Etienne Laurent/AP Photo
Protesters march to demand better wages and lower rent prices in Los Angeles, September 28, 2024.
Deanna Williams, an independent Black realtor, has come to understand the realities of eviction firsthand. In early 2022, as COVID-19 continued to rip through America, Williams struggled to find clients. So she moved from suburban Maryland to Los Angeles, where an agency promised to pair her with celebrity homebuyers. “It was my California dream,” said Williams (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy). She rented a three-level townhouse, sight unseen, in the San Fernando Valley. At $2,800, the monthly rent was steep, but she was enticed by an unusually low security deposit of $800.
From the outset, there were problems with the home, part of a community owned by national real estate giant Equity Residential. Utility fees, for example, were far higher than initially quoted. Meanwhile, Williams’s new clients never materialized, and she fell behind on rent payments. After the county did away with its pandemic-era eviction moratorium, she began receiving threatening letters from the landlord. Finally, she found the dreaded unlawful detainer notice tacked to her door. All told, her rent debt amounted to more than $17,000 with fees and legal costs. “It was a very painful time of my life,” Williams said. “I would be on the floor sometimes, just crying. I was in L.A. by myself. I had no help.”
The study shows that Black tenants made up 41.5 percent of corporate eviction filings but just 14 percent of tenants in the areas where they were filed.
Williams’s experience with Equity Residential is part of a predatory pattern by landlords, according to a breathtaking new study. Researcher Alexander Ferrer at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that the largest corporate landlords in L.A.—national real estate investment trusts, or REITs—are “surgically” and “deeply disproportionately” evicting Black tenants from neighborhoods with few Black residents in the post-pandemic housing market—often ones like Williams, whom they purposefully ensnared. The findings are disturbing, but they also raise possibilities for tenants to fight back against eviction through organizing and legal action.
The study, published in Urban Geography, is the first to show both the racial pattern of eviction and the type of landlord responsible. It uses new data from the Tenant Power Toolkit, an online legal tool that helps tenants respond to eviction filings in California courts. The toolkit—created by the Debt Collective, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy—allowed Ferrer to observe 5,725 eviction filings spanning from August 2022 to December 2023. Tenant responses include both their racial identity and information about their landlord, which is not available in other bulk eviction data. To understand the racial proportion of eviction filings, the study compares them to the racial makeup of local census tracts, assuming that landlords’ properties would have a similar composition. Black eviction was disproportionate in the toolkit overall, but large, highly financialized REITs were unique: Black tenants made up 41.5 percent of corporate eviction filings but just 14 percent of tenants in the areas where they were filed. In other words, corporate landlords filed evictions on Black tenants at around three times the expected rate, a disparity almost twice as large as that of individual landlords.
“In the past, we have not been able to talk with much certainty about whether these types of corporate landlords were demonstrating racially disparate eviction patterns,” Ferrer told me. “And now we can.”
Eviction has ghastly consequences, tattering people’s physical and mental health, driving them into homelessness, and increasing premature death rates. Researchers have long known that Black tenants are especially vulnerable to these harms, as recent national findings from Princeton’s Eviction Lab show. And corporate landlords are well established to be profligate evictors. At a moment of national crisis, as large real estate companies hoover up a growing share of increasingly unaffordable rentals, it is more important than ever to understand the business practices to which these profiteers expose working tenants.
Among the REITs in Ferrer’s study, three chronic offenders stood out in grim distinction: Essex Property Trust, AvalonBay Communities, and Equity Residential. Williams’s former landlord filed a staggering 60 percent of its evictions on Black tenants, more than four times the expected rate.
What could account for such a howling disparity? To gain additional insight, Ferrer interviewed several former tenants who had been evicted by each company. Their responses suggest an emerging strategy, one that counters such landlords’ public claims of seeking upwardly mobile renters and low turnover rates. Corporate landlords appear to have relaxed their screening practices and offered low security deposits in order to attract precarious Black tenants into desirable neighborhoods (much as bank lenders pushed Black homebuyers who would have qualified for normal mortgages into subprime ones during the housing bubble). When those tenants failed to make ends meet, landlords quickly filed evictions—often automatically, using software. At times, they refused to offer repayment terms, even when tenants wanted to pay their debt, preferring to eject them and refill the unit.
“The finding cuts against some of the theoretically informed expectation that floats around in the public discourse about how these super-professionalized landlords in relatively affluent places should be more likely to use objective measures and be compliant with fair housing law,” Ferrer said. “In fact, their patterns demonstrate a bigger disparate racial impact than you get with other types of landlords.”
Counterintuitively, it seems to make business sense. “The most sophisticated landlords in the market have shifted toward a strategy of lower stringency in screening, higher turnover rates, and more frequent evictions in exchange for higher average rents,” Ferrer said. “It’s more profitable.” While these practices may be formally color-blind, they nonetheless produce highly unequal outcomes—a product of long histories that deny wealth to Black Americans.
Equity Residential, in a bristly email, questioned the data in the study. A spokesperson said that the company “emphatically” denies that any of its screening or eviction activity is tied to race. “We would point out that the ‘study’ claims to have spoken to three former Equity Residential residents who were evicted,” the spokesperson said. “To extrapolate information allegedly shared from three people in order to support a very serious accusation about our operating practices is highly questionable.” An AvalonBay Communities representative commented that the company follows all fair housing laws and does not evict on the basis of race, color, or any other protected category. (Essex Property Trust did not respond to a request for comment.)
The study sample may not be perfectly representative, as Ferrer acknowledges. But it’s arguably strong enough to illuminate corporate landlords’ outsized role in propelling a troubling set of neighborhood shifts.
Corporate landlords are systematically attracting Black residents into white, upmarket neighborhoods, stripping their wealth, and then kicking them out again.
Public understanding of Black eviction tends to center on processes of gentrification, in which landlords force people out of neighborhoods marked for improvements so that they can jack up rents for whiter, wealthier in-movers. Or else we consider the way that slumlords churn through low-income tenants in impoverished Black areas, extracting what profits they can before displacing them. Ferrer’s findings, by contrast, suggest a post-pandemic phenomenon of desegregation followed by resegregation: Corporate landlords are systematically attracting Black residents into white, upmarket neighborhoods, stripping their wealth, and then kicking them out again. In many cases, Ferrer found, these tenants have been dislocated from L.A. altogether. Some are now homeless and living in their cars.
Williams’s eviction drove her back to Maryland, a nasty rupture of her California dream. She began to see a pattern, she said. Equity Residential knew that tenants like her were bound to fail, but the company was only too happy to lure them in and collect their money. The black mark on her record threatened to nuke her credit score and make it impossible to find another rental. “Once you get an eviction, and you’re in that cycle,” she said, “where are you going to live?”
The Tenant Power Toolkit is an attempt to break that cycle. The Debt Collective and its partners at the Los Angeles Tenants Union use it to help tenants defend against abusive landlords. One way is by researching bad actors and their business model, with a goal of mobilizing collective action. Recently, for example, the Debt Collective and LATU organized two Equity Residential apartment complexes to demand that the company justify its extremely high monthly fees for utilities. Rose Lenehan, an organizer with the Debt Collective and LATU, said that the toolkit was helpful in picking a target: “We chose to focus on Equity, in part, based on the data.”
Eventually, that data may also allow tenants to confront landlords and demand the elimination of their rent debt. After all, that form of household debt is no less rapacious than student loan or medical debt, its abolition an economic goal no less just. “What could be won is cancellation of the debt and freedom from that burden,” Lenehan said. “That would obviously be a huge relief for anybody who’s dealing with that stress. More broadly, there’s not a vocal movement of the evicted, and I think that could be very politically powerful.”
For now, the toolkit provides frontline defense for individual tenants. When people use it to respond to an eviction filing, the Debt Collective invites them to a workshop where organizers direct them to legal resources. And LATU organizers often support users of the toolkit for legal tasks, such as responding to discovery requests.
When Williams filed her response to Equity Residential’s eviction case using the toolkit, she quickly heard from organizers with the Debt Collective. They recommended that she work with a local legal aid organization that would help her represent herself in housing court. The court experience could have been intimidating. She saw Equity Residential’s attorney, and his folder was huge, she said: “My impression was that he does this a lot.”
But as Ferrer’s research shows, these REITs are often pushing the boundaries of tenant protection laws with their highly automated systems. Hence, she was emboldened to use a novel strategy. First, she negotiated a settlement with the landlord’s attorney in which she agreed to vacate the property and pay a small sum. Then, during her hearing, she requested that the judge seal her case. The judge agreed to do so.
Williams’s rent debt remained lodged with a collection agency. But working with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, she argued that her debt was uncollectible because her eviction case was sealed. The collection agency backed down. And once that company removed her debt from its rolls, the credit bureaus removed it from theirs. Her credit score has suffered, but it is slowly returning to its pre-eviction number.
Ideally, the Debt Collective and LATU prefer to see cases resolved more cleanly, with all debt cleared before a tenant walks out the courthouse doors into the L.A. sun. Still, Williams’s case represents a success story. “She is now playing a role where she’s going to be able to teach other people to protect themselves in the way that she protected herself,” Lenehan said.
Today, Williams is an active member of the Debt Collective, where she makes calls to other tenants, past and present, to hear about their struggles with large corporate landlords and recruit them into organizing. “There’s so much shame involved with eviction and debt,” Williams said. “I want to fight, not just for Black people but for everyone who is dealing with these landlords. I hope that other tenants will gain courage and join us and know that they’re not alone.”
