There are No Good Landlords: Deconstructing Discourses of the “Mom and Pop” Landlord in Syracuse, NY

This thesis examines how landlords operating in Syracuse, NY’s high poverty neighborhoods use discourse to legitimize their class interests and reinforce their dominance in a postindustrial, neoliberalizing city. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with members of the Central New York Landlord Association, it explores how landlord narratives are shaped by, and help reproduce, the interconnected structures of urban neoliberalism, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism. While the City of Syracuse promotes redevelopment strategies to attract private capital and raise property values, many landlords continue to profit from long-term disinvestment and tenant confinement to the city’s poorest rental markets. Local landlord discourse is marked by a contradiction: landlords invoke neoliberal logics to justify deregulation and assert their economic importance, yet do not share the City’s commitment to increasing property values through private investment. While landlords frame themselves as benevolent housing providers and essential contributors to the city’s economy, they portray tenants as threats to property, law, and public safety. Their stigmatization of tenants draws on racialized and settler logics of property, framing tenants as an equal party to the landlord class who share responsibility in property neglect and declining property values. Through this framing, landlords obscure the unequal power at the foundation of private property and the landlord-tenant relationship. This project contributes to scholarship in critical urban geography by showing how landlord discourse plays a role in reinforcing neoliberal urban governance and the racial-capital, settler-colonial structures through which urban neoliberalization takes shape.