Panel:
Landlords and Tenant Selection in the Low-Rent Market
(Housing, Community Development, and Urban Policy)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Despite their key role in housing markets, we have surprisingly little understanding about landlord motivations, financing or behavior. This is especially true for landlords that operate in the low-rent market. Yet understanding the behavior of landlords is essential to effective rental housing policy. This panel includes four papers that shed important new light on the landlords that house low-income households. Two of the papers focus on the landlords serving housing choice voucher holders in particular. The voucher program is unusual among social programs in that it requires take-up from both tenants and landlords. The first paper highlights the very high proportions of landlords that outright refuse to accept tenants with vouchers, and implications for access to opportunity neighborhoods and high-performing schools. That said, the paper also shows enormous variation in denial rates and explores the sources of that variation. The second paper takes advantage of a national dataset on the universe of landlords who participate in the voucher program to test whether and how the enactment of Source of Income Discrimination Laws and the adoption of Small Area Fair Market Rents increases the number and type of landlords accepting vouchers. The third paper employs quantitative data from online rental property listings in Cleveland, OH and interviews with landlords, to show an inconsistency between landlords’ tenant preferences (stated through rental listings) and their decisions to ultimately act on them after meeting with interested tenants–which may create obstacles to securing housing, and at the same time, increase financial losses for landlords. Finally, the fourth paper examines how landlords weigh tenant factors such as race and voucher status during the screening process in ways that limit residential options for low-income, minority, and subsidized tenants.
