Legislating corporate landlords: a comparative analysis of recent interventions in Los Angeles and San Francisco

Since 2008, financial actors and practices have become increasingly embedded within US rental housing markets. The growing consolidation of rental real estate into corporate hands has contributed to higher rents, more eviction filings, and more systematic tenant harassment aimed at forcing tenant turnover. Until recently, the influence of ‘corporate landlords’ on local housing markets was largely unregulated and unconstrained. This paper compares novel policy strategies to regulate the tenant-landlord relationship in two California cities, focusing on enforcement mechanisms and the role of the municipal government. Both policies, San Francisco’s ‘Union at Home Ordinance’ and Los Angeles’s ‘Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance’, were developed in response to public pressure to regulate corporate landlords and give tenants recourse in the context of unfettered rental housing financialisation. Using policy documents and data collected through the Los Angeles Housing Department and the UC Berkeley Labour Centre, alongside interviews with tenants and organisers who have utilized the ordinances, this paper argues that Union at Home–which is enforced by tenants as opposed to the municipal government, renders organising a ‘housing service’, and imposes an obligation on landlords to negotiate with tenants associations–appears to more effectively redress the power dynamics in the rental housing sector.