Summary

Our homes are the foundation of our lives—our places of shelter, sustenance, and refuge. A home is a fundamental human need and should be a human right. Instead, US policy decisions over many years have cast homes primarily as commodities to be bought, sold, and rented for profit, leaving millions of Americans without safe, affordable, or stable roofs over their heads. Today, housing costs, housing instability, and houselessness are at an all-time high. Corporate landlords and Wall Street investors—who now own nearly half of all rental housing stock in the US—have helped create this situation and profit dramatically from it.

As corporate landlords become more powerful and prevalent, the harms they inflict on renters are intensifying. Their devotion to their profit margins and shareholders, the sheer size of their market share, and their unchecked political power and influence are exacerbating the housing crisis and harming health on a mass scale.

This report describes the impacts of corporate landlords on the public’s health through analysis of datasets on housing code violations and interviews with government workers, housing researchers, community organizers, and tenants residing in Los Angeles, California; St. Louis, Missouri; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Boulder, Colorado. We also conducted a comprehensive literature review on corporate landlords, housing conditions, and health impacts.

Our research finds that corporate landlords’ profit-seeking strategies create harmful housing conditions that lead to poor health for renters, including: anxiety and depression, poor birth outcomes, chronic health illnesses, lead poisoning, violence, houselessness, and premature death. We find that corporate landlords use their resources, money, and power to intensify existing inequities in the landlord-tenant relationship, with little transparency and accountability. Further, corporate landlords specifically target Black, Latinx, immigrant, and working-class communities; deepening health injustices for these communities.

Corporate landlords harm public health via 6 profit-seeking strategies:

1. Neglecting upkeep, which results in substandard housing conditions
2. Filing mass evictions, which drives individuals, families, and communities into further financial debt and housing instability
3. Hiking up rents and charging ancillary fees, forcing residents to spend less money on food and sacrifice their medical care needs
4. Evading taxes, depriving our communities of the resources they need to be healthy, such as funding for public education and public health
5. Dodging accountability by hiding behind a corporate veil and failing to make repairs
6. Wielding vast influence over policy and undermining democracy to boost profits and weaken tenant power

“With the rent increases, it’s not always easy to pay for food, rent, and bills. Sometimes we struggle economically. Especially during the pandemic—I cleaned houses, and many people stopped hiring me to clean their homes. I just didn’t have enough and was struggling financially, so I often neglected to buy my medicine or go to my doctor’s visits to be able to pay for rent. Unfortunately, my condition worsened, and I didn’t have the money for the treatment as well as for rent and food, so this really affected me, and I lost my leg.”

‍— (Rosa, manufactured housing community resident, Boulder, Colorado)

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Without government intervention, corporations will continue to consolidate their power, gamble on our homes, inflate rents, neglect repairs, and disregard government safeguards. It doesn’t have to be this way. Powerful and coordinated action at all levels of government—in partnership with renters and community-led housing justice movements—can ensure we all have a safe and stable place to call home.

Local governments in particular, including public health departments, housing agencies, and elected officials, have an essential role in protecting communities from profit-driven landlords whose actions threaten public health. They need tools that are effective in holding large corporate actors accountable. And they must prioritize tenants’ needs and build power with communities to ensure safe, affordable, and dignified housing for all.

Recommendations

The companion Action Agenda presents five actions that local governments can take to stop the health harms of corporate landlords:

1. Increase ownership transparency and data access through rental registries and landlord licensing programs
2. Keep residents safe in their homes by using tools that are designed to be effective with large corporate actors
3. Protect tenants from retaliation and abuses of power by implementing anti-retaliation, anti-harassment, and right-to-organize policies so that they can stay in their homes and exercise their rights
4. Address the root cause of the problem: limit speculation by corporate landlords and make it harder to gamble on communities or profit from unhealthy housing
5. Resource public options that are permanently affordable and community-controlled

Government agencies and community organizers can use the tools, case studies, policy examples, and links to implementation guides that accompany each action to achieve housing and health for all.

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Project advisors:

Larry Brooks, Alameda County Healthy Homes Department

‍Amee Chew, Center for Popular Democracy

‍Iris Craige, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy

‍Matifadza Hlatshwayo Davis, City of St. Louis Health Department

‍Sunni Hutton, Tenants Transforming Greater St. Louis

‍Yocelyn Iboa, 9to5 Colorado

‍Greg Miao, ChangeLab Solutions

‍Veronica Reed, Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative

‍Christina Rosales, PowerSwitch Action

‍Tony Samara, Right to the City

‍Paul Terranova, Manufactured Housing Action