How Private Equity Landlords Prey on Working-Class Communities of Color

https://doi.org/10.1177/10957960231170168

New Labor Forum

2023, Vol. 32(2) 54 –63

CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies

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DOI: 10.1177/10957960231170168

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The ownership of rental housing by private

equity (PE) companies has been on the rise in

the United States and abroad in recent decades.

PE firms invest funds contributed by institu-

tional and otherwise large investors, including

pension and sovereign wealth funds. The typi-

cal PE playbook is to take controlling interest in

a business, restructure it to increase the appear-

ance of improved financial performance, and

resell for a substantial profit. PE operates in a

variety of sectors, including healthcare, media,

and retail, often to the long-term detriment of

these businesses and their services. PE firms

frequently take aggressive asset-stripping and

cost-cutting measures, leading to lower quality

services, while also raising costs for customers.

Since the expansion of PE buyouts in the 1990s,

there has been widespread documentation of

the damages wrought by PE takeovers, from the

elimination of local news coverage to declining

care in nursing homes.

Since the foreclosure

crisis and the recession of the 2000s, these

firms have begun taking a controlling interest in

the ownership of rental housing, leading to

widespread attention on the larger phenomena

of corporate landlords.

While corporate ownership is sometimes

conflated with PE ownership, not all corporate

landlords are PE firms. Some, including the

largest and most widely known, are publicly

traded real estate investment trusts (REITs).

Though PE funds and REITs differ in their spe-

cifics, both are conduits for investing in real

estate, yoking the housing needs of millions of

renters across the planet to investors’ expectations

for competitive financial returns. Because of

PEs’ and REITs’ aggressive expansion in rental

markets, tenants have faced escalating rents and

reduced services, exacerbating rent burden and

displacement, and crowding out of opportuni-

ties for affordable homeownership. Here, we

describe the factors contributing to the rise of

PE and REIT ownership in housing, the impact

of this trend on poor and working-class commu-

nities, and the current organizing that seeks to

address it. We give particular attention to single-

family rentals (SFR), a new frontier for PE and

corporate investment and the subject of our

ongoing research. We present an analysis of the

spatial concentration of rental homes by PE and

REIT firms in the Atlanta metropolitan area,

which has become one of the principal sites of

PE investment into SFRs across the country.

Seeing Opportunity in Crisis:

PE Firms and the Rental

Market

Historically, owners of both low-cost apart-

ments and SFR homes were predominantly

local independent landlords seeking long-term,

stable rental income. Though corporate owner-

ship of multifamily properties like apartment

buildings is not new, PE has claimed a growing

share of this market in recent decades. The

burst of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s

and the stock market crash in the 2000s led to

1170168NLF

XXX10.1177/10957960231170168New Labor ForumSeymour and Shelton

research-article2023

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA

Corresponding Author:

Eric Seymour, [email protected]

How Private Equity Landlords

Prey on Working-Class

Communities of Color

Eric Seymour

and Taylor Shelton

Keywords

private equity, corporate landlords, real estate investment trusts, housing insecurity, financialization

56 New Labor Forum 32(2)

low interest rates and easy mortgage credit,

making real estate an attractive investment.

These conditions piqued PE interest in multi-

family properties, particularly in New York

City, where PE firms targeted rent-stabilized

properties. The attractiveness of rental proper-

ties was enhanced by revisions to state laws

governing rent regulation in the 1990s allowing

units with already high rents and those that

became vacant to exit the rent-stabilized inven-

tory.

The rationale for these changes was that

occupants of high-rent units do not require pro-

tection and that rent regulations made it finan-

cially infeasible for owners to renovate units

upon vacancy. PE firms capitalized on these

changes, purchasing rent-regulated properties in

order to remove existing tenants and replace

them with higher-paying occupants, exacerbat-

ing displacement and gentrification. Similar pat-

terns occurred in San Francisco, following the

thinning of rent regulation there in the 1990s.

PEs saw opportunity in . . . the

Covid-19 pandemic. Even as tenants

faced difficulties paying rent . . .

PE firms bet big on the post-

pandemic resurgence of rental

apartments . . .

PE firms have continued to acquire multi-

family properties in desirable housing markets

across the country since the housing crash and

recession of 2008, which tightened mortgage

lending and boosted demand for rental housing.

Recently, PEs saw opportunity in yet another

crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic. Even as tenants

faced difficulties paying rent during the pan-

demic, PE firms bet big on the post-pandemic

resurgence of rental apartments in destination

markets like New York, targeting relatively

lower-valued properties relative to what inves-

tors believe they could realize through restruc-

turing.

Limited reporting requirements and the

use of shell corporations to purchase real estate

makes it difficult to precisely enumerate the

number of units controlled by these firms. One

source estimates the minimum number of apart-

ment units owned by PE firms in 2022 at more

than one million nationwide, though these are

concentrated in high-demand markets like New

York and San Francisco.

Growth of Private Equity in

Single Family Rentals

Even with the precedent of corporate owner-

ship of multifamily apartments, the incursion of

PE into the SFR market, in particular, has rep-

resented a dramatic shift in housing ownership.

Before the foreclosure crisis of 2008, large

financial institutions avoided operating SFRs

because they are scattered and have diverse

characteristics, making them more difficult to

manage. The foreclosure crisis, however, pre-

sented investors with the opportunity to buy

discounted homes at scale during a period of

surging demand for rentals. Blackstone was the

largest PE investor in SFRs, buying and operat-

ing homes through its rental-home company

Invitation Homes since 2012. American Homes

4 Rent was another early investor in single-

family homes, leveraging a $600 million invest-

ment from the Alaska Permanent Fund. Other

early investors included Front Yard Residential

and Tricon American Homes. More recently,

there has been a period of SFR industry con-

solidation through mergers and acquisitions,

alongside shifts in their corporate structures.

Invitation Homes—now the largest SFR land-

lord in the United States after a decade of

acquiring other competing firms—initially

started as a PE-controlled subsidiary of

Blackstone, but was taken public in 2017 in

order to raise additional capital for expansion.

Pretium Partners, the PE parent firm of Progress

Residential is the largest private owner of SFRs

after their 2021 acquisition of previously pub-

licly traded Front Yard Residential.

In the immediate aftermath of

the foreclosure crisis, firms like

Blackstone bought heavily in the

Sunbelt, particularly in suburban

neighborhoods with newer housing.

Estimates of PE ownership of SFRs indicate

they own at least 240,000 homes across the

United States.

A common industry talking

Seymour and Shelton 57

point is that this is just a small fraction of SFRs,

somewhere in the range of 1 to 3 percent, chal-

lenging suggestions they are monopolizing the

market for rental homes. This talking point has

been amplified in mainstream media, with

some arguing PE funds play too small a role in

the rental home market to cause concern.

However, this argument fails to recognize the

fundamental importance of location in under-

standing housing markets. Certainly, 300,000

rental homes are a small fraction of the entire

U.S. inventory, but they are highly concentrated

in specific metropolitan areas. In other words,

they are unevenly distributed, and national sta-

tistics obscure how local markets possess high

concentrations. In the immediate aftermath of

the foreclosure crisis, firms like Blackstone

bought heavily in the Sunbelt, particularly in

suburban neighborhoods with newer housing.

Atlanta has by far the largest number of homes

owned by these PE and REIT landlords, fol-

lowed by places like Phoenix, Houston, Las

Vegas, and Tampa.

One of the principal challenges in

studying institutional landlords is

their use of corporate aliases to

obscure the true scale

of their holdings.

Investors targeted these metropolitan areas

for a number of reasons, among them low pur-

chase prices, but also strong underlying funda-

mentals in terms of housing demand and a

permissive regulatory environment, including

a lack of tenant protections that might con-

strain their business models. Even within the

metros in which these firms own SFRs, their

holdings are often highly spatially concen-

trated in certain neighborhoods,

as we demon-

strate below.

After the initial wave of SFR acquisition by

the largest firms, another set of firms began buy-

ing lower-valued properties in different housing

submarkets, often in working-class and rela-

tively lower income neighborhoods compared

to the more middle-class suburban Sunbelt

neighborhoods where Blackstone and its

peers concentrated investment. With reduced

inventory and higher acquisition costs in the

once-distressed neighborhoods where firms like

Blackstone bought large portfolios of discounted

properties, these second-wave SFR investors

searched for other sources of lower-cost homes.

These firms include FirstKey Homes, owned by

Cerberus Capital Management, and Vinebrook

Homes, controlled by a REIT created by

NexPoint Advisors who also specialize in the

Midwest, including in cities like Cincinnati,

Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and St Louis.

Patterns of SFR Home

Investment in Metro Atlanta

One of the principal challenges in studying

institutional landlords is their use of corporate

aliases to obscure the true scale of their hold-

ings. Rather than finding the full scope of a

given company’s holdings in tax assessor

records under the parent company’s name, any-

one who goes looking for these corporations

will instead find an overlapping series of shell

companies with obscure names like SFR 2014

GA LLC, SUNFIRE 3 LLC or 2018-4 IH

BORROWER LLC. The proliferation of shell

companies makes it incredibly difficult to iden-

tify the full scope of any company’s holdings.

While some researchers have taken advantage

of corporate filings for the largest publicly

traded REITs, including Invitation Homes,

American Homes 4 Rent, and Tricon American

Homes,

PE firms are not required to disclose

such information publicly because of a carve

out in the Investment Company Act of 1940,

and so their operations remain relatively

opaque. This has in part contributed to a dearth

of research into PE firms and other institutional

investors relative to REITs.

We were, however, able to uncover the full

scope and a more localized picture of the prop-

erties owned by these investors in the metro

Atlanta area, by cross-referencing corporate

LLC aliases and office addresses to tax assessor

records. We identified over 32,028 single-

family homes owned by the ten largest institu-

tional SFR investors in just the five core coun-

ties,

representing 2.35 percent of all housing

units, 3.47 percent of all single-family homes,

58 New Labor Forum 32(2)

5.59 percent of all rental units, and 17.36 per-

cent of all SFRs across these five counties.

Just like the national-level statistics used by

apologists for these corporate landlords, these

metro-wide statistics similarly obscure the deep

spatial concentration of ownership. The top 10

percent of census tracts account for over half of

the total properties owned by these companies.

So while these landlords own almost no single-

family homes throughout the predominantly

wealthy and white area that noted housing scholar

Dan Immergluck calls the “favored northern

quarter” of the Atlanta metro,

they own thou-

sands in predominantly Black and working-class

suburbs of south DeKalb, south Fulton and

Clayton counties, along with the more racially

diverse and middle-class suburbs of eastern

Gwinnett County and northern Cobb County.

[The] pattern [of acquisition]

maps almost perfectly onto the

geographies of race and income

in Atlanta . . .

While Figure 1 shows the total concentration

of properties owned by these ten landlords, and

therefore, the areas where these firms generally

have targeted their investments, it does not

address the question of market power that is

crucial for understanding the impact of these

institutional investors. By comparing these con-

centrations of corporate-owned SFRs to the

total number of SFRs in the same neighbor-

hoods, we can identify twenty-four census tracts

where these corporate-owned SFR properties

account for more than 50 percent of all SFRs,

and in some tracts these figures rise to as

much as 80 percent. Even more so than the total

number of properties, it is these shares of

particular submarkets that point toward oligop-

olistic, if not outright monopolistic, control,

allowing these firms to not only set rental prices,

but also to more readily exploit tenants through

substandard conditions, lack of maintenance,

extraneous fees, and serial evictions due to the

lack of alternative options available to them.

Our research further shows that different

types of corporate landlords adopt different

kinds of strategies when it comes to the neigh-

borhoods they target, as seen in Figure 2. PE

firms like Amherst and Vinebrook have concen-

trated their acquisitions almost entirely in the

southern portions of the five-county metro,

while publicly traded REITs were more active in

the northern reaches of the metro. This pattern

Figure 1. Geography of corporate-owned single-family rental properties across Atlanta. Single-family

homes owned by the ten largest corporate landlords, Atlanta five-county area, 2022.

Source. Authors’ analysis of 2022 county tax assessor data for selected counties.

Note. Dots are sized relative to the total number of single-family rental properties owned by the ten largest institutional

investors.

Seymour and Shelton 59

maps almost perfectly onto the geographies of

race and income in Atlanta, where predomi-

nantly Black and poor to lower-middle-class

communities are concentrated in a crescent

shape across the southern suburbs, while whiter

and more affluent neighborhoods sit to the north

of the city itself. Indeed, the average property

owned by a PE firm sits in a census tract that is

73 percent Black and has a median household

income of $62,750, while the average property

owned by public REITs is located in a tract that

is only 45 percent Black and has a median

income of nearly $79,000.

While all corporate landlords follow a simi-

lar playbook, this map demonstrates clearly that

different firms have distinct spatial strategies for

investment that target different segments of the

market. While it reveals clearly that PE firms in

particular are most directly targeting working-

class communities of color in cities and suburbs

in Atlanta, this is a strategy these firms are using

in communities across the country.

Impact on Residents and

Communities

Investigative journalists and academics have

repeatedly identified problems with rental

housing companies owned by PE and REIT

entities. There is ample documentation that

these companies raise rents and otherwise

increase revenues by adding and aggressively

collecting numerous fees and charges.

Even

as they charge ever-higher rents, several PE and

REIT landlords have reduced services, leading

to unsafe housing conditions. In January 2023,

the city of Cincinnati filed a lawsuit against

VineBrook Homes for failing to maintain its

rental homes in accordance with municipal

codes and landlord-tenant laws. VineBrook

owns more than 3,000 homes in Hamilton

County, which contains Cincinnati, and thou-

sands more in nearby Dayton, making them by

far the single largest SFR landlord in the region.

Investigative journalists in Memphis similarly

found that FirstKey Homes—controlled by PE

firm Cerberus Capital Management—was

linked to an outsized number of code viola-

tions.

Most, if not all, of the largest SFR land-

lords have been accused of cutting back on

maintenance costs. The Washington Post

recently reported that Invitation Homes failed to

follow the permitting process for repairs, lead-

ing to faulty repairs including leaking pipes.

PE and REIT landlords are also associated

with elevated eviction rates, reflecting these

Figure 2. Comparison of investment strategies of publicly traded REITs and private equity firms. Single-

family homes owned by the ten largest corporate landlords, Atlanta five-county area, broken down by

publicly traded REIT or private equity, 2022.

Source. Authors’ analysis of 2022 county tax assessor data for selected counties.

Note. Dots are sized relative to the total number of single-family rental properties owned by the ten largest institutional

investors. The three largest publicly traded REITs are on the left and the seven largest private equity-controlled firms

are on the right. REIT = real estate investment trusts.

60 New Labor Forum 32(2)

firms’ aggressive pursuit of revenues, even in

the presence of code violations and habitability

concerns. A study of eviction filings in Atlanta

found that several corporate SFR landlords

were significantly more likely to file for evic-

tion compared to owners with fewer than fif-

teen properties.

Related research in metro Las

Vegas has come to similar conclusions.

. . . [T]hese companies raise rents

and otherwise increase revenues

[through] . . . fees and charges

[while reducing] services, leading

to unsafe housing conditions.

PE firms and REITs buying single-family

homes are also crowding out homeownership

opportunities for working-class households.

These entities, with their ability to pay cash and

waive contingencies, have an unfair advantage

competing for homes compared to prospective

homebuyers, who typically require a mortgage

to finance the purchase. The incursion of firms

like Cerberus and VineBrook into moderately

priced, working-class and minority neighbor-

hoods that have historically served first-time

homebuyers has been especially impactful. As

a result, would-be homebuyers are consigned to

renting from companies backed by institutional

investors and paying more than they would

have paid to a mom-and-pop landlord, and

often more than they would have paid toward

their mortgage and taxes had they been able to

purchase the property themselves.

Organizing Resistance to

Private Equity in Housing, and

Its Challenges

Despite the considerable power these institu-

tional investors hold in the markets in which they

are active, tenants, housing justice activists, and

even some politicians have begun standing up to

these new corporate landlords, suggesting strate-

gies for holding owners accountable and promot-

ing housing security in Atlanta and beyond. In

San Francisco, tenants formed the Veritas Tenants

Association (VTA), now a statewide tenants

union, to fight for important concessions from the

large multifamily PE landlord Veritas.

Tenants

demanded Veritas cancel rent debt accumulated

during the pandemic, and they withheld applying

for rental assistance until Veritas canceled debt

not covered by the state and canceled scheduled

rent increases. Coming out of this effort, San

Francisco adopted a “Right to Organize” ordi-

nance, requiring landlords to bargain with tenant

associations. This campaign was successful in

bringing Veritas to the table because of its need to

collect state rental assistance to meet the substan-

tial debt obligations these firms take on to expand

their holdings. Rent and debt strikes, particularly

large-scale multi-building campaigns, can force

these firms to negotiate better terms with their

tenants, though this capacity is contingent on ten-

ant protections, which are far stronger in

California than most of the other states where

institutional investors, particularly single-family

landlords, have targeted their investments.

Rent and debt strikes . . . can force

these firms to negotiate better

terms with their tenants, though

this . . . is contingent on tenant

protections . . .

Despite corporate landlords’ growing pres-

ence and the media attention paid to them, ten-

ant organizing campaigns against these

landlords are less common than those in multi-

family buildings. One of the principal barriers

to organizing against SFR landlords is the fact

many of them targeted investments in states

with limited tenant protections like Georgia,

Florida, and Arizona. Similarly, it is consider-

ably more difficult to organize SFR tenants

given that each of them lives in a completely

separate property that might be spread quite

far across a metro area. Perhaps the most

notable exception to this rule comes from the

Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul,

Minnesota, where tenants of properties owned

by SFR landlord Pretium Partners have been

organizing with Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia

(United Renters for Justice) to demand better

housing conditions and treatment and bringing

public attention to the problems associated with

this company, which targeted its investment in

Seymour and Shelton 61

Black working-class neighborhoods on the

northside of Minneapolis. Since 2018, city

inspectors have documented more than 1,500

code violations across the company’s roughly

200 homes. Tenant activism has brought this

problem to the attention of Minnesota Attorney

General Keith Ellison, who filed a lawsuit against

HavenBrook, the property management arm of

Pretium-subsidiary Front Yard Residential. The

city of Minneapolis and Front Yard Residential

recently agreed to a set of conditions the landlord

must abide by to continue operation, including

addressing code enforcement violations. The

company is also subject to a temporary morato-

rium on acquiring additional properties pending

the company meeting those conditions.

Pro-tenant activists have also applied pressure

to the institutional investors contributing funds to

corporate landlords. Some of the largest investors

in PE funds are public pension funds and univer-

sity endowments, whose investments pit their

financial returns against the housing security of

the workers and communities they represent. The

California Public Employees’ Retirement Fund

(CalPERS) and the New York State Teachers’

Retirement Fund (NYSTRS), two of the nation’s

largest public pension funds, have invested sub-

stantial amounts with Blackstone, among other

PE funds managed by firms active in real estate.

Given increasing awareness of the effect of PE

and REIT housing investments, activists have

raised the possibility of conditioning pension

fund investments on tenant protections. As noted

in a 2019 Gothamist article, there is precedent for

this type of conditional investment: in 2009, a

coalition of housing advocates pressured the New

York City comptroller to adopt a policy allowing

pension funds to withhold investments in PE

firms found to be engaged in predatory behav-

ior.

More recently, tenants and union members

have protested the University of California’s

more than $4 billion investment in the Blackstone

Real Estate Investment Trust (BREIT).

The

Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) has

similarly brought attention to the North Carolina

Retirement System’s (NCRS) investment with

PE firms who are in turn investing in Progress

Residential.

In addition to these various other challenges

facing those seeking to rein in these corporate

landlords, there is also the problem of informa-

tion: tenants and organizers require the kind of

property ownership information and corporate

aliases employed by landlords in order to

understand the scale of their holdings. Efforts

by organizations like the PESP have been help-

ful on this front, using their research capacity to

demonstrate the practices and ownership pat-

terns of entities like Pretium Partners. The

Action Center on Race & the Economy

(ACRE), often in partnership with PESP and

other organizations, has also elevated the issues

raised by residents of working-class communi-

ties of color to the national stage, and they have

been instrumental in recent action by Congress

to investigate the practices of some of these PE

and REIT landlords.

Together, these efforts

point to the challenges of understanding and

organizing against a newly emerging form of

landlordism that is both intensely local in its

effects and experiences, but also national or

global in its structure. While tenants within a

single building can gain leverage over their land-

lords when the conditions are right, organizing

tenants of a shared corporate landlord dispersed

across thousands of single-family homes in the

sprawling suburbs of a major metro area repre-

sents a more daunting task, though one that also

cuts to the heart of the changing nature of the

landlord-tenant relationship today.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter-

est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or

publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the

research, authorship, and/or publication of this

article.

ORCID iD

Eric Seymour https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1906-

3701

Notes

1. Michael Ewens, Arpit Gupta, and Sabrina T.

Howell, “Local Journalism under Private Equity

Ownership,” NBER, 2022; Atul Gupta, Sabrina

T. Howell, Constantine Yannelis, and Abhinav

62 New Labor Forum 32(2)

Gupta. “Does Private Equity Investment in

Healthcare Benefit Patients? Evidence from

Nursing Homes,” NBER, 2021.

2. Desiree Fields, “Contesting the Financialization

of Urban Space: Community Organizations and

the Struggle to Preserve Affordable Rental

Housing in New York City,” Journal of Urban

Affairs 37, no. 2 (2015): 1486-502; Benjamin

F. Teresa, “Managing Fictitious Capital: The

Legal Geography of Investment and Political

Struggle in Rental Housing in New York City,”

Environment and Planning A 48, no. 3 (2015):

445-84.

3. Mathilde Lind Gustavussen, “Corporate

Landlords Are Taking Over—But Tenants Can Use

their Monopolies against Them,” Jacobin, June,

2022, available at https://jacobin.com/2022/06/

corporate-landlords-ca-tenants-unions-finance.

4. Claudia Irizarry Aponte, “When Private Equity

Came Knocking, Bronx Renters Were Given

Two Options: Buy or Get Out,” The City,

February 23, 2022, available at https://www.

thecity.nyc/2022/2/23/22947878/when-priv

ate-equity-came-knocking-these-bronx-rent

ers-were-given-two-options-buy-or-get-out;

Hannah Levintova, “Real Estate Predators

Tried to Cash in on the Pandemic. Then Tenants

Fought Back,” Mother Jones, May-June 2022,

available at https://www.motherjones.com/

politics/2022/05/private-equity-brooklyn-park-

slope-greenbrook-nw1-mcnam-schumer/.

5. Americans for Financial Reform, “Research

Memo: New AFR Research Estimating

Minimum Number of Private Equity-Owned

Housing Units,” June 2022, available at

https://ourfinancialsecurity.org/2022/06/

letters-to-congress-new-afr-research-esti-

mating-minimum-number-of-private-equity-

owned-housing-units/.

6. Americans for Financial Reform, “Research

Memo.”

7. Jerusalem Demsas, “Meet the Latest Housing-

Crisis Scapegoat,” The Atlantic, January 26, 2023,

available at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/

archive/2023/01/housing-crisis-hedge-funds-

private-equity-scapegoat/672839/; Jerusalem

Demsas, “Wall Street Isn’t to Blame for the

Chaotic Housing Market,” Vox, June 11, 2021,

available at https://www.vox.com/22524829/

wall-street-housing-market-blackrock-bub-

ble; Derek Thompson, “BlackRock Is Not

Ruining the U.S. Housing Market,” The

Atlantic, June 17, 2021, available at https://

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/

blackrock-ruining-us-housing-market/619224/.

8. Suzanne Lanyi Charles, “The Financialization

of Single-Family Rental Housing: An

Examination of Real Estate Investment Trusts’

Ownership of Single-Family Houses in the

Atlanta Metropolitan Area,” Journal of Urban

Affairs 42, no. 8 (2022): 1321-341.

9. Desiree Fields and Manon Vergerio, “Corporate

Landlords and Market Power: What Does the

Single-Family Rental Boom Mean for Our

Housing Future?” 2022, available at https://

escholarship.org/uc/item/07d6445s.

10. These firms are, in order of the size of their

property holdings in the five core counties:

Invitation Homes, Pretium Partners, Amherst

Holdings, Cerberus Capital Management,

American Homes 4 Rent, Tricon American

Homes, Starwood Capital, Avenue One Homes,

Sylvan Homes and Vinebrook Homes. Of these

firms, Invitation, AH4R and Tricon are the only

publicly-traded REITs, while the rest are con-

trolled by private equity firms.

11. Dan Immergluck, Red Hot City: Housing, Race,

and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta

(Berkeley: University of California Press,

2022).

12. Alana Semuels, “When Wall Street Is Your

Landlord,” The Atlantic, February 13, 2019,

available at https://www.theatlantic.com/tech-

nology/archive/2019/02/single-family-land-

lords-wall-street/582394/; Francesca Mari, “A

$60 Billion Housing Grab by Wall Street,” The

New York Times Magazine, March 4, available

at 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/

magazine/wall-street-landlords.html; Heather

Vogell, “When Private Equity Becomes Your

Landlord,” ProPublica, February 7, 2022,

available at https://www.propublica.org/article/

when-private-equity-becomes-your-landlord.

13. Todd C. Frankel and Dan Keating, “Eviction

Filings and Code Complaints: What happened

when a private equity firm become one of the

city’s biggest homeowners,” The Washington

Post, December 25, 2018, available at https://

www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/

eviction-filings-and-code-complaints-what-hap-

pened-when-a-private-equity-firm-became-one-

citys-biggest-homeowner/2018/12/25/995678d

4-02f3-11e9-b6a9-0aa5c2fcc9e4_story.html.

14. Jonathan O’Connell, Peter Whoriskey,

and Kevin Schaul, “At Invitation Homes,

Unpermitted Work Leaves Leaky Plumbing,

Faulty Repairs, Renters Say,” The Washington

Post, July 12, 2022, available at https://www

.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/12/

invitation-homes-corporate-landlord-permits/.

Seymour and Shelton 63

15. Colony American Homes, since subsumed by

Invitation Homes, was more than three times

as likely to file for eviction compared to small

landlords, while American Homes 4 Rent

was nearly three times as likely, and Progress

Residential was nearly twice as likely. Elora

Lee Raymond, Richard Duckworth, Benjamin

Miller, Michael Lucas, and Shiraj Pokharel,

“From Foreclosure to Eviction: Housing

Insecurity in Corporate-Owned Single-Family

Rentals, “Cityscape 20, no. 3 (2018): 159-88.

16. Invitation Homes, American Homes 4 Rent, and

Progress were all more than three and half times

as likely to file for eviction compared to small

landlords and Cerberus being more than twice

as likely. Eric Seymour, “Corporate Landlords

and Pandemic and Prepandemic Evictions in

Las Vegas,” Housing Policy Debate (2022):

1-22; Eric Seymour and Joshua Akers, “‘Our

customer is America’: Housing Insecurity and

Eviction in Las Vegas, Nevada’s Postcrisis

Rental Markets,” Housing Policy Debate 31,

no. 3-5 (2021): 516-39.

17. Cameron Ehrlich, Tim McDonald, L. David

Vertz, and Sage Computing Staff, “Institutional

Investors in Housing,” Evidence Matters,

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban and

Development Office of Policy Development

and Research, Winter 2023, available at https://

www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/em/win-

ter23/index.html.

18. Gustavussen, “Corporate Landlords Are Taking

Over.”

19. Susan Du, “Minneapolis Imposes Lengthy

Conditions on Troubled Corporate Landlord,”

Minneapolis Star Tribune, January12, 2023,

available at https://www.startribune.com/min

neapolis-imposes-lengthy-conditions-on-trou

bled-corporate-landlord/600242948/.

20. Emma Whitford, “Could NY’s Pension Funds

Use their Real Estate Holdings to Protect

Tenants? Gothamist, June 25, 2019, available

at https://gothamist.com/news/could-nys-pen

sion-funds-use-their-real-estate-holdings-to-

protect-tenants.

21. Charmaine Chua, Desiree Fields, and David

Stein, “When the Public University Is the

Corporate Landlord,” Law & Political Economy,

February 2, 2023, available at https://lpeproject.

org/blog/when-the-public-university-is-the-cor

porate-landlord/

22. Jordan Ash and Madeline Bankson, “Investing

in the Housing Crisis: An Exploration of

the North Carolina Public Pension System’s

Relationship with Landmark Partners and the

Single Family Rental industry,” Private Equity

Stakeholder Project, 2022, available at https://

pestakeholder.org/news/new-report-reveals-

how-north-carolina-retirement-systems-pri-

vate-equity-investments-support-controversial-

corporate-landlord-progress-residential/.

23. Matthew Goldstein, “Large landlords aggres-

sively moved against renters in the pandemic,

a report says,” The New York Times, July 29,

2022, available at https://www.nytimes.com/

2022/07/29/business/large-landlords-aggres

sively-moved-against-renters-in-the-pandemic-

a-report-says.html

Author Biographies

Eric Seymour is an assistant professor in the pro-

gram in urban planning and policy development at

the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and

Public Policy at Rutgers University. His research

focuses on post-foreclosure-crisis transformations in

housing markets and their implications for housing

security.

Taylor Shelton is an assistant professor in

the Department of Geosciences at Georgia State

University. Broadly trained as a geographer,

Shelton’s research focuses on the variety of ways

that mapping can be used to develop alternative

understandings of urban social and environmental

injustices, especially as it relates to issues of housing

and property ownership.