UC Irvine

Rising rents and stagnating wages have led to an affordable housing crisis across the United States. How do renters navigate unaffordable rental markets to find housing opportunities, and what are the consequences of housing unaffordability for families and the reproduction of inequality? This dissertation begins to answer these two broad questions by analyzing 131 semi-structured interviews with very-low and middle-income, Latino and non-Hispanic white renter families with children living in Los Angeles, California—one of the least affordable metropolitan areas in the United States. In the first chapter, I show how strict tenant screening practices encourage low-income renters to turn to their ties for instrumental support during moves. While many low-income renters are able to successfully mobilize their networks for assistance, network wealth gaps contribute to the reproduction of racial inequalities in housing search outcomes. In the second chapter, I show how renters’ legal status becomes salient during the tenant screening stage of moves, limiting the housing opportunities available to undocumented and mixed status immigrant families. Finally, Chapter 3 examines renters’ immobility decisions and how immobile renters negotiate landlord neglect vis-à-vis unit maintenance. I propose the concept of predatory immobility as a way to connect rising housing costs to landlord disinvestment, renters’ immobility decisions, and renters’ health. Taken together, this dissertation extends our understanding of how renters find housing opportunities in unaffordable contexts, how renters receive and negotiate support from their social ties, and how features of contemporary rental markets reproduce inequalities by race/ethnicity, household income, and legal status.