Corporate practices of racial banishment in Los Angeles

Abstract

Using a new dataset of eviction records produced through the Tenant Power Toolkit in Los Angeles and interviews with affected tenants, I trace the role of corporate landlords in driving new geographies of Black eviction. With novel access to both tenant and landlord information, we are able to identify landlords’ surgical and deeply disproportionate eviction of Black tenants from neighborhoods with few Black residents. I find that the largest corporate landlords–national Real Estate Investment Trusts–are central in the enactment of these eviction patterns in LA's post-pandemic housing market. Innovations in corporate practice in screening and eviction which responded to the risk and regulatory environment of the pandemic further contributed to saddling these Black tenants with disproportionate rental debt, redoubling the extirpative character of Black tenancy. I conclude that eviction comes to function as a central mechanism for producing and enforcing the racialized socio-spatial order and that collective organizing for tenant power centering Black life and the protagonism of tenant-debtors is necessary to change that order.