possessed a great deal of economic power, and most filed for eviction at elevated rates. These findings change our understanding of the eviction crisis by demonstrating how a small number of landlords can substantially affect citywide housing precarity. In do so, it demonstrates how investigative sociology can bring to light people and institutions exerting outsize influence on a matter of public importance, deepening our understanding of the problem and motivating new policy initiatives.
Gomory, Henry. Revise and Resubmit. “Racialized rents: How White Ownership of Rental Housing in Black Neighborhoods Perpetuates Racial Inequality.” American Journal of Sociology.
Abstract: 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.
Labor market research
Gomory, Henry, and Nathan Wilmers. Revise and Resubmit. “How Employer Wage-Setting Shapes Working Poverty.” Social Forces.
Abstract: Do markets actively produce poverty, rather than merely transmit prior disadvantage? In housing and credit markets, prior work demonstrates that the poor often transact on worse terms. We ask whether this disadvantage extends to the labor market, the single most important source of cash income for workers around the poverty line. Drawing on a novel linkage between household panel data and employer wage records, we estimate firm premiums — the degree to which firms pay above or below-average wages for the same workers, identified by comparing the same individuals across employers — to test whether the poor are underpaid by the companies they work for. Working at a low-premium firm doubles the rate of poverty, even among workers with similar educations, occupations, and family structures. Equalizing firm premiums would reduce aggregate poverty by 13\%. Despite paying lower wages, low-premium firms are the primary employment path out of poverty because they are far more likely to hire the poor: for the disadvantaged, inclusion in the workforce is often conditional on being underpaid. These findings track market sources of poverty into the firms that rely on the working poor.
Gomory, Henry, and Nathan Wilmers. Revise and Resubmit. “How considering housing costs changes our understanding of income inequality.” American Sociological Review.
Abstract: US income inequality has grown substantially since 2000. But the translation of income into experienced economic inequality also depends on the dynamics of consumption costs, and particularly housing costs. As income inequality rose, a housing bubble and crash, historically low interest rates, and rising rents roiled the housing market. How have concurrent trends in income and housing affected economic inequality? We develop a framework decomposing post-housing income inequality into changes in median housing costs, cost spread, and income-cost sorting. Drawing on ACS and PSID data from 2000 to 2023, we find that post-housing income inequality — measured as both residual income and affordability ratio inequality — increased by half, far outpacing the 22 percent increase in income inequality alone. This was not driven by a broad-based affordability crisis; median costs rose only slightly relative to incomes. Instead, housing costs compressed and decoupled from income, as renters' costs rose while homeowners' costs fell due to mortgage payoff and low interest rates. Redefining homeowner costs as implicit rents eliminates the housing cost compression, suggesting that changes in how housing is financed, rather than in housing consumption, drove rising post-housing income inequality.
Methodological research
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.
Gomory, Henry. Revise and resubmit. “Validation of Emergent Data through Degradation (VEDD): An Application to Hidden Landlords.” Sociological Methods and Research
Gomory, Henry, and Joseph Fish. Working paper. “Using Administrative Datasets to Identify Landowners and Operationalize their Characteristics.”
Abstract: Landowners play central roles in many urban sociological theories, but empirical analysis of these actors has frequently been stymied by insufficient data. Few surveys collect detailed information on landowners and administrative data present multiple challenges, most importantly that property owners frequently obscure their identities through shell companies and other corporate structures. This paper presents a data construction methodology for creating linked, longitudinal datasets describing the people and companies that own urban properties using widely available tax assessment records and business filings. The author implements this approach in four metropolitan areas — Boston, Massachusetts, Baltimore Maryland, Miami, Florida, and Houston, Texas — between 2005 and 2020, demonstrating the adaptability of the method to areas with different levels of data quality. The pipeline draws on four methodological innovations. First, it uses internal validation and external harmonization to address biases and inaccuracies within tax assessment records. Second, it presents a network-based entity reconciliation methodology better suited than existing methods to the sparse but linked data contained in the source records. Third, it presents a flexible and comprehensive methodology for operationalizing corporate networks. Finally, it operationalizes multiple sociological characteristics of landowners and estimates their degrees of bias. The paper concludes by demonstrating several empirical analyses this methodology permits. The methodology contributes to ongoing efforts to build data on urban landowners and more generally to entity reconciliation methods, corporate network identification, and methodologies that draw on multiple sources of data to make visible otherwise hidden social actors.
Abstract: Combining administrative records can produce data not fully present in any individual source, or “emergent data.” Assessing and correcting the data quality problems frequently present in emergent data is difficult, as external benchmarks are often unavailable, and standard missing-data methods often make untenable assumptions or fail to fully leverage low-quality observations. We introduce VEDD (Validation of Emergent Data through Degradation), a framework that observes how high-quality observations change when data quality is degraded, using the resulting shifts to estimate bias. The framework assumes that bias (rather than outcomes) is missing at random conditional on observables, which is more plausible for hard-to-observe populations. VEDD produces assessments of baseline pipeline accuracy, a decomposition by data-quality factor that doubles as a roadmap for pipeline improvement, and corrected estimates at the observation and population levels. We demonstrate VEDD on a pipeline that traces through shell companies to identify corporate landlords across three U.S. metros.
Gomory, Henry. In preparation. “Network-based Entity Reconciliation for Sparse but Networked Records.”