During the last few decades there has been an increase in gentrification in urban areas in the United States, as well as increasing economic inequality. In addition, there is not enough affordable housing to meet demand. The Great Recession exacerbated this problem, tightening an already constrained housing market for renters. Landlords play a significant role in providing or prohibiting access to housing as cities gentrify and rental housing markets become more challenging. This project studies how landlords operate under these conditions. The project addresses the following research questions: How do landlords make sense of their role in both residential and commercial contexts? In what ways do landlords amplify or counter neighborhood changes associated with gentrification? How do the actions or inactions of landlords affect access to neighborhoods for various social groups? Understanding how landlords make sense of and react to neighborhood changes associated with gentrification, and the impact of this on including or excluding various demographic groups, will allow for increased understanding of the factors that shape racial and economic residential segregation in the United States. Project findings will have implications for housing policies in the United States.
Research on gentrification theorizes that landlords are part of the gentrification process, but few studies have provided empirical evidence to analyze these claims. The focus of most gentrification research has been on the experiences of residents (both new and long-time residents)while analyses of landlords in gentrifying neighborhoods have been sparse. This project will address this gap by analyzing how both residential and commercial landlords understand their roles in the context of neighborhood changes associated with gentrification. The primary data for this project will come from 50 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with landlords and property managers in four gentrifying neighborhoods in a large northeastern U.S. city. The project will include property managers because they occupy a unique position as intermediaries between landlords and tenants in the rental housing relationship. In addition, in order to better understand the day-to-day activities of rental property maintenance and upkeep, the project incorporates ethnographic fieldwork as a means of triangulating the interview data. The ethnographic component of the research project involves performing the duties of a maintenance technician for a large rental real estate company. This project will contribute to scholarship by addressing the gap in research on landlords, analyzing whether landlords act as gatekeepers in both residential and commercial real estate transactions, and by utilizing a strategy of participant observation with landlords, allowing for firsthand observation of their investment, maintenance, and rental agreement practices.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
