Landlord Paternalism: Housing the Poor with a Velvet Glove

Private landlords play an important role in America’s poverty governance, with profound effects on poor families and neighborhoods. Drawing on data from interviews with 127 landlords in Baltimore, Dallas, and Cleveland, we ask how landlords understand 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 housing those in need on the condition of their moral reform. We identify two components of this strategy: exclusion and reform. 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 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.