As a key actor in housing the poor, the private landlord plays an important role in America’s poverty governance, with profound effects on poor families and their neighborhoods. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with 127 landlords in Baltimore, Dallas, and Cleveland, we ask how landlords think about their role as purveyors of affordable housing. We find that landlords think about their tenants in moral terms, drawing upon cultural categories to describe and define their tenants. Landlords see renting to the urban poor as a social good insofar as it facilitates a civilizing mission that houses those in need on the condition of their moral reform. We identify two components of this strategy: exclusion and reform. On the one hand, landlords pursue profit through exclusionary tactics such as screening and eviction. While recent research has focused on this component, this article explores how landlords also invest resources in “training” tenants, attempting to mold them into a profitable ideal, rather than replacing them. Using both incentives and surveillance, landlords seek to create a tenant class that conforms to mainstream notions of responsibility and self-reliance. We argue that exclusion and reform are two sides of the same coin, that is, complementary components of paternalistic poverty governance. Landlord paternalism carries special salience in today’s increasingly privatized federal housing policy, where landlords have a great deal of discretion and little oversight.
Housing Is Health: A Renewed Call for Federal Housing Investments in Affordable Housing for Families With Children