The following post contains references for the studies and articles mentioned in “The Rise and Impact of Corporate Landlords,” which appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of the Marquette Lawyer magazine.
Bibliography
Demers, Andrew and Andrea L. Eisfeldt. “Total returns to single-family rentals.” Real Estate Economics 50 (2022): 7-32. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6229.12353
Desmond, Matthew and Nathan Wilmers. “Do the Poor Pay More for Housing? Exploitation, Profit, and Risk in Rental Markets.” American Journal of Sociology 124, no. 4 (January 2019): 1090-1124. https://doi.org/10.1086/701697
D’Lima, Walter and Paul Schultz. “Buy-to-Rent Investors and the Market for Single Family Homes.” The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics 64 (2022): 116-152. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11146-020-09790-5
Epstein, Gerald A. “Introduction: Financialization and the World Economy.” In Financialization and the World Economy, ed. Gerald A Epstein, 3-16. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005.
Fields, Desiree. “Automated landlord: Digital technologies and post-crisis financial accumulation.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 54, no. 1 (2022): 160-181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X19846514
Gomory, Henry. “The Social and Institutional Contexts Underlying Landlords’ Eviction Practices.” Social Forces 100, no. 4 (June 2022): 1774-1805. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab063
Leung, Lillian, Peter Hepburn, and Matthew Desmond. “Serial Eviction Filing: Civil Courts, Property Management, and the Threat of Displacement.” Social Forces 100, no. 1 (September 2021): 316-344. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaa089
Raymond, Elora Lee, Richard Duckworth, Benjamin Miller, Michael Lucas, and Shiraj Pokharel. “From Foreclosure to Eviction: Housing Insecurity in Corporate-Owned Single-Family Rentals.” Cityscape 20, no. 4 (2018): 159-188. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26524878
Nearly everybody uses the internet every day and, for many us, all day long. It is ubiquitous and, looked at from a long-term perspective, an amazing part of our lives. It is also far from perfect. Can it be made better?
A core aspect of addressing that goal is the prime focus of the Summer 2023 issue of Marquette Lawyer magazine. In the cover story, “The Past’s Lessons for Today: Can We Get to a Better Internet?,” James B. Speta, the Elizabeth Froehling Horner Professor of Law at Northwestern University, looks at whether common-carrier principles could be applied, in an artful and appropriate way, to combat domination of the internet by a small number of giant platforms. Speta’s piece is an essay version of the Robert F. Boden Lecture he delivered at Marquette Law School this past academic year.
Speta’s analysis and suggestions are accompanied by responses from eight other legal academics with a wide variety of experiences and perspectives (in order of presentation):
Kate Klonick, St. John’s University
Ashutosh Bhagwat, University of California, Davis
Sari Mazzurco, SMU Dedman
Eugene Volokh, UCLA
Howard Shelanski, Georgetown
Tejas N. Narechania, University of California, Berkeley
Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University
Bruce E. Boyden, Marquette University
The presentation is capped by thoughts from Congressman Ro Khanna of California, a leading figure in policy discussions about improving the internet. Khanna offers his ideas in an interview with Speta.
The new Marquette Lawyer also includes a probing discussion of the duties and obligations of lawyers, focused on a new book by Michael S. Ariens, L’82, who serves as the Aloysius A. Leopold Professor of Law at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. Ariens’s book—The Lawyer’s Conscience: A History of American Lawyer Ethics—is described in the opening section of the article.
There then follow pieces engaging with Ariens’s book from three Marquette Law School faculty members—Peter K. Rofes, Rebecca K. Blemberg, and Nathaniel Romano, S.J.—and a pertinent excerpt from a 1982 law review article by the late Robert F. Boden, L’52, during his long tenure as dean of the Law School.
Ellen Henak, a well-known criminal defense attorney and former adjunct professor at Marquette Law School, is retiring. As she draws her practice to a close, she offers careful but candid and provocative thoughts in a piece titled “Unretiring Thoughts from a Retiring Criminal Defense Lawyer,” which may be read by clicking here.
John D. Johnson, research fellow at the Marquette Law School Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, has done groundbreaking work analyzing significant shifts in property ownership in Milwaukee. He brings together much of his work in an article, “The Rise and Impact of Corporate Landlords.” It may be read by clicking here.
Any change in the faculty and staff of Marquette Law School is important, but retirements of two pillars of the Law School and appointments to two major positions are of particular note. In a set of short profiles, titled “Great Appreciation . . . and Great Anticipation,” we first say thank you to Professor Tom Hammer, L’75, and Associate Dean Bonnie Thomson, each of who has served for several decades. And then we welcome Derek Mosley, L’95, who was named director of the Lubar Center for Public Policy and Civic Education after serving as a Milwaukee municipal judge for 20 years, and Mary Triggiano, who will lead the Law School’s Andrew Center for Restorative Justice after serving as a judge of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court since 2004 and as chief judge since 2020. The four profiles may be read by clicking here.
In his column, titled “Leadership and Mission at Jesuit Schools Today,” Dean Joseph D. Kearney focuses on Marquette University President Michael R. Lovell and Katie Mertz, L’11, director of pro bono and public service at the Law School. Lovell recently honored Mertz with a Marquette University “Difference Maker” award. The column may be read by clicking here.
Finally: the Class Notes describe recent accomplishments of more than 30 Marquette lawyers and may be read by clicking here, and the back cover (here) makes a point about the Marquette Law School Poll.
The recent overall trends in Milwaukee county’s population are well known, but these headline figures obscure enormous variation between individual neighborhoods and suburbs.
Since 2000, the city’s population has declined a bit while the suburbs have, collectively, grown slightly. But within the city, neighborhood trajectories dramatically diverge, and population growth is really only limited to a specific set of pro-growth suburbs.
The graphic below categorizes census tracts into one of four demographic trajectories. “Building boom” neighborhoods (shown in dark blue) are building new housing and consequently increasing the number of households. In the city, this has mainly occurred in Greater Downtown (stretching from the north end of Bay View through the Lower East Side) as well as a cluster of subdivision-style housing developments on the far northwest side. All told, these areas have added 18,000 more residents since 2000, a 23% growth rate.
Glendale, Franklin, Oak Creek, Greenfield, and parts of St. Francis, Cudahy, and Wauwatosa have also grown thanks to new construction over the last 20 years. In total, the suburbs have added 23,000 residents in building boom tracts, a growth rate of 19%.
Most people in either the city or the suburbs don’t live in a tract that’s building more units. Instead, they live in a neighborhood with few empty lots, where the number of occupied housing units has remained steady, but with a slowly declining typical household size. This combination inevitably leads to gradual population loss. These “stable decline” neighborhoods are shown in orange.
In Milwaukee, they cover much of Bay View, the west side, and the northwest side. In total these neighborhoods saw a population decline of 14,000, or 6%. The suburbs of Brown Deer, River Hills, Bayside, Fox Point, West Allis, Hales Corners, and Greendale all followed this trajectory as well. The suburban population in stable decline neighborhoods fell by 3,000, or 2%.
The flip side of “stable decline” neighborhoods are the more unusual phenomenon of population growth thanks to increasing household size. Shown in light blue, these neighborhoods are mainly found on the south side of Milwaukee, with a few additional clusters on the north side. Generally, this reflects the presence of immigrant families with typically larger household sizes. Despite not adding more housing units, these neighborhoods increased their population by 9,000, or 8%, since 2000.
In the suburbs, this growth pattern is mostly limited to Whitefish Bay, which managed to slightly increase its average household size over the past 20 years, no doubt aided by the popularity of its school district.
Adding these three kinds of neighborhoods—building boom, stable decline, and family-size driven growth—yields a population growth of about 13,000 in the City of Milwaukee over the past two decades. But Milwaukee didn’t grow over that period. It shrank. The reason is the remaining category, “Depopulation,” shown in red.
These are tracts which experienced a dwindling number of households along with high and/or growing vacancies. In some places more than 1-in-5 housing units are vacant. All told, the population in these tracts fell by 32,000 (21%) since 2000. The population is declining because many households choose to leave when they can, and few people replace them. It’s easy to understand why. These are also the neighborhoods with the highest racial segregation, asthma-related emergency room visits, incidents of childhood lead poisoning, mass incarceration rates, absentee landlords, building code violations, etc.
Encouraging population growth in Milwaukee will require different strategies for each neighborhood type.
The current strategy of dense infill development in Milwaukee’s downtown is paying dividends. Wherever construction has boomed, demand is high and vacancy rates are low.
That style of growth is ill-suited to the “stable decline” neighborhoods where there are few empty lots appropriate for large-scale redevelopment. Finding ways to restore the historic population density in these neighborhoods will require creativity and regulatory reform. Zoning density standards need to be reformed—for instance, by removing the lot area per dwelling unit minimum requirement.
The city should allow the construction of accessory dwelling units by right. These are already common in Milwaukee (we call them “carriage houses”), but they are illegal to build today. Allowing people to replace their garages with small dwellings or to install “in-law” suites in their attics or basements is a key way to help popular neighborhoods like Bay View and Washington Heights maintain the population density essential to their historic, walkable commercial districts.
Immigration, and correspondingly high family sizes, have been a valuable source of growth in some neighborhoods. Milwaukee should do whatever it can to encourage and support immigrants, who have always been a key pillar of the city. But the level of immigration we receive is largely a function of national policies outside our control, and, in any case, neighborhoods with large families today are still trending towards a status of stable decline as household sizes predictably shrink.
Even if Milwaukee accomplishes all these things—developing new apartment buildings, densifying in-demand residential neighborhoods, and encouraging immigration—we will still probably shrink. The main driver of population loss in the city is depopulation in neighborhoods where decades of disinvestment has caused low quality of life. Solving this will take much more than real estate development; although, building quality affordable housing will certainly play a role.
Milwaukee has the potential to grow a lot. Within the city we have relatively affordable housing, compared to much of the country. We have adequate natural resources and basic infrastructure to support many more residents. And much of the city is already growing. Whether due to new construction or immigration, about 40% of the city’s residents already live in a neighborhood that grew over the last 20 years.
Currently, that success is limited to specific neighborhoods. Creating broad-based population growth will require building more towers where land is available, adding density in built-out neighborhoods that already have high demand, welcoming more immigrants, and—most critically—making the depopulating neighborhoods on the near north side attractive places for existing residents to stay.