Holding Landlords Accountable

Renters have limited control over building maintenance, so it's up to planners to monitor property ownership and landlords' violation or eviction patterns. Though landlord records are valuable to planners and housing nonprofits, misspelled names and shell companies make it difficult to track all properties owned by one person.

In "Who Owns America? A Methodology for Identifying Landlords' Ownership Scale and the Implications for Targeted Code Enforcement" (Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol 90., No. 4) Brian Y. An, Andrew Jakabovics, Anthony W. Orlando, Seva Rodnyansky and Eunjee Son brandish a new tool for identifying property ownership.

The authors showcase a practical, user-friendly method for tracking landlords' property ownership using the open-source software OpenRefine. They demonstrate how to target code enforcement and highlight how this free tool can be applied to other messy datasets important for planning.

Neglect and Ownership Scale

Looking at Fulton County Georgia, Atlanta, the authors documented the relationship between code violations and ownership scale (the number of properties owned by the same landlords).

While strong, scale is not the only predictor. A one percent increase in landlord scale correlated with an eight to 10 percent increase in the probability of code violations generally and a 25 percent increase for multifamily, rather than single-family, properties.

Zooming in, the authors suggest how the code enforcement approach can target the small portion of buildings (3.8 percent of their sample data) whose landlords were 3.5 times more likely to commit serious code violations than others. They also estimate the number of multifamily units at the peak of code violations.

The authors' approach relies on a combination of linguistic principles to clean up messy ownership records. The natural language processing algorithm behind the OpenRefine software breaks down text data based on linguistic principles and compares different pieces.

One step, called phonetic fingerprinting, transforms text into its phonetic equivalent in English. The authors clarify that this tool can be applied to other data sources, including parcel registries, business registries, real estate transactions, and administrative data.

Beyond Enforcement

While the authors' approach demonstrates its effectiveness in capturing institutional investors at the center of recent housing policy debates, they also argue that the tool is excellent for identifying mom-and-pop owners. These smaller landlords often purchase properties under individualized names and are more likely to use unstandardized LLC names than large investors.

Identifying these smaller-scale investors could be important for educational outreach, such as around housing choice vouchers. These small landlords are promising candidates for preservation subsidies that can improve housing quality while maintaining affordable rents.

The open-source approach removes the cost hurdle for smaller jurisdictions with limited resources. The program's simplicity overcomes the tradeoff between limited time and resources amidst many other tasks. Without any need to write code, planners can try out the new approach.

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