Housing Exploitation

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An intriguing article in CityLab about some recent research:

How Poor Americans Get Exploited by Their Landlords
American landlords derive more profit from renters in low-income neighborhoods, researchers Matthew Desmond and Nathan Wilmers find.
Richard Florida
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/03/h...erty-desmond-inequality-research/585265/

It is a mistake, Desmond and Wilmers argue, to see slums as a byproduct of the modern city, rundown areas that occur by accident. Instead, they contend that the slum has long been a “prime moneymaker” for those who profit from land scarcity, racial segregation, and deferred maintenance. “If labor exploitation is understood to be getting paid less than the market value of what one produces,” they write, “we can extend this definition to the housing market by operationalizing exploitation as being overcharged relative to the market value of what one purchases, paying more for less.”

They define housing exploitation as the amount of rent paid relative to the market value of that housing, and measure this exploitation as the ratio of annual rents from rental housing units over their combined property value. The level of exploitation rises as the ratio of rent to property value grows. (The study methodology accounts for the costs of upkeep and maintenance.) Desmond and Wilmers make use of two key sources of data: a large-scale national survey of rental properties, and a detailed set of surveys of renters and rental properties in Milwaukee.

Ultimately, they find consistent evidence that the poor, and especially the minority poor, experience the highest rates of housing exploitation. In their most basic formulations, they find that renters in high-poverty neighborhoods experience levels of exploitation that are more than double those of renters in neighborhoods with lower levels of poverty. Neighborhoods with a poverty rate of less than 15 percent have an exploitation rate of 10 percent—meaning that rents cover 10 percent of the actual cost of that housing. (In other words, the actual cost of that rental housing can be paid off in 10 years.) But in high-poverty neighborhoods, those where 50 to 60 percent of residents live in poverty, the exploitation rate is 25 percent, meaning that 25 percent of the value of the property is paid back in a single year of rent.

Discuss.