How Do Housing First Caseworkers Mediate Landlord-Tenant Conflicts?

ABSTRACT

Housing First (HF) is a service model that addresses chronic homelessness with permanent supportive housing. Previous studies have analysed market constraints on housing searches, strategies caseworkers use to navigate these barriers, and clinical interventions that help clients transition to unsupported housing. Little research has examined the nuanced ways caseworkers mediate landlord-tenant conflicts once a lease has been formed. I advance those studies by answering the question: How do HF caseworkers mediate landlord-tenant conflicts? Using interview and focus group data collected in a large U.S. County, I provide evidence that HF caseworkers mediate landlord-tenant conflicts by managing “enforcement costs” throughout the lease. Enforcement costs are (non-)financial expenditures beyond the price of a commodity to ensure co-signers honour their contractual obligations. HF caseworkers manage enforcement costs by absorbing them for landlords and/or tenants throughout the lease. When caseworkers cannot or will not absorb enforcement costs, they are keen to delegate this responsibility to other parties. Absorption and delegation can help rebalance power inequities and/or undermine the reputation of HF programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing first
• landlords
• tenants
• housing services
• transaction costs

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Availability of Data and Material

Masked data is available upon request.

Code Availability

Not applicable.

Notes

1. This definition excludes somebody who has lived in an institutional setting (i.e. jail, hospital, and mental health facility) for more than 90 days and met the listed criteria before entering the facility. The definition includes families with a head of household who meets the listed criteria even if the composition of their household changed during an episode of homelessness.

2. Government and non-profit housing providers also screen applicants. I focus on private landlords here because that is the stakeholder who study participants in this paper engaged.

3. In the USA, a household is rent burdened if it devotes more than 30% of its income to rent.

4. This is a broader application of TCE than has been used in the past. Quigley (2002) identified four types of transaction costs that renters confront: search, legal, administrative, and adjustment costs. Although Quigley’s analysis included discussion about renters, his primary concern was homeowners. It therefore lacked a thorough analysis of opportunism by landlords and/or tenants throughout the lease. Moreover, Quigley used TCE to develop an econometric model for hypothesis testing. I instead used TCE as a sensitizing framework to conceptualize strategies that HF caseworkers use to manage enforcement costs. This paper thus extends Quigley’s work by offering a more nuanced account of enforcement costs in rental markets and an analysis of third-party efforts to manage enforcement costs during the lease.

5. This does not mean the County PHA only provided HF services. The organization managed a small public housing stock and larger HCV programme.

6. “Public housing” refers to units owned by the government while “social housing” refers to units owned by non-profit orgs.

7. Although interviewees did this, withholding rent is illegal in some places.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the Institute for Research on Poverty, Mellon Foundation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Crowe Scholarship, and John DeLamater Award.