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\u201cThe eviction moratorium is killing small landlords\u201d CNBC cautions. "Some small landlords struggle under eviction moratoriums,\u201d declares The Washington Post. \u201cEconomic Pressures Are Rising On Mom And Pop Rental Owners,\u201d laments NPR. \u201d[Landlords] can\u2019t hold on much longer,\u201d cries an LA Times headline.

Throughout the course of the pandemic, we\u2019ve seen a spate of media coverage highlighting the plight of the small or so-called \u201cmom-and-pop landlord\u201d struggling to make ends meet. The story usually goes something like this: A modest, down-on-their-luck owner of two or three properties \u2014 say, a elderly grandmother or hardworking medical professional \u2014 hopes to keep them long enough to hand them down to their kids, but fears financial ruin in the face of radical tenant-protection laws.

But this doesn\u2019t reflect the reality of rental housing ownership in the United States. Over the last couple decades, corporate entities, from Wall Street firms to an opaque network of LLCs, have increasingly seized ownership of the rental housing stock, intensifying the asymmetry of landlord-tenant power relations and rendering housing ever more precarious for renters. In the meantime, the character of the \u201cmom-and-pop landlord\u201d has been evoked nonstop \u2014 much like that of the romantic \u201csmall business owner\u201d \u2014 in order to sanitize the image of property ownership and gin up opposition to legislation that would protect tenants from eviction moratoria to rent control.

On this episode, we explore the overrepresentation of the \u201cmom-and-pop landlord\u201d in media, contrasting it with the actual makeup of rental housing ownership. We\u2019ll also examine how the media-burnished image of the beleaguered, barely-scraping-by landlord puts a human face on policies that further enrich a property-owning class while justifying the forceful removal of renters from their homes.

Our guest is Alexander Ferrer of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE).