Browsing by Subject "predatory landlord tactics"

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    Residential Alienation in Minneapolis: Eviction Filings, Judgments, and Housing Insecurity
    (2021-05) Alcorn, Patrick S.
    Landlords file over 3,000 evictions in Minneapolis each year (Minneapolis Innovation Team, 2016). Rising rents, stagnating wages, the financialization of housing, and predatory landlord tactics have all contributed to the ongoing crisis. Recent research shows that different social forces drive evictions depending on characteristics of local housing markets. Two of these processes can be categorized as evictions that occur in non-gentrifying neighborhoods, often defined by racial exclusion, poverty, and insecurity, and those that occur in a separate process that is driven by real estate activity and gentrification (Sims 2021). While distinct from one another, they are both governed by the broader social forces of the rental market. Madden and Marcuse develop the term “residential alienation,” an adaptation from Marx’s alienation of labor, as a unifying concept of the distinct ways that insecurity, extraction, and displacement affect the housing of working-class people. Rather than results of random occurrence, residential alienation centers housing insecurity as a predictable and structural outcome of the capitalist housing system. In this paper, I investigate if either of these forms of eviction-based alienation are occurring in Minneapolis using data on evictions and rental property sales. In the first section, I review the literature on evictions, displacement, and gentrification, and then situate evictions within the concept of residential alienation. This reveals how evictions are more than the actions of individual landlords pursuing their own interests; evictions are a political action with devastating consequences, especially for low-income and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) renters.