Eviction and Segmented Housing Markets in Richmond, Virginia

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between housing market segmentation and eviction in Richmond, Virginia. Housing market segmentation conceptualizes housing consumption through multiple distinct submarkets instead of a unitary regional market. To examine the production of housing segmentation we rely on an original large-building database for all multifamily buildings in Richmond with more than 25 units, which we complement with qualitative interviews with more than 25 Richmond tenants who have experienced at least one eviction. Our analysis makes three key contributions. First, by placing two different scholarly traditions in conversation-urban economics and critical urban political economy-we foreground the importance of understanding what institutions and actors create and maintain submarkets. Second, the article takes a novel methodological approach to segmentation by analyzing ownership of rental housing and tenant experience. Finally, these approaches allow us to move beyond framing eviction as simply a feature of some rental submarkets and to pose the question about what role eviction plays in creating and maintaining submarkets and classmonopoly rents. We offer evidence that through eviction and the threat of eviction landlords create targeted housing scarcity for specific groups of tenants. We argue for understanding eviction as a formative institution of housing submarkets.

The Suburbanization of Eviction: Increasing Displacement and Inequality Within American Suburbs

“…Research on eviction in urban spaces reveals eviction patterns to be relatively stable and unlikely to shift substantially over time. In many cities, a limited set of landlords within a community file a disproportionate share of evictions, anchoring displacement in place (Sims and Iverson 2021;Teresa and Howell 2021). The stability of eviction hot spots across time indicates that eviction is a durable feature of neighborhood inequality (Rutan and Desmond 2021).…”

“…In urban settings, evictions are often concentrated in space because a limited set of landlords account for large portions of all evicted households (Rutan and Desmond 2021;Teresa and Howell 2021). Although some work demonstrates that high volume eviction filers do operate in some suburban neighborhoods (Immergluck et al 2020), it is not clear whether evictions would become more diffuse or concentrated over time.…”

Beyond Urban Displacement: Suburban Poverty and Eviction

“…It is also critical to recognize that neither urban nor suburban rental housing exists in a unitary market. Renters' options are constrained and property managers practices vary across segmented markets in ways that deserve further analysis in both urban and suburban spaces (Teresa and Howell 2021).…”

An antitrust framework for housing

“…Of their coordinated conduct, what was most concerning to Harvey was the ways in which landowners manipulated the housing supply to create artificial scarcity by keeping units vacant (Harvey, 1974; Harvey and Chatterjee, 1974). More recent engagements with class monopoly rent and housing reflect a gamut of collective anticompetitive conduct used to maintain and enhance professional landowners’ position of power: product differentiation via submarkets and subsectors (Revington, 2021); barriers to entry using evictions (Anderson et al, 2022; Teresa and Howell, 2021); and tacit collusion between developers rather than head-on competition (Anderson, 2019). Enabled by global financial institutions that discriminately price debt to different racial groups (Wyly et al, 2009; Teresa, 2022), the realization of class monopoly rents, or monopoly prices, impacts tenants with varying degrees of intensity.…”

“…Evidence suggests that as investors build market power in rental housing, it is tenants who pay the literal and proverbial high costs of a concentrated industry. For instance, investors merge, exclude, and collude to raise prices above competitive levels with conduct like evictions and restricted housing supply (Anderson, 2019; Harvey, 1974; Revington, 2021; Teresa and Howell, 2021). Although these contributions from political economy draw attention to the harms of landowners’ collective behavior on tenants, rarely does this literature consider the role of antitrust legislation in realizing class monopoly rents (see mention in Anderson et al, 2022).…”