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 2: Gomory, Henry, and Matthew Desmond. Working Paper. “An Invitation to Investigative Sociology: The Case of Top Evictors in Three Metropolitan Areas”
Paper 3: Gomory, Henry, and Joseph Fish. Revise and Resubmit. “Using Administrative Datasets to Identify Landowners and Operationalize their Characteristics.” Sociological Methods and Research
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.
Paper 1: 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.
Landlord 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.
Labor market research
Gomory, Henry, and Nathan Wilmers. Working Paper. “How Employer Wage-Setting Shapes Working Poverty”
Abstract: Even hiring for the same occupation, some employers post the lowest wage possible, while others follow a high-road strategy. How does employer power over wage-setting shape working poverty? We link household panel income data to employer wage records and find working poverty rates four times higher and poor hires twice as likely to stay in poverty at low-premium compared to high-premium employers, among American workers. However, high-premium employers rarely hire poor workers, due to a combination of human capital, work history, and demographic mechanisms. Because low-premium employers are the only option for low-skilled, underemployed workers, these firms lift more workers out of poverty than high-premium employers do. But, because these firms still offer below market rate wages, their workers have much higher poverty rates than they would if they worked for the median firm. Specifically, counterfactual estimates suggest that if all firms adopted median premiums without changing employment composition, the American working poverty rate would decrease by about 15%. In summary, because high-premium firms exclude the poor, low-premium firms offer the most common pathway out of poverty, but the endpoint of this pathway is a underpaid work and substantially higher rates of poverty than would occur if they were paid market-rate wages.
Gomory, Henry, and Nathan Wilmers. Working Paper. “How considering housing costs changes our understanding of income inequality”
Abstract: As income inequality has grown over the past three decades, housing costs have outpaced incomes for low-income households. These two key economic trends have rarely been analyzed together. In this study, we show that inequality in income after deducting housing costs is larger, and has grown faster, than income inequality overall. During this period, housing costs grew more for low-income households than for high-income ones, resulting in a declining correlation between income and housing costs that exacerbated inequality. Post-housing income inequality grew most markedly at the bottom of the distribution, where 50-10 ratios increased at five times the rate that they did for income alone, but post-housing income inequality also grew more at the top, with 90-50 ratios for post-housing income growing about 40% more than those for income. This reflects two distinct trends: Rent costs outpaced incomes for low-income renters, particularly in high-cost cities, reflecting how economic growth in these areas created shared costs but uneven benefits. Second, mortgage costs for high-income homeowners fell following the foreclosure crisis and rose slowly thereafter. Low interest rates reduced costs for those households that needed cost relief the least. In a series of supplementary analyses, we show that cost increases and decreases are not driven by residential upgrading. This study contributes to our understanding of inequality by showing that a convergence in housing costs between rich and poor has exacerbated income inequality.