Surveillance in Single-Room Occupancy Hotels: Market Position and Perceptions of Safety in Housing’s Bottom Rung

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 15: Policing, Surveillance, and the Carceral State

Abstract

Low-income tenants are often subjected to surveillance. In the U.S., the current reliance on the private market to provide affordable housing means that private landlords and property managers are heavily involved in surveilling the poor. Although low-income tenants are often subjected to invasive surveillance, they can also reside in places where there is a noticeable lack of monitoring. Furthermore, when low-income tenants are heavily surveilled, they sometimes frame their monitoring as punishment or protection. What accounts for these contradictions? Through our research on single-room occupancy hotels (SROs) in San Diego, California, we argue that market position drives surveillance practices and that tenant perceptions of surveillance as being either for or against their benefit results in feelings of safety or insecurity. Drawing on interviews with landlords, property managers, and tenants, we discovered that landlords trying to get out of the SRO business employed punitive monitoring to maintain the respectability of buildings. By contrast, SRO landlords who saw their buildings as a smart investment utilized noninterference. The one SRO in our sample sold to the local public housing authority embraced compassionate monitoring. While punitive monitoring and noninterference led to feelings of insecurity among tenants, compassionate monitoring generated a sense of safety. SROs, as the "bottom rung" of the private housing market, are increasingly regulated across U.S. cities. Despite this regulation, SRO landlords are still very free to dictate the conditions of their buildings. These competing forces - local regulation and landlord freedom - have generated the different market positions and approaches to surveillance in SROs we see in San Diego. Together, these forces have created very different spaces for SRO tenants: from those that feel safe and promote mental health and social connection to those that feel deeply insecure and generate anxiety and alienation.

Authors

• Stacey Livingstone, University of California-San Diego

• Jennifer Marie Nations, University of California-San Diego