Reporters are not going door to door, knocking on people's doors asking, are you a landlord? Ore doing stories on landlords. How do they get in contact with these landlords? I think they're pitched to them by real estate lobbying groups,. O som some people cal em landlord advocacy. Thatis my favorite advocacy. They're advocating for landlords. Nobody wants mister burns. You have to find the most sympathetic then you might actually support eviction mororyand red coto. And that, politically, would not be as feasible if we didn't have this constant stream of a bleeding heart, totally misrepresentative, totally cherry picked, totally non representative depictions of o the so called mama
“The eviction moratorium is killing small landlords” CNBC cautions. "Some small landlords struggle under eviction moratoriums,” declares The Washington Post. “Economic Pressures Are Rising On Mom And Pop Rental Owners,” laments NPR. ”[Landlords] can’t hold on much longer,” cries an LA Times headline.
Throughout the course of the pandemic, we’ve seen a spate of media coverage highlighting the plight of the small or so-called “mom-and-pop landlord” struggling to make ends meet. The story usually goes something like this: A modest, down-on-their-luck owner of two or three properties — say, a elderly grandmother or hardworking medical professional — hopes to keep them long enough to hand them down to their kids, but fears financial ruin in the face of radical tenant-protection laws.
But this doesn’t reflect the reality of rental housing ownership in the United States. Over the last couple decades, corporate entities, from Wall Street firms to an opaque network of LLCs, have increasingly seized ownership of the rental housing stock, intensifying the asymmetry of landlord-tenant power relations and rendering housing ever more precarious for renters. In the meantime, the character of the “mom-and-pop landlord” has been evoked nonstop — much like that of the romantic “small business owner” — in order to sanitize the image of property ownership and gin up opposition to legislation that would protect tenants from eviction moratoria to rent control.
On this episode, we explore the overrepresentation of the “mom-and-pop landlord” in media, contrasting it with the actual makeup of rental housing ownership. We’ll also examine how the media-burnished image of the beleaguered, barely-scraping-by landlord puts a human face on policies that further enrich a property-owning class while justifying the forceful removal of renters from their homes.
Our guest is Alexander Ferrer of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE).