The Hollowed State and Housing Policy: Landlords as Poverty Governors

Synthesis

This essay's readings offer a rich overview of housing insecurity in the United States. Different authors situate housing insecurity as a condition that extends beyond affordability; rather, they see it as a phenomenon encumbered by systemic, structural, and paternalistic practices that interact to transform low-income tenants into 'well-behaved' citizens. Although research in other fields like public health, economics, and urban planning treats housing insecurity as an affordability issue, scholars like DeLuca and Rosen (2022) call for readers to go beyond this narrow viewpoint, seeing housing insecurity as a result of structural constraints shaped by institutions and social relationships. Rosen and Garboden (2022) empirically further this claim. By conducting interviews and ethnographic observations, they find that the discretionary practices and moral evaluations of landlords towards their tenants shape the outcomes of low-income tenants. Their central claim is that the devolution of housing to the private market has transformed landlords into quasi-state agents, situating them as poverty governors who wield authority that can either punish or modify tenant behavior.

Lundberg et al. (2021) build on this discussion by extending their analysis to the structural factors that influence eviction risk. They analyze different types of housing assistance programs like vouchers and public housing, arguing that public housing offers better protection against eviction. McCabe (2023) investigates how public housing agencies (PHAs) govern poverty through the administration of the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, arguing that its administration functions as a mechanism of poverty governance through selection, formation, and nudging.

Analytic Perspective: Landlords as Poverty Governance

These readings construct a layered narrative on the lived experiences of individuals navigating America's housing system. Several authors interrogate how the devolution of housing assistance to the private market has perpetuated a neoliberal paternalistic form of poverty governance (Rosen and Garboden, 2022; DeLuca and Rosen, 2022; McCabe, 2023). The decline of public housing has led to a broader shift toward privatization, allowing landlords to gain autonomy in managing subsidized tenants. This devolution puts renters in a precarious position, as landlords can opt out of the voucher program at the end of a lease for personal or business reasons — leading to terminations that families experience as evictions, even if not formally classified as such (Lundberg et al., 2021).

In the "hollowed state," where government functions are outsourced to private actors who regulate the poor using market logics (Rosen and Garboden, 2022), landlords now wield the disciplinary 'stick' of poverty governance through housing vouchers. Research by DeLuca and Rosen (2022) highlights how eviction filings are mechanisms used to intimidate and compel rent payment, transforming tenants into debtors rather than consumers. Meyer et al. (2024) argue that when such structural failures go unaddressed, they contribute directly to housing precarity and ultimately to homelessness.

The Hollowed State and Housing Policy: Governance Without Accountability

Accountability is a salient concern in the hollowed state (Heinrich et al., 2004). As governance becomes more networked and less hierarchical, traditional mechanisms of democratic control — like legislatures, courts, and electoral processes — are strained. This separation of ownership (citizens) and control (unelected administrators or third parties) creates new challenges for legitimacy and oversight. According to Rosen and Garboden (2022), this shift towards marketization in housing policy can be understood within a broader historical context. Modern housing policy has placed landlords at the frontline of poverty governance by employing vouchers and tax credits.

This dispersion of authority across networks of landlords and agencies weakens democratic accountability and enables overbearing control in market relationships. Landlords act as street-level bureaucrats. Like Lipsky's welfare caseworkers, they exercise discretion, set routines, and shape service provision. Their dual function — encouraging compliance and self-governance while disciplining, punishing, and excluding those who fail — embodies two arms of a neoliberal and paternalistic form of governance.

By dispersing authority, the hollow state weakens traditional accountability mechanisms, leaving tenants vulnerable to the arbitrary whims and paternalistic practices of the landlord (Lundberg et al., 2021). In contrast, public housing offers stronger legal safeguards against eviction than voucher recipients receive. Public housing authorities must demonstrate "good cause" such as nonpayment or lease violation and must follow a formal judicial process. These procedures protect the tenant and reduce the likelihood of informal or arbitrary evictions. Thus, public housing emerges as a more stable, though imperfect, site of tenant protection.

Arganoff (2005) argues that there is difficulty in assessing performance in settings where multiple jurisdictions and organizations share responsibility for policy and program implementation. In intergovernmental systems, the expectations of program designers often diverge from the realities faced by implementers, creating friction between accountability and discretion.

Conclusion: A Shift from Marketization to Participatory Governance

Yet marketization is not the only path forward. Peters (2018) introduces an alternative to the market model of governance: the Participatory model, grounded in political and organizational theory. It identifies the core problem of public administration not as monopoly or inefficiency, but as a lack of voice and excessive hierarchy. The participation model argues that citizens desire greater input in how services are designed and delivered, and calls for reforms to create new channels for input — including public hearings, deliberative forums, and client-managed forums. Although both the market and participatory models aim to increase client choice, they do so through fundamentally different mechanisms. In the market model, citizens are empowered as consumers through tools like vouchers. In the participatory model, citizens are involved in governance structures themselves — exercising choice through deliberation and shared decision-making. By granting service recipients a genuine voice in decisions, it opens new possibilities for reimagining accountability within the hollow state.