“Our Customer Is America”: Housing Insecurity and Eviction in Las Vegas, Nevada’s Postcrisis Rental Markets

ABSTRACT

In the wake of the foreclosure crisis, investors purchased large numbers of single-family residential properties and converted them to rentals. Activists and scholars have documented investor practices of withholding maintenance while raising rents to maximize profits. Increased demand for rental housing since the crisis has constrained the options of low- and moderate-income households, tilting power toward investor-landlords and raising the odds of abuse. A similar although less-discussed dynamic plays out in motels, which are often the last stop before homelessness. Leveraging 10 years of property ownership and eviction records, this article first examines differences among institutional investors and other landlords of single-family rentals in the scale of their holdings and the likelihood of their properties having an eviction record in Las Vegas, Nevada. Second, this article examines the scale of residential motel properties and their association with evictions. Through statistical analysis, we find institutional investors in single-family rentals are associated with higher rates of evictions, although these odds are highest for local actors expanding existing portfolios of rental properties. Large residential motel operators are similarly associated with extremely high eviction rates. We offer a number of recommendations for policy and research.

KEYWORDS:

• eviction, single-family rental housing, motels, housing insecurity, Las Vegas

Acknowledgments

We thank Michael Scott Davidson and Lauren Flannery of the Las Vegas Review-Journal for sharing their eviction and property ownership data and their survey of housing attorneys in all 50 U.S. states, and for introducing us to crucial contacts in Las Vegas. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. All errors remain ours alone.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Only 6 of the 20 metro areas in the AHS sample include any respondents living in hotels or motels, with Miami, Florida, first and Las, Nevada, second among sampled metro areas.

2. Michael Scott Davidson of the Las Vegas Review-Journal provided us with interview transcripts he produced as part an investigative series on evictions (Davidson, 2019).

3. In Las Vegas, a tenant is granted some legal protections after 30 days of residency. These protections do not apply to people paying rent weekly, with a few exceptions such as manifesting intent (setting up internet or cable or enrolling children in a nearby school).

4. This calculation is based on the total number of single-family homes in the 2009 Clark County assessor file.

5. As discussed in the methodology section, we identified all owner names associated with a specific corporate landlord, but for all other owners, we simply counted the number of properties associated with an owner name as it appears in the assessor records. The number of large investors and the properties they hold is likely larger given the proliferation of LLCs used to hold properties. We find 13 additional corporations beyond our named entities, each owning between 50 and 306 single-family rentals in 2018.

6. The Eviction Lab acknowledges that its estimate for 2016, the most recent year it displays, is too low.

7. We only considered parcels where the land-use code signifies single-family residential use and the number of dwelling units equals 1.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eric Seymour

Eric Seymour is an assistant professor in the program in urban planning and policy development at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. His research focuses on transformations in postcrisis housing markets and their implications for the housing security and health of low-income and minority populations.

Joshua Akers

Joshua Akers is an associate professor of Geography and Urban & Regional Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. His research examines the intersection of markets and policy and their material impacts on urban neighborhoods and everyday life.