Extractive Landlord Strategies: How the Private Rental Market Creates Crime Hot Spots

Authors: Henry Gomory and Matthew Desmond
Published by: Eviction Lab
Date Published: May 11, 2023
Date Completed: September 28, 2026
Category: Real Estate / Housing / Crime & Community Safety

Read the original article: Extractive Landlord Strategies: How the Private Rental Market Creates Crime Hot Spots

Why I Chose This Article

I read this article because it was suggested to me by Patrick Sharkey, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University whose research focuses on urban inequality, violence, and public policy. He previously served as Chair of Sociology at New York University and Scientific Director of Crime Lab New York and is the founder of AmericanViolence.org.

I reached out to Professor Sharkey because his work sits at the intersection of several issues I have been trying to better understand: crime, communities, inequality, and the conditions that can contribute to violence. He recommended this article in response to a question I asked him about property management and the role landlords can play in community safety and crime.

I am preparing to build a real estate investment company, so I want to understand not only how to acquire and profit from properties, but also how the way those properties are managed can affect tenants and the surrounding community.

What the Article Is About

The article focuses on what the authors call extractive landlord strategies—management practices designed to maximize profits while minimizing investment in properties and tenants.

One example involves landlords quickly filing eviction cases when tenants fall behind on rent while routinely neglecting maintenance requests involving problems such as roaches, rodents, broken windows, malfunctioning lights, broken door locks, heating problems, and plumbing issues.

The authors argue that these practices allow landlords to increase profits at the expense of their tenants and may also contribute to higher levels of danger and crime around their properties.

Their research examined rental properties in Milwaukee and found that between 2016 and 2018, more than half of reported assaults occurred on the 1.9% of rental properties the researchers classified as being operated by extractive landlords.

That statistic stood out to me. However, I don’t think it should be interpreted to mean that these landlords directly caused those crimes. Instead, the research examines several possible connections between landlord practices, housing conditions, tenant instability, and the concentration of crime.

My Biggest Takeaway

My biggest takeaway is that real estate and the way it is managed can play a role in community safety, tenant well-being, and crime reduction.

Before reading this research, I primarily thought about property management as a business responsibility: maintain the property, collect rent, control expenses, and protect the investment.

This article made me think about it differently.

A landlord’s decisions can extend beyond the property line. Maintaining secure doors, working lights, safe living conditions, and stable housing may affect not only tenants but the larger neighborhood.

In a broader sense, responsible housing practices could potentially contribute to better conditions for people returning to their communities after incarceration as well. Housing stability is one part of successful reentry, and landlords are among the people who ultimately determine who gets access to that stability.

That means property management isn’t simply about protecting an asset. It can also be about protecting and strengthening the community surrounding that asset.

What I Agree With

I agree that extractive management practices are especially concerning in disadvantaged and stigmatized neighborhoods because the people living there often have fewer housing alternatives.

When tenants have limited options, landlords may have less competitive pressure to provide quality housing or responsive management. That creates the possibility of a damaging cycle: the neighborhoods most in need of responsible investment can become the places where neglect is easiest to get away with.

The research also made me think differently about the relationship between physical property conditions and crime. Broken locks, poor lighting, neglected buildings, frequent evictions, and unstable occupancy aren’t merely property-management problems. Collectively, they can affect the stability and safety of an entire community.

What I Question

One part of the article made me stop and think.

The authors discuss the possibility that extractive landlords may disproportionately rent to people who have difficulty finding housing elsewhere, including individuals who may be considered at higher risk of committing crime.

At first, I had a problem with this argument.

I don’t know exactly what should be used as a metric to determine that someone is more likely to commit a crime. More importantly, if landlords refuse to rent to these individuals, where are they supposed to live?

This question is especially important to me because of my interest in reentry. People returning from incarceration already face significant barriers to housing. If every landlord uses someone’s past as a reason to reject them, we haven’t eliminated the problem—we’ve simply narrowed where that person can live.

The article ultimately raises a more interesting possibility: perhaps concentrating people with limited housing choices into a small number of properties contributes to the problem itself.

That changed the question for me.

Instead of asking whether landlords should avoid renting to people considered higher risk, perhaps we should ask:

What happens when those individuals are given more housing choices rather than fewer?

If people with criminal records, previous evictions, poor credit, or other barriers were able to live throughout a wider range of communities, perhaps there would be less concentration of disadvantage in particular properties and neighborhoods.

I don’t know that this research proves that outcome. But I believe it is an important question.

How This Applies to My Life

I plan on creating a real estate investment firm.

Knowing that real estate management may have consequences beyond profitability means I need to be more conscious of the management decisions I eventually make.

There will always be pressure in business to reduce expenses and increase profits. But housing is different from many other investments because the asset is also someone’s home.

My duty to the community is more important than maximizing profits.

That doesn’t mean profitability doesn’t matter. A company that isn’t financially sustainable can’t maintain its properties, employ people, grow, or serve anyone for very long.

The challenge is building a business model where profitability and responsible property management reinforce each other instead of competing with each other.

That’s the kind of system I want to build from the beginning.

What I’m Going to Do Differently

In my company’s operating practices, I want to make it a policy that our homes do not become neglected.

That means having a responsive maintenance system and treating maintenance as a predictable operating expense rather than an unexpected burden. Maintenance costs should be considered when analyzing a property before we acquire it, not after something goes wrong.

If a deal only works financially because I assume that I can defer necessary maintenance, then maybe it isn’t actually a good deal.

I also want to think carefully about tenant-screening policies. My first instinct after reading this research is that someone’s criminal history should not automatically determine whether they deserve access to housing.

At the same time, being responsible to the community means I can’t pretend tenant screening doesn’t matter. I will need policies that protect residents, comply with the law, manage legitimate risk, and still give people a fair opportunity to obtain housing.

That is something I intend to continue researching before developing an actual screening policy.

The larger lesson for me is simple:

How I manage a property matters just as much as whether I acquire it.

Who I Would Recommend This Article To

I would recommend this article to community violence-prevention organizations, homeowners, policymakers, landlords, property managers, real estate investors, and anyone interested in creating safer communities.

For investors in particular, I think it provides an important perspective that doesn’t appear often enough in traditional real estate education:

A property can produce a financial return while still creating costs for the community around it.

A responsible investor should understand both sides of that equation.

Final Thoughts & Rating

Crime reduction is a community effort. Everyone has a responsibility and a role to play in achieving it.

Incarceration is one tool society uses to address crime, but it comes at a tremendous financial and social cost and cannot solve every condition that contributes to crime.

Research like this matters because it forces us to look at decisions that may seem unrelated to public safety—property maintenance, eviction practices, tenant screening, and investment strategy—and ask whether they have consequences beyond the individual property.

For me, that’s what made this article worth reading. I started with a question about the relationship between housing and crime. I came away thinking much more deeply about the kind of landlord and real estate investor I eventually want to become.

I don’t simply want to own properties.

I want the communities where I own properties to be better because I was there.

Xavier Lee of Elkton, MD

“Mizz Debbie’s Boy”