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Abstract

This dissertation investigates how conflicts over renting—both routine and spectacular, short lived and prolonged, in public and behind closed doors—reshaped the landlord-tenant relationship in American cities. The chapters that follow show how the rental relationship itself became contested terrain in American life from the years following World War II through the rise of gentrification in the late twentieth century. This dissertation asks not only how tenants and landlords understood their relationship to each other, but also how that relationship morphed amidst political, social, and cultural changes in these decades. Moreover, it explores how the landlord-tenant relationship informed urban inequality. While conflicts between landlords and tenants were by no means new, the changing culture of property lent new urgency to existing tensions in the realm of renting. As a result of the discrimination embedded in the culture of mass homeownership and the reordering of metropolitan geography, race took on an increasingly important role in the rental relationship from the postwar era forward. I argue that over the second half of the twentieth century the landlord-tenant relationship underwent a halting renovation through which the relationship morphed but remained unequal. This renovation was in part the consequence of tenants’ struggle to dismantle the structure of the relationship. Through conflicts over rent control, maintenance, domesticity, and eviction, tenants argued that this long-standing structure—which empowered landlords to set rent, dictate the conditions and use of domestic space, select tenants, and evict—was unequal and ill-suited to the realities of modern urban life. They championed a relationship that would embrace the interdependence of the respective responsibilities of landlord and tenant. However, it was shifts in the practices of property management that had the most pronounced and lasting impact on the rental relationship. Landlords invested more in their capacity to choose tenants by turning with new intensity to screening and eviction in the last decades of the century. Landlords had long evaluated a prospective tenant’s finances and character, but more rigorous screening proliferated with the professionalization of property management. Simultaneously, landlords turned to eviction with more frequency. In short, while the balance of power in the rental relationship did not dramatically change, the ways in which landlords used their power did, particularly the power to select their tenants. If tenants had envisioned a transformed structure of renting that entailed a more equal balance of power, landlords were able to successfully reshape the rental relationship into a more rigid one that enabled them to readily deny tenants housing. Both screening and eviction facilitated continued discrimination, particularly along the lines of race, in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, the landlord-tenant relationship was a sturdy pillar of housing and racial inequality. This dissertation therefore contends that the evolution of the landlord-tenant relationship had lasting implications for inequality in American cities.

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