Strong Protections v. Vulnerable Tenants: How Access to Justice Shapes Residential Mobility for Oakland's Low-Income Renters

• In Event: Housing, Neighborhoods, and Institutions: Structural Inequality in Urban Communities

Abstract

The intense commodification of housing has generated a rich body of research on housing insecurity among poor Americans (DeLuca and Rosen 2022; Desmond and Bell 2015; Dreier 1982; Pattillo 2013). Research on the mobility patterns of low-income tenants navigating unaffordable housing finds they often move involuntarily, i.e., through evictions (Desmond 2016), or move reactively, i.e., to worsening neighborhood conditions (Rosen 2019). These studies highlight the prevalence and severity of “trigger” events that trigger low-income tenants’ residential displacement. Other research also demonstrates the myriad steps tenants take to avoid displacement in face of a trigger event. For example, in the face of an eviction notice, borrowing money for owed rent, foregoing necessities, and reaching out to aid organizations (Edin and Shaefer 2015; Desmond 2016). However, much less is known about whether and why tenants rely on legal support as an intervening step between a trigger event and the outcome. Given the growing adoption of stronger tenant protection laws like rent control and just cause for eviction, understanding how tenants interact with these laws can shed light on potential intervention points in the pathway from trigger event to outcome. Indeed, many triggering events such as eviction, rent increases, and inhabitable living conditions are what sociolegal scholars call justiciable issues—issues concerning relevant laws that can be adjudicated in court. Moreover, much of the research on housing instability among low-income families focuses on moving, adopting an underexamined assumption that staying put is the family’s preferred outcome. Considering the diversity of trigger events beyond eviction, such as habitability concerns, enriches our understanding of how to support under-resourced families to achieve their preferred housing outcomes beyond moving or staying.

Strong tenant protection laws are intended to even the playing field by arming tenants with the power of law against unscrupulous, exploitative landlords. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 80 low-income renters in the City of Oakland, widely regarded as having robust tenant protections, I investigate how tenants approached their legal rights and options (or not) in the face of three types of triggering events that are also justiciable events – eviction (or the threat of eviction), rent increases, and habitability concerns – in the most recent ten years of their residential histories. I find that every individual has encountered at least one justiciable trigger event but approaches to the law in face of these events vary dramatically across individuals. Furthermore, I find that even for individuals who know their rights and who exercised their rights via formal, legal contestation with landlords, the eventual outcome was rarely an unqualified improvement from their prior conditions. These findings highlight first the inequality in who has access to legal empowerment offered by robust tenant protection laws, and second, the puzzling futility of tenant protections in upholding and improving tenant housing security even when successfully invoked. Taken together, I advance a theoretical model of residential mobility among low-income tenants that calls for a more thorough investigation of intervening pathways—particular those pertaining to housing laws and policies—connecting trigger events to residential outcomes.

Author

• Iris Zhang, Stanford University
  Presenting Author