Episode 35: Landlord Regulation and Unintended Consequences with Meredith Greif

Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice Podcast, and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. This week's guest is Meredith Greif of Johns Hopkins University, and she's joining us to talk about her research and new book, 'Collateral Damages: Landlords and the Urban Housing Crisis'. We've been on a bit of a landlord kick over the past few months, and you'll definitely hear some echoes of previous conversations in this episode. Professor Greif's research looks at the experiences of nearly 60 small and medium-sized landlords in Cleveland, Ohio, and specifically at the ways nuisance and utility regulations, which levy penalties on landlords, may ultimately fall most heavily on tenants, especially those who are already marginalized due to their race, family or employment status, or experiences with domestic violence. This is by no means a call to eliminate regulations, but Greif's work does encourage us to consider the unintended consequences that may accompany those regulations, and to design or redesign them accordingly.

I want to give a bit of a longer introduction here for this episode because I know there can be a temptation to interpret any amount of sympathy toward landlords as a form of apologia, and I want to acknowledge that here at the top and make it clear that our purpose is not to cast landlords as victims, especially when juxtaposed against tenants. Among the many reasons I don't think that's the appropriate way to interpret this research, landlording is a business and it is therefore something that people opt into. And as real and legitimate as the concerns raised in this conversation may be, there's no question that even the landlords discussed here are in positions of exceptional privilege relative to most if not all of their tenants, especially those who face overlapping vulnerabilities and marginalization due to their race or ethnicity, their socioeconomic status, gender identity, or otherwise. The landlords in this study also in some cases openly admit to breaking the law based on little more than folktales shared amongst their peers. At the same time, Professor Greif's work helps illustrate how we can unintentionally exacerbate these inequalities if our gut reaction to any kind of landlord complaint is to dismiss them out of hand, or if we assume that if something is bad for landlords then it must be good for tenants. Her research points to some cases where what's bad for one is bad for the other, and that, to me, seems like something worth knowing, even if it still leaves us the difficult work of figuring out how best to respond to that.

Just for a quick example, here, Professor Greif mentions in our discussion how some landlords say they don't rent to tenants with children under six years old, because they'd be subject to lead remediation requirements that they feel they can't afford. We could respond to that by saying, "well, too bad, this is important, and everyone's required to do it even if they're not renting to households with children. If you're not willing to spend the money on lead remediation, then you shouldn't be in the landlording business." That's pretty much my view if we take unintended consequences off the table. But Cleveland is a poor city where housing is already worth very little. What if the result of that mandate is for some rentals to go vacant, and others to be converted to owner occupancy, so that yes, the rental units still available are now lead free, but there are fewer of them, and they're more expensive, because there's less supply and the same demand. Are renters in Cleveland better off? Households with kids under six probably are assuming they can still afford the slightly more expensive housing. But there was a clear cost there in losing some of those units and the price of the remaining ones going up, and it wasn't borne just by the landlords. Again, this does not mean that the response is to throw up our hands and do nothing and say, "well, we just aren't going to do lead remediation." But whatever our response, it has to take those trade-offs into account, and maybe in the process we can come up with a solution that actually works better for more tenants, whether it's something landlords support or not. That's really what we're getting at with this discussion, and I think it's an interpretation Professor Greif would also agree with. So I hope everyone is able to listen to this episode charitably, and with an open mind, even if it makes you a bit queasy -- which I think is also an appropriate response to much of this, to be clear. The Housing Voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Olivia Arena, and Jason Sutedja. As always, feedback and show ideas can go to me at shanephillips@ucla.edu. Now, let's get to our conversation with Professor Meredith Greif.

Meredith Greif is Assistant Professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University and she is the author of a new book titled 'Collateral Damages: Landlords and the Urban Housing Crisis', published by the Russell Sage Foundation. She's joining us today to talk about that book and some of the research that motivated it. Professor Greif, welcome to the Housing Voice Podcast.

Meredith Greif 5:17
Thank you so much for having me.

Shane Phillips 5:19
And my cohost today is Mike Lens, on campus at UCLA. Welcome.

Michael Lens 5:23
On campus at UCLA, back to living in Los Angeles. Somebody should do something about the traffic here. You know anybody?

Shane Phillips 5:34
Okay, so as always, we start with a tour from our guest. I assume you want to do Baltimore, but up to you -- when you have friends or colleagues visiting the city, where do you like to take them?

Meredith Greif 5:45
I take them to Patterson Park, which is a huge, beautiful green space. And it's one of the oldest and most historic parks in Baltimore, and it has this iconic feature of a famed pagoda with a three story observation at the top of a hill. And it's one of the best views of the city. It also has a duck pond, and I'm an avid bird-lover so I'm a sucker for that.

Shane Phillips 6:12
That sounds lovely. So before we get into the study, I had a more macro level observation based in part on our previous guests, which is that it seems like a lot of the best research on landlords and eviction comes from sociologists - Matthew Desmond and his work in Milwaukee, our recent guests Eva Rosen and Philip Garboden, and of course yourself, why do you think that is? Why sociology?

Meredith Greif 6:37
First, thank you for observing that, and I think there are a few reasons why sociologists have provided such meaningful findings on these topics. It's the qualitative and ethnographic approach, which I and these other sociologists have used to give us a chance to put together a picture by hearing people's stories, and in a way that you wouldn't ordinarily get from using large scale survey data alone, or other forms of quantitative data and statistics. And when it comes to landlords, in particular, who have been a stigmatized population, we've really missed out on their perspective.

Michael Lens 7:17
Right, there's not a lot of, you know, data on on so many fundamental things, and and when I say data, I mean, quantitative or administrative data, or even large scale survey data that you might glean from the census, there's just not -- there's all these urban housing phenomena that you hear anecdotes about, that you hear accusations about whether it's from the landlord side levied at tenants, whether it's from the tenant side, and their advocacy community levied at landlords, and we just don't have systematic information on that. And so it's so valuable that we have people like you and other folks getting these stories, finding some ways to have a evidence base on what we got, right?

Shane Phillips 8:10
Yeah. So the article that we're discussing today was published several years ago in the journal City and Community. It's titled "Regulating Landlords: Unintended Consequences For Poor Tenants.", and as I said, your book, it builds upon this research. Your research is similar to Eva's and Philip's in that it was based on a bunch of interviews with small and medium sized landlords. In your case, these were all in Cleveland, and also similarly, you talk to others involved in the housing market in one way or another, especially the lower-end housing market - this could be eviction court judges and magistrates, people who inspect homes with Housing Choice vouchers, council members, tenant advocates, and so forth. Both the article and your book are about how landlords respond to regulation and the unintended negative consequences or collateral damages that that can have for poor tenants. But at least for the article, this was not about regulation of all kinds, necessarily, but rather a few regulations or policies in particular. The defining characteristic of these regulations, to me, seems to be their relationship to the problem of moral hazard, which, to give a very oversimplified definition, occurs in situations where a person or organization or other group or entity is protected from the consequences of their actions. Usually, someone else has to pay the cost. I'm most familiar with the concept of moral hazard in the context of health insurance, where there's a concern that if, for example, the government covers people's medical expenses, they may be more likely to behave in ways that put their own health at risk through smoking or eating unhealthfully or not exercising, and the idea there is that, you know, at least some of the cost of those actions is borne by the public, through the health insurance program, rather than the individual themselves -- putting aside the fact that being unhealthy is its own cost that you pay. But in this case we're talking about tenants who violate certain rules or norms and landlords who ended up paying. What were the regulations that you were actually interested in for this study, and why do they raise concerns about unintended consequences? And as you answer, you can feel free to expand on my very inadequate definition of moral hazard as a part of your answer if you think that would be helpful.

Meredith Greif 10:28
Okay, sure. I realize the term moral hazard can sound jargony. You did capture it well. I'll just go on to remind that it's meant to describe a circumstance where someone stands to incur a loss, often financially, as a result of someone else's behavior, especially when that person doesn't seem to have anything to lose as a result. And so as you wondered, what are some of those policies that do create these moral hazard circumstances, and why are they such a problem for tenants? So there are two in particular I focus on in this paper, and continue to discuss it even more in my book, but they pertain to criminal activity nuisance ordinances, and to water billing regulations. And although there are some differences between them, they do evoke some of the same feelings from landlords and subsequent treatment towards tenants on the basis of this moral hazard concept. So first, I'll talk about the criminal activity nuisance ordinances, or CANOs, and these are actually sweeping through cities across the nation. They are usually enforced locally, and are meant to deter undesirable activity from private properties. So there's a growing list of nuisance behaviors on the books in many cities, and that includes loud noise, drug use, calling the police too many times for help, even if that means help with domestic violence issues.

Shane Phillips 11:59
Yeah, which it seems really perverse.

Meredith Greif 12:01
It does, and we can talk more about that. According to these ordinances, it's the property owner who can incur hundreds or thousands of dollars in fines, or even criminal sanctions as a result of nuisance activity on their property. So you can imagine how it is that landlords feel especially concerned about their tenants' "nuisance activity" on their property, and might therefore turn to some disadvantageous practices in order to minimize that financial risk. So for instance, when it comes to these CANOs, there were landlords who screened out people who had criminal convictions on their record. Notably, these are people who face obstacles to getting access to housing anyway. Some landlords explained that they were worried to have someone with a criminal conviction because of concerns about their own safety, or the safety of their tenants if they had a multi-unit building, but this adds another layer of risk for the landlord because, in their minds, they presumed that if someone had committed some illegal act previously, that there was a greater likelihood that they might do so on their property, inviting all of the financial sanctions or criminal sanctions that could occur in the future if they did house this person. So it's layering on this other additional type of risk for people with this background. Another thing, which is also very upsetting and shocking, is that there are landlords who look to screen out people who share they were survivors of domestic violence, because, again, of the idea that calling the police for assistance multiple times, --in particular for this or other issues -- can lead to a property being labeled a nuisance. And so when landlords heard that someone had experienced domestic violence, said "that's a red flag; turning his person away." So already, right then and there, you're seeing two populations that face obstacles to housing that are additionally getting set back as a result of these CANOs. But I'll also note that aside from screening, there are other ways that tenants suffered as a result -- that their housing security suffered because there were landlords who were so hyper-scrutinizing of their tenants -- and especially tenants' illegal activity on the property, notably drug use -- that when they received any kind of suggestion or had any suspicion that their tenants were engaged in such activity on their properties, found ways to harass them to have them leave without having to go through the court process. So they didn't have tangible evidence that in theory could enable them to be victorious in a court eviction hearing, but just the suspicion alone motivated them to try to raise red flags in the tenants' minds and scare them to get out, and without the court process. We would call that an informal eviction, which is also illegal.

Michael Lens 15:00
Right. And, you know, some of those issues with domestic violence in particular -- Shane brought that up as a perverse incentive or perverse system, we learned a lot about that from Desmond's book, Evicted, back in 2016 or whatever. So it's, I think, important to emphasize, for me, that every jurisdiction is going to be different, you know, policy-wise, whether this is on the policing side, or the code enforcement side, or how badly we disincentivize a victim of domestic violence coming forward. But we know that there are so many places out there where, on top of the long, long and tragic list of reasons why a victim might not be very comfortable coming forward, calling the police, trying to get away from somebody that's harming them, you add the potential that a landlord can have you removed, or has additional incentives to have you removed, because the city, the police have labeled your unit, your home, a problem. Rather than, you know, a housing problem to solve -- not just like, "you have a problem of danger to your body, and your well being," right, and that's just so, so tragic, and I think is a really important motivation for what you're doing.

Meredith Greif 16:40
Yes, it's a true catch-22 to select between your housing and your safety. That's the position we're putting people in.

Shane Phillips 16:47
And you also mentioned water regulations as well, could you tell us a little bit about those?

Meredith Greif 16:53
Water was one of the most shocking findings of this work, something that I did not see coming, honestly.

Michael Lens 17:02
And not just in like drought stricken California, right? We're in Cleveland, there's a very large body of freshwater nearby.

Meredith Greif 17:14
Yes, it came up very early on. Some landlords, it was the first thing they wanted to talk about. You could barely get past the first sentence without them saying "water bills are terrible for the landlord," "water is a monster, water is a killer." And then they began to share why. And I'll just give a brief background that water bills are rising nationwide, for everybody. And Cleveland is not even the city where it's rising the most. There are places where it's even rising much faster. And the reason is because our water infrastructure is crumbling, and it's really expensive to improve -- to upgrade -- and the federal government used to provide more money for that, and is pulling away. Now cities are having to take over that responsibility and are jacking up costs for the consumer in order to fund that.

Shane Phillips 18:05
Which you would imagine would be especially bad in a place like Cleveland, where the population is, what, half(?) what it was at its peak, and so it's got this much larger system probably than it even needs, and yet it has to keep maintaining all of that with the smaller economic base.

Meredith Greif 18:18
Exactly, right, it varies across contexts for reasons like that. They still have to do all that work, and if there aren't enough tax dollars, they're just gonna raise taxes more. And that has implications for everybody. The reason why it has particular implications for landlords and their tenants is because, according to these regulations, which are found also in cities nationwide, is that ultimately, it's the property owner / landlord who's responsible to pay that water bill. So even if the lease states that it's the tenant's responsibility, or even if the water bill is in the tenant's name, it does not matter legally. Ultimately, it's the landlord that's responsible. It's something that in some ways, perhaps, is meant to protect the tenant and also to ensure the city gets their money, but it does have these negative consequences for tenants and of course I can go on and talk about that or...

Shane Phillips 19:20
I assumed that it was just an issue of, like, water is very rarely separately metered for individual units, but I was not aware that even if it were, it's still the responsibility of the landlord. I guess I can see, like, if the landlord doesn't maintain the pipes and there's a leak, that's not the fault of the tenant, and yet they might be billed for it. So I can see at least one reason you might have a rule like that, yeah tell us a little bit more about how this affects landlords, or how this moral hazard problem comes in specifically.

Meredith Greif 19:48
So it puts them -- especially the small landlords -- on edge in terms of these rising and unpredictable water bills. Some even admitted that they would not be making money in the business if the tenants used more water, or if they had some major water bill that, for a lot of these landlords, their bottom line was really tight -- something that we need to give more attention to as we talk about them. They're not all making tons of money, and that's a part of this whole story that I'm talking about here. So when it comes to the water bills, first, landlords were motivated to screen out applicants who they assumed would use more water, and notably, these are some of the very populations that already face obstacles to gaining affordable, decent housing. So for instance, they were very wary to house people who were unemployed, and not just for the reason that they figured those folks would have trouble paying rent consistently, but they literally said, "well, this person will be home more hours of the day using more water."

Shane Phillips 20:57
Right, that was really interesting to me, I hadn't thought about that before.

Meredith Greif 21:00
I hadn't either. And it goes to show you this calculus that these landlords are going into it with, just trying to predict the renters every move before they put them in their property because of a sense of lack of control that some of these landlords express, especially in regards to water. Based on some other regulations, which are important -- like the landlord is not allowed to turn off the water at any time, and they aren't even allowed to go into the property to investigate tenants' water usage without a 24 hour notice -- these are protective laws for the tenants and are important, but just on the landlord's end, it made them feel somewhat powerless, like "I have to pay this bill, I can't turn off the water, I can't control what's happening in there." So they scrutinize their tenants even more. Relatedly, because of concerns about unemployed people using more water, they had an incentive to turn away voucher holders because of an erroneous assumption that voucher holders were unemployed, making them more "risky," because they might therefore use more water. Some other populations that also faced limited housing options included larger families, and notably families with kids.

Shane Phillips 22:13
And correct me if I'm wrong -- is that not considered a protected class? You're not legally allowed to discriminate based on that, but proving someone is doing so -- other than I guess when they just tell you in an interview -- is pretty difficult.

Meredith Greif 22:28
Yeah, that is one of our major issues here in trying to protect people under these laws, is to prove that discrimination can be very challenging. And so, certainly, some landlords expressed concern about larger families in general -- just wear and tear, and children -- but then the additional layer of water. In their minds, doing the math: more people, more water being used, so I'm going to turn them away.

Shane Phillips 22:56
So one question I had, which I think is basically already answered, but I just want to put it out there, is: if it's often tenants that are at fault here -- they're using, you know, "too much water," they're causing some nuisance -- another one that we didn't mention, but there are also penalties if people don't put the lid on their trash can, and these kinds of waste-related things as well... these are really all entirely, or almost entirely, out of the hands of landlords, and yet they're paying fines and penalties for them. My question was going to be, you know, can't the landlord just put these provisions in the lease to say, like, "if you, the tenant, incur this fine or penalty, you are responsible for it." I think in the case of water, it sounds like there's just rules that basically say you can't do that the landlord is ultimately responsible. Obviously, with things like domestic violence, as I said, that would be a perverse rule to say, "you're gonna have to pay a fine because you called the police against your abuser" but there's a few examples... I mean, it seems like with the trash, at least like couldn't the landlord just put that provision that says, "if a fee is levied because you didn't put the trash can lid on, or whatever, or drag it to the right spot, then you're responsible for that"?

Meredith Greif 24:11
It's a good question. In theory, landlords would be permitted to do that, and I raised that question with them. But over and over again, they said, "I don't see getting that money. It doesn't seem at all plausible" when you're looking at the lower end of the market, where tenants really struggle to pay rent consistently. The landlord said, you know, "I have trouble getting the rent a lot, so these tenants are not going to be able to give me that $100 or in some cases $500 fine for leaving the trash can out too long." It just wasn't plausible.

Shane Phillips 24:44
Right, and ultimately the fine or penalty is going to the landlord and it would just be a question of can they get the money from the tenant -- it's not going to shift the burden, where, now the city is reaching out directly to the tenant to try to get the money.

Meredith Greif 24:57
Right, exactly. It goes straight to the landlord and the landlord has to pay it or else face additional consequences, yeah.

Michael Lens 25:02
Did you ever encounter, or have you contemplated how technology might be marshaled to at least help in some of these relationships? Like, we all get reminders and notifications from different people and like, you know, some we ignore at this point. I'm sure for most of us there's too many of them to really fully act upon all the time, right? And then, you know, tenants in the circumstances that we're talking about are going to be some of the least connected to some forms of technology, whether it's email -- but most everybody has a cell phone, and there's, you know, text message capabilities or whatever for everybody. So if a landlord had the ability to just like auto-remind people to do trash things, or whatever, like every week -- reminders do not necessarily solve everything, but is there any movement in that direction?

Meredith Greif 26:10
That's a good question. It didn't come up among the landlords with whom I spoke, but I could see that as being a step in the right direction -- presuming the emails or texts are polite, respectful, and not overly persistent or threatening, but I know that's not what you're recommending. I think that could help. Just in an informal way, there were landlords who noted that, once in a while when they reminded a tenant of like "hey, when you leave the trash can out too long, I could get a fine, can you please be on top of that?" Or, "hey, could you please be sure to let me know of a running toilet?" They said the tenants did perk up and respond. And the landlords did acknowledge sometimes that it wasn't that the tenants didn't care, or even worse were trying to stick it to the landlord, but that people get busy and they forget sometimes. And so, you know, on that note, I think it's important to find ways to help landlords and tenants communicate more productively and respectfully, and I do have some ideas on how to do that, potentially. But I think that would be a step in the right direction.

Shane Phillips 27:18
So one question I had, you know, these landlords are saying, "because of these water and utility and waste regulations, and nuisance regulations, we are screening more strictly, and look, it's actually harming the people it's intended to help." But what makes you confident that the reasons they're giving for their actions are actually what's motivating them? Just, for example, if someone has a either conscious or unconscious bias against Black households, they may take a previous bad experience with a Black tenant, and then make a false association that leads them to be more critical of all future Black applicants. Then if the city where that landlord owns property enacts stronger nuisance laws, the landlord may, you know, as you say, be even less likely to rent to a Black household in particular but that's really the fault of the landlord and their biases, not the city --or at least it feels that way to me, and in that sense it seems wrong to say, you know, "we can't have stronger protections, we can't have these regulations, just because they will cause landlords biases to become more salient" -- even if it is true that the burden will fall disproportionately on these marginalized communities. And I don't gather that this is what you're suggesting -- that we should just throw things out because of this. This is more about bringing these trade-offs to light, you know, maybe in the hopes that we can find better solutions. But how do we take this desire to act and balance it with the possibility, or maybe even the certainty in some cases, that it could backfire and do more harm than good? I think we can all agree we can't just throw up our hands and say, "well, landlords are going to punish their tenants for this, so we can't do it."

Meredith Greif 29:02
I think it's a great point. And it's actually something I was mindful of, especially as someone who studies race as part of my research agenda. And one thing to note is that even the landlords who housed somewhat more financially stable tenants, who also were, relatedly, white, also expressed significant concerns about water bills, leading me to believe it's not solely a race-driven pattern. But while I do think that there's an objective financial component to these landlords concerns about water bills, I do think it is also amplified by tenants' marginalized status and the stereotypes that come with it about irresponsibility and deviance. And so I understand your point, but my point is that we cannot ignore racial biases any longer when devising policies. I think it's not likely that racial stereotypes and biases are going to decline in the very near future, and with that in mind I think we have to be vigilant about ensuring our policies do not disproportionately harm populations, like people of color, who already are at a great disadvantage as a result of these biases. So it's not letting landlords off the hook about these biases, but it's acknowledging that we have a serious problem on our hands in regards to racial biases and systemic racism, and that we have to account for it in our policymaking. I don't see any other options moving forward if we're concerned about racial equity and justice.

Shane Phillips 30:44
We've had a few episodes around this topic, and it just feels like several of the last episodes, we keep coming to this -- just having to grapple with, like, sometimes policies have unintended consequences. And we can be very unhappy about that and feel it's unjust -- and it often is -- and yet, we still have to somehow deal with them. We can't just pretend they're not there or be mad that they're there, and if we're mad about them maybe they won't occur anymore. We actually have to adjust our policy accordingly. Could you talk about the "atrocity tales" you were told by some landlords? This was a really memorable part of your paper for me. You had a bunch of landlords sharing how they were afraid of tenants doing things to deliberately increase the landlord's expenses, but then they would concede that they'd never actually experienced those things personally. We also heard about something kind of similar from Eva and Philip in this fear among landlords of the "professional tenant" -- these cases of deliberate abuse. One was, like, they worry that the tenant will turn on all the faucets when they vacate their unit, and just let it run, and, you know, in addition to costing a bunch of money in water, they also do a bunch of damage. So these things do happen, but it seems that landlords often build up this boogeyman in their heads with little or no first-hand experience of these behaviors, and then that fear becomes this real driving force behind their tenant selection process.

Meredith Greif 32:10
It really was shocking and fascinating to see how this played out for landlords -- how you could hear them tell so vividly how tenants were prone to do this and wanted to stick it to the landlord, and this is something you have to really worry about in this business, and especially at the lower end of the market. And then when you subsequently asked the landlord, "has this ever happened to you?" and then they say, "no, that never happened to me." Like you said, when it comes to running the water after an eviction or even things like washing other people's clothes in exchange for money, and all that -- they had this outsized fear about what could happen.

Shane Phillips 32:55
If I can read a quote really quickly from the paper that I pulled out, it just says, "Quinn, with five properties in an economically distressed East Cleveland community, also intimated that tenants' retaliatory water use was a common practice. He expressed, 'my big fear every time I go into a vacant apartment is that they just turned the faucets on and walked away.' Yet Quinn later conceded that he had never personally experienced this scenario." That was just -- he's, he's like, he's fearful of it every single time, and yet it has not once happened to him.

Meredith Greif 33:29
Exactly, and he'd been in the business for 30 years, and I talk about this more in my book, how I joined him at a unit where he was going to enter it for the first time after a tenant vacated it... she had been evicted. And h e was really rattled. He was jumbling, fussing around, seemed unusually edgy for someone who is usually pretty calm, but sometimes can be a little bit feisty. And he was so relieved to walk in the door and not see the water running. And there were other minor damages --

Shane Phillips 34:03
Sounds like being a landlord is too stressful a job for this guy.

Meredith Greif 34:07
Yes. And it's true, I mean, on that related note, it seems as though many were well-intentioned. I will say, that many -- not all, but many -- had good intentions to run a legit business and play by the rules and all that, but that the business was very stressful and unnerving to them. For reasons I think we don't talk about enough, that has to do with interpersonal interactions where some went into it thinking, "I'm gonna be successful, you know, I know how to repair properties. I know how to manage a spreadsheet, that kind of thing. I know people have done this, it's going to be fine." And then many admitted they didn't realize how much of a people person you had to be to do well, or at least be spared of some stress of how especially dealing with tenants who struggle a lot to pay rent, and so on -- how to be empathetic, how to be patient, how to communicate well. For some of them it did not come easily, and it led them to become more stressed and riled up with the tenants, taking the hit for that. So I think there's something to be said for helping landlords and tenants to communicate more productively, like I'd said, and, and maybe to acknowledge that for some people, this is not the ideal business for them.

Shane Phillips 35:31
This is another thing that reminds me of the conversation with Eva and Philip, where they talked about how we just expect a lot of landlords. We basically expect them to provide housing at affordable prices that often are actually not prices they can afford. They become like our first line of defense in some ways -- they are the social workers for their own tenants, in large part because we don't provide enough resources in the form of vouchers and rent assistance and other kinds of needs. So I can certainly imagine how that would be a very stressful part of the job, trying to, you know, not just get your own bottom line, but also, that in many ways depends on being helpful to your tenants, and also being kind of the bad guy in a lot of cases, too.

Meredith Greif 36:21
Yes, in my observation, some of these landlords demonstrated something people call "emotional fatigue" or "empathy burnout," that you would talk about in regards to caseworkers. Where, after a long period of time in the business, just got a little bit desensitized -- they felt like they were hearing a lot of the same stories over and over again, not because tenants were lying, but it's just that's the nature of housing people who are just very low income, who, you know, are very financially fragile. And sometimes having to help out other family members, and so on, that, over time, they became desensitized, and even said it -- some of them seemed really disappointed with themselves, and even seemed, looking back -- they hadn't really thought back about their career in a long time, until a sociologist shows up to ask them about it -- and seemed almost in amazement that, "wow, I didn't always used to be this way." They noticed that they've become desensitized over time, this compassion fatigue, compassion burnout, is not someone that they actually identified with, but realized that it actually really was occurring. I would like to find ways for us to minimize that, because I think that's an important part of why tenants might suffer, you know, in the larger picture.

Michael Lens 37:33
I wanted to tie some of this back to methods, and qualitative methodology, in particular. So, Shane kind of started this discussion about these atrocity tales, which is such a good phrase - all these bad things that landlords want to get off their chests, and these fears that they have, that, you know, may or may not have been confirmed by real life sometimes but you talked in the methods about, you know, snowball sampling -- using your respondents to identify other respondents that you can talk to, so that the sample snowballs from there, right? How much do you think that related to that, kind of, getting off your chest, right? Because if somebody's willing to talk, they've got something to say... and that's inevitable, I think, in any form of research where you're relying on people to respond to your questions or to participate but how much do you think that played a role?

Meredith Greif 38:45
It's a great question, something I considered myself, and while I will note that through the snowball sampling, initially, people were more willing to go ahead and agree to be interviewed because they had a feeling of, "oh, my friend or colleague passed on my information, they must have had a good experience with you" -- that kind of thing, versus the people who were brought on through the random sampling, where we called people who had rental listings advertised on Craigslist and other places -- it gave us a foot in the door, but once we were there... from my experience, once we were there that didn't fundamentally produce any differences in terms of the findings across the snowball and the random sample. Sometimes at first, true, they were even initially a little bit more open, just casual and comfortable, but the key of doing good qualitative research is to know how to build rapport with your subjects, regardless of how you came to meet them, such that 10 minutes into the conversation it stopped mattering anymore whether it was a snowball sample person or a random sample -- all of these landlords had a lot to share, a lot to get off their chests, and, you know, that came out. These concerns that I'm raising here were widespread across the sample. I wouldn't have had such a fire to write this article, and write this book, if it only came up among a few people, or among a subset of people based on how they were sampled, and so on. These findings were just so powerful, unexpected, and so widespread that it made me feel as though there's a larger systemic problem here. And notably, also just because these issues of the water and the nuisance ordinances and other things that I talk about in my book, and we can talk about some more... it was surprising how common these were across landlords who were very different in a lot of ways. Their stories, in many ways, departed in terms of why they got into the business, some wanted short-term cash versus some were just planning ahead for retirement; there was a lot of variation when it comes to age and gender and racial background and the neighborhoods where they operated but regardless of all that, over time, it was so shocking and fascinating to see their stories converge in terms of more financial precarity and uncertainty, more mistrust towards tenants, and scrutiny towards tenants, more mistrust towards authorities -- it told me that there was a much larger systemic problem, that people who were so different can enter this market and start saying some very, very similar things, and doing very similar things.

Shane Phillips 41:31
Yeah that convergence is really interesting. One distinction that I noticed between these nuisance and utility issues compared to other regulations -- I think there is a distinction here -- policies that we end up discussing a lot on the show, and just, you know, in life here in California, are things like rent stabilization, just cause eviction protections -- kind of standard tenant protections. In a lot of cases they're basically attenuating the property rights of the property owner: you know, limiting their ability to earn unrestricted profits or remove tenants without cause. These water and nuisance regulations -- high utility bills, penalties when tenants overfill their garbage cans -- here, we're really just punishing landlords for the behavior of their tenants. And its behavior that landlords have little or no control over. These seem just like very different things to me, and the latter case just sounds like bad policy for the most part, especially since penalizing the landlord may not even lead to better behavior, which is, I think, at least nominally, the purpose of a penalty. But I'm curious if this can tell us anything about those other kinds of regulations, like that first set I mentioned -- rent stabilization just cause -- where there may be unintended consequences that we're pretty well aware of with those kinds of things, but there are also pretty clear benefits, and maybe less concern about moral hazard. What does your research into these nuisance and other kinds of regulations and their impacts tell us about other kinds of regulations that maybe don't fit that same mold?

Meredith Greif 43:05
I'm glad you asked that question. I think that there's a lot to learn from these particular regulations to inform our understanding how other regulations work too, even when they don't involve a situation of moral hazard per se. And so these situations regarding water bills and nuisance ordinances -- beyond just moral hazard -- but the story there is that it pertains to landlords' financial precarity, and that applies to other regulations and the rental industry more generally. So first, I just want to establish even more so, and something that I cover in the book, is just how precarious these landlords are. It's not only because of the inconsistencies that they find with rent collection, but the costs of evictions, for instance -- and that can include you know, filing costs, and lawyer costs when applicable... bailiff costs, mover costs, these things fall on the landlords --

Shane Phillips 44:05
This episode will be right after our interview with Ingrid Gould Ellen, by the way, where we talked about right to counsel so this is very, very applicable.

Meredith Greif 44:12
Oh, great. Okay, so yeah, dovetailing off of that -- the landlords who operate at the lower end of the market, just disproportionately, are going to be paying more eviction costs, you know, compared to people who have tenants that are able to stay more current on their rent. And there are other issues even besides rising water bills, like rising property taxes, and property insurance, and maintaining older properties, which is where more of these landlords tended to do their business. So these landlords are on shaky ground, a number of them, and that showed through their reaction to the water regulations and the nuisance ordinances but there are other cases where these laws are not just about trying to penalize a landlord or tenant, but really are just trying to help the tenant, and we still see it backfire. I have a few examples of that that I talk about more in my book. One pertains to lead safety laws, which are really important. Cities are supposed to enforce these, but in reality, don't necessarily do so thoroughly. And these lead laws essentially say that it's illegal to have lead paint in the walls, and we know that's pretty common in older properties that are built before 1978, which is when lead was banned from paint use for residential purposes. And so this lead paint, this is a crisis for young children -- exposure to lead paint, and ingesting it through crumbles of paint, flaked paint, can lead to long-term developmental, cognitive delays, and it can really be disastrous. So I mentioned that cities don't do an excellent job of enforcing their lead laws. But public housing authorities that administer vouchers do -- that's actually pretty high on their list for the quality inspections that they do for voucher holders. And so, for instance, for units that are going to be housing a voucher holder with a kid under six, it's required that these inspectors do this, you know, lead test and make sure the property is lead-free. And so in the case that lead is detected, that's a pretty costly process, actually, to remediate it. So because of this stipulation that a unit that houses a kid under six will have to undergo this scrutiny and potential lead remediation, I had landlords saying, "we do not house voucher holders with kids under six." So it's a case of a very well-intended law meant to protect tenants, but landlords facing the potential financial fallout as a result -- it could be hundreds or thousands of dollars -- in their mind, logically, you know, it wasn't necessarily a bias towards anyone on the basis of race or class that I could perceive, but just to say, "we cannot afford that, so I'm just going to find someone who doesn't have kids under six." Meaning that, again, another penalty for people with young kids, as talked about in regards to the water bills, of them not being able to benefit from this law and actually instead facing more obstacles to housing. Another one I want to bring up that was really surprising to me, pertains to Americans with disabilities, and who collect government assistance for it, usually when they are low income as well. These are important laws which state that disability income can't be garnished in court, meaning that a landlord can't sue a tenant for unpaid rent, or excessive wear and tear, if that tenant primarily subsists on disability income. So again, this is an important law. But in turn, some landlords shared with me that they felt it was too financially risky to house renters who would primarily pay using that government assistance for a disability, even when objectively the resources these tenants had could easily cover the rent amount, it didn't matter. The landlord said that "I'm stuck. If they did fall behind on rent, or there was wear and tear, etc, I cannot recoup that money," and then they had an incentive to turn them away.

Shane Phillips 48:27
It seems like in a lot of cases, even if someone is not relying on disability insurance, it can be hard to recoup rent from tenants. But I can imagine, at least you have that threat as a landlord to be able to say, "I can take you to court and you may have your wages garnished," and whether you ever follow through on it -- whether you know anything comes of it -- if someone is on disability insurance, and they know that that's not something they have to worry about. Again, I doubt this is a common thing going through the minds of tenants, where they're like, "I'm going to take advantage of this!" but because of these atrocity tales, because of these, you know, a few bad experiences, you can understand why a landlord would then be wary of that kind of thing.

Meredith Greif 49:08
And one thing I want to add is that these and other examples do add up to violations of the federal Fair Housing Act, which is meant to protect people from discrimination on the basis of race, and gender, and family and children, and disability, and so some of these landlords' practices were not just something immoral, but actually literally illegal.

Shane Phillips 49:36
Just very hard to prove that they made their tenant decisions based on those. They could just say, "well, I thought they were more respectful, or I liked their job more." You can make up any reason -- it's very, very hard to prove exactly why someone chose one tenant over another.

Michael Lens 49:53
Right, and we've talked a fair amount about the voucher program -- Housing Choice Voucher program, and there's a lot of interesting and challenging ways that this interacts, I think, with a lot of these problems and policies. And, you know, one basic thing is that the voucher program, when you're calculating the subsidy -- the portion of the money that the government is going to pay to the landlord, utilities are taken into account so it's utilities plus the rent is not supposed to exceed 30% of the household's income - the recipient's income. But I keep thinking here, like, how could you possibly build in these, you know, potential fines and everything into that, so like, that seems outside the scope of that program, in terms of whether somebody's going to get a big giant water fine, and how would the government pay for that, etc -- and then, what kind of moral hazard would that create, and then there's, you know, we've talked a few times about protected characteristics, and actual discrimination on the books. Some places have source of income laws that kind of bring vouchers into a protected characteristic, but most jurisdictions do not. I don't actually know whether Cleveland or Ohio does so, you know, that's just kind of some connections that kind of interest me with the voucher program in particular.

Shane Phillips 51:25
If I can just add on to that, one thing I found interesting here was there's sort of two levels of the moral hazard. There's the one between the tenant and the landlord, but there's also this one between the city and the landlord, where the city is getting a bunch of money coming in if the tenants act poorly, but the landlords have to pay it, and so the city doesn't really seem to have much incentive to change things. You know, when landlords or tenants break the rules, it's the city that gets paid, they do need the money, and the money often comes from these landlords who may not even live in the city or vote in the city. Could you talk a little bit about that, and maybe this can lead into a little bit of a conversation about, how do we get away from these kinds of things when, you know, it seems to be working for everyone but the landlord? Where do we go from here?

Meredith Greif 52:14
Good question, it is true that cities, and especially struggling cities, such as Cleveland, do have some financial incentive to try to get some of that money out of landlords' or homeowners' pockets. I do think that the fines are excessive, objectively. For instance, that garbage can law where even if the lid is about an inch sticking up too high, or the can is left out overnight, it could be $100 fine, but if the landlord is registered as an LLC -- get this -- $500.

Shane Phillips 52:51
As though that changes the impact of violating that rule, and as though $100 is even a reasonable fee for that.

Meredith Greif 53:00
Yes, there has been some push to lower the fine a little bit. I believe the city of Cleveland has looked to do that, down to $75 in the case when it was $100 so that's a step in perhaps the right direction. I've heard from city authorities though saying, "well, what are we supposed to do? We don't want trash in our streets, and we need water bills to be paid." And this and that -- "what are we supposed to do?" I think it does speak to a much larger problem that some of these issues really need assistance from the federal government, from higher up -- cities have only so much money to play with. And especially in cities where the tax base is low, they are struggling to fund all of their services and infrastructure. So sometimes they're pulling money in when maybe they could stand to pull a little money less out of people. And as a result, they're creating tensions and worse for the case of landlords and tenants. So I think this is where cities need to rethink some of these policies. And in some cases when it comes to domestic violence they have. There are select communities in the Cleveland metro area and nationwide that have crossed off calls for help with domestic violence as a nuisance. So, therefore, people will not be penalized in that way if they do call. But nonetheless, that law remains on the books and in most places at this point in time, so I think it is important to think about removing or reducing these when possible -- but then also getting some more assistance from the federal government to help out, to get by with these dwindling budgets that are just stretched too thin to cover everything that the city needs.

Shane Phillips 54:48
I do think studies like this help illustrate why regulation alone is often not enough to solve these problems, even if it is sometimes an essential part of the solution. A recurring theme of this podcast is that many times the solution is just you need to give people money, or maybe cities money, in this case, rather than trying to solve the problem of water, crumbling infrastructure, through fines and fees. Like maybe we just need federal investment again, to build up on this. The title of this article is "Unintended Consequences." The title of your book is "Collateral Damages." This is clearly about trade-offs. But as we close out here, if you could tell us a little bit more about the book in particular -- it's obviously got a lot more in there than the article -- what is the message? If you could just tell us a little bit more about the book, its contents, and what's it trying to say?

Meredith Greif 55:46
So the book Collateral Damages, overall, shows how laws fall short and even have unintended negative consequences, harming the very people and populations -- notably marginalized renters and communities -- that they're actually meant to protect. And it establishes, first, that renters have become increasingly more vulnerable to disadvantageous landlord practices. First, financially because of the disappearance of good jobs and greater obstacles to gaining access to government cash assistance. Also, because of the expansion of mass incarceration, and the carceral state that gives people more marks of stigma that make it hard to find housing and jobs. And another point that permeates the book is the growing mistrust towards authorities on the basis of the expansion of the carceral state, such that studies have shown over and over that people who have negative experiences with the police -- even if they've not been arrested or incarcerated -- end up having mistrust towards authorities, and make them not want to interact with them. Even authorities beyond the police -- there's a "spillover effect" of system avoidance, as sociologists have called it, saying that for people with those negative experiences and distrust towards a particular government institution, it can lead them to not want to interact with other authorities. And so for the sake of the current story here, it can look like someone who's afraid to report the landlord's unwillingness to fix a broken heater or, you know, unwillingness to report a landlord's harassment or informal eviction, because of this sense of mistrust towards authorities. And that's really difficult to ignore -- I had this topic come up when I spoke to representatives at tenants' rights organizations, and even people at the housing court, of seeing that, first, you have to acknowledge that renters are more and more vulnerable. And then layer on there, one of the other primary contributions of the book is just to show how some of these laws really do work counterproductively, or fall short simply by revving up landlords' financial precarity and mistrust towards tenants and mistrust towards authorities for some of the reasons we've been talking about, by giving them fines that they think are unfair or unpredictable. And that in turn motivates or enables landlords to justify some of their practices, like discrimination and screening, or harassment, or letting their properties fall apart, or illegally evicting people. And so, the primary point of the book is to show how disadvantage can be perpetuated in hidden ways, and that it's important to consider people's social and economic circumstances when devising laws. And in that case, when looking at landlords and tenants. And to be clear, the book emphasizes that landlords are not inherently exploitative, and it's not the case that authorities aren't interested necessarily in marginalized populations but just that there has been a blind spot for these issues, just because they haven't been studied in depth, and the housing market has not really been studied in a holistic kind of way. Thankfully, sociologists are doing the important work of changing that, and I think we're at a key moment right now when we're seeing more and more work doing that but that's the primary gist of the book -- to understand why these laws fall short, and to show these hidden mechanisms that perpetuate disadvantage and segregation for marginalized communities.

Shane Phillips 59:29
I do think it's really useful in another way, which you did mention, which is just sort of acknowledging that, yes, landlords have privilege and power relative to tenants. But that doesn't mean that landlords can't be disadvantaged or taken advantage of in some ways, and that we can be concerned about the interests of landlords, without needing to, you know, by default, dismiss those of tenants. We can hold both of these things in our mind at the same time, and I think this conversation, and some of our recent ones has really helped illustrate that So, Meredith Greif, thank you again for joining us on the housing voice podcast.

Meredith Greif 1:00:05
Thank you. It was a pleasure to talk with you.

Shane Phillips 1:00:12
You can read more about Professor Greif's research on our website, lewis.ucla.edu. Show notes and a transcript of the interview are there too. The UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter @shanedphillips, and Mike is there at @mc_lens. Thank you for listening. We will see you next time.