Nonparticipant Observation

From late 2015 to early 2018, I conducted fieldwork in three contexts: a coalition mobilizing for reform, the city’s official stakeholder and law-writing committee, and city meetings, including public forums, trainings, and City Council meetings. Fieldwork began in November 2015 with nonparticipant observation of a coalition of activists and nonprofit employees. Following signals from then mayor Ed Murray that the use of criminal records in housing would be on the city’s policy agenda, the group’s leaders published a report on the issue and held a public forum designed to bring community voices into the process. From that point until the law passed in August 2017, the coalition held meetings and forums, produced a set of demands, and lobbied elected officials. I attended organizing meetings and events in which reform advocates discussed the issue, decided on political strategies, and ultimately formed a platform. The reform coalition provided a clear sense of the moral and instrumental arguments in support of the law.

While the coalition devised their strategy, the city’s official policy-making process began in early 2016. Typical of his governing style, Mayor Murray brought city officials, reformers, and market actors together, creating an eighteen-member stakeholder committee tasked with debating and drafting an ordinance. The stakeholder group sought input from city officials, reform advocates, private landlord groups, affordable housing providers, reentry service providers, and two people who themselves had criminal records. The group’s start was fitful and, after a single meeting in the winter of 2016, the committee reconvened six months later, at which point I was granted access to the closed-door process. (I attended the final five meetings.) During these meetings, participants debated the importance of background checks, what criminal records mean for landlords, the content and extent of possible regulation, and appropriate enforcement mechanisms. As a space intended for deliberation and debate, the stakeholder meetings not only highlighted disagreements between supporters of the law and landlords but also revealed moments of consensus.

Finally, the city meetings offered a window onto both carefully crafted political statements (often presented in City Council meetings) and off-the-cuff comments and exchanges (typically in public forums and city trainings). Following the stakeholder process, the city’s Office of Civil Rights convened a handful of public information and training sessions for landlords, which provided space for the city to stake its position, professional industry representatives to respond, and local landlords and residents to ask questions. In subcommittee and full City Council meetings, supporters and opponents presented arguments and shared personal stories during public comment periods. While many of the central stakeholders attended and spoke at public meetings, these settings also provided opportunities for people who were not consistently or closely involved in the political process to weigh in on the issue.

Interviews

To further examine the justifications and logic behind political claims, I conducted seventeen semi-structured, in-depth interviews with the main players working on the legislation. The interviews were conducted between November 2016 and July 2017 after I had begun attending meetings in all three contexts. Twelve participants were recruited from the official stakeholder group and the reform coalition. Together, the two groups included many of the most active people working on the issue. I interviewed the four leaders of the reform coalition and members of the mayor’s stakeholder group who attended at least half of the meetings. Two participants attended both groups. To get a sense of others actively involved with the issue politically, but not a part of either group, I asked each respondent who else had a hand in the policy. I then contacted people who were mentioned by at least two others; the remaining five participants were identified through this process. Interview respondents included city employees, nonstate actors brought into the official process, and advocates actively pressuring elected politicians. Of the seventeen, four represented private or affordable housing providers, five worked for the city, and eight represented criminal justice, homelessness, and housing advocacy organizations.

Since this analysis focuses primarily on landlord opposition, some clarification of Seattle’s rental industry landscape is in order. An online survey, though not representative, gives a general sense of landlord demographics in the city: 59 percent report owning a single building and, of those who responded to such questions, nearly 82 percent report that they are white and 54 percent report that they are male (Crowder et al. Reference Crowder, Carll, Herting and Hess2018). Landlords are represented politically by two main trade groups, one advocating on behalf of large corporate landlords and the other for small, independent owners. Both groups worked to drum up opposition to the law, made their case in newsletters and op-eds, and lobbied City Council and the mayor’s office to minimize the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance’s reach. Since affordable housing providers lack a profit motive and face some externally imposed constraints on their rental requirements, they have different concerns than landlords in the private market. Nevertheless, while there are important differences among landlords, these private owners, as well as affordable housing providers, raised common concerns and articulated their interests in markedly similar language. This is not to say that landlord perspectives do not vary. Indeed, the fact that small-time landlords compose a majority of the rental market assures diverse opinions and approaches to rental housing. Yet what emerged in the debate was a remarkable consistency in the language used and conclusions reached by industry representatives and the individual landlords who came to public meetings, wrote emails expressing concern, and posted anonymously in response to online news stories. Thus, I treat landlords as a class, with shared interests and language for describing those interests, noting important variation when pertinent.Footnote ³

Media Content

Finally, to gain a comprehensive sense of the political arguments and verify my observations and responses from interviews, I analyzed news media coverage, court documents,Footnote ⁴ publications and newsletters from a landlord association and the reform coalition, and recordings of previous city meetings and training sessions related to criminal records, which I accessed through the Seattle city archives. I gathered news coverage of the law on a rolling basis, using Google News and by following coverage in the city’s main news outlets. I also searched newspaper archives to gather any mention of criminal records in housing from past debates. A landlord newsletter, emails to a city agency from individual landlords, and comment boards responding to Seattle Times coverage of the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance were of particular importance for assessing landlord claims. Online comment boards provided unfiltered (but certainly unverifiable) landlord claims. Some posts, of course, have the bluster we have come to expect from Internet commentary. Nevertheless, they provided confirmation of landlords’ rhetoric around risk as well as their threats to circumnavigate the law.

Data Analysis

I conducted data analysis inductively with the help of NVivo software. In the early rounds of coding field notes, I isolated the principal topics of debate and subjects that elicited disagreement: definitions of housing, criminal records, risk, and potential solutions. These topics provided the core structure for interviews. I then analyzed subjects’ claims and justifications for their policy positions on these topics, focusing on understandings of the responsibilities of the state and private market, landlords’ role and duties, definitions of housing, understandings of risk, and what criminal records signal about a rental applicant. Finally, I situated landlord arguments about the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance within the context of property rights and the city’s changing housing market in order to generate a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between antidiscrimination law, private property, and landlords’ decisionmaking.

Not A Moral Issue

Supporters of the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance argued that the use of criminal records in rental housing was unjust for several reasons. First, given racial disparities in arrest, conviction, and sentencing, denying people with convictions from rental housing would disproportionately affect renters of color. Moreover, advocates argued that widespread social exclusion amounted to excessive punishment and contributed to the revolving door of the criminal justice system. Landlords did not disagree with these claims. In fact, industry representatives and many individual landlords asserted that these were compelling and legitimate issues for the city to address. As one landlord representative told me in an interview, “it’s ridiculous to say there isn’t bias in the system. I get that. I think the criminal justice system needs to be reformed, for sure.” In writing, public events, interviews, court documents, and the closed-door stakeholder meetings, landlords echoed advocates’ claims that people should not face continued punished after they have served time, that the criminal justice system needs reform, and that people with criminal records need housing.

Moral alignment with the intent of the law, however, did not translate into political support. Indeed, many landlords expressed support for the underlying aims of the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance in the same breath as their disagreement:

These claims express an overarching sentiment among landlords: they considered the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance to be illegitimate and mobilized against its passage. Rather than making value-based arguments or challenging advocates’ framing of the issue, landlords responded through the language of risk, arguing that their opposition to the law was not grounded in conflicting values but rather stemmed from owners’ legitimate interests as rental property owners.

The Many Faces of Risk: Criminal Records and Liability

Both private market and affordable housing providers feared that the law would expose owners to risk by limiting their capacity to screen for tenants with criminal records. For private landlords, this would violate their prerogative to know about, mitigate, or avoid risk. In doing so, landlords claimed that the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance would take away an important, legitimate, and meaningful indicator of risk that helps protect rental owners from financial loss and legal liability. This assessment hinged on the understanding that criminal records are reliable and important signals of the risk that landlords should be able to see and consider when evaluating prospective tenants.Footnote ⁵

Seeing like a Landlord: Tenant Screening as Risk Management

Rental owners argued that tenant screening was an essential tactic by which landlords attend to their primary business concerns: “As far as the risk goes for an owner, I want to make sure my tenants are safe, my property is safe, I want to make sure I’m safe … and I want to make sure the rent is paid on time.”Footnote ⁷ Landlords claimed that they rely on tenant screening techniques to identify and avoid potentially problematic renters who might skip out on rent, destroy the unit, or otherwise cause a hassle, all of which take a financial or personal toll. As one landlord put it, “there’s this x-factor of the tenant from hell problem that everybody tries to avoid by screening.” Another echoed this sentiment, “you set your screening criteria to screen out highest risk situations.” For owners, a conviction or arrest history signaled one such high-risk scenario and was therefore a vital component of the screening process.

Although many landlords argued that the criminal justice system was racially biased, they insisted that the consideration of criminal history should nevertheless remain legal. Landlords understood that their property rights are constrained by “reasonable anti-discrimination measures” but saw criminal records as being outside of those protections. This assessment drew on the argument that, during the screening process, landlords sort applicants according to their risk level. In the information age, screening practices increasingly rely on digital dossiers—accretive individual accounts of economic behavior (credit scores, rental history, and income) and public records (criminal and eviction histories). Contemporary screening techniques, including the growing use of criminal records, are emblematic of a larger industry shift toward risk management and more standardized, ostensibly nondiscriminatory procedures (Thacher Reference Thacher2008). For owners, that the commonly used metrics are facially neutral and behavior based lent legitimacy to tenant screening in a colorblind era:

These sentiments were expressed most strongly by industry representatives, who described the screening process as enabling a rational, objective sorting of applicants according to their risk levels. By “seeing” in terms of risk, landlords are able to protect their property and investment without discriminating on the basis of protected categories.

In short, landlords described risk as a knowable and manageable quality that could be identified and avoided through tenant screening. Because they maintained that criminal records were objective indicators—that is, reliable, neutral signals of risk—landlords argued that they fell outside of fair housing protections. More broadly, landlords claimed that tenant screening was central to the work landlords do: it provides a means of discerning potentially risky tenants and, through that, managing their exposure to risk. Landlords’ judgment that the screening process was legitimate stems from the expectation that private property rights protect landlords’ capacity to make business decisions about risk. In their eyes, the law was illegitimate because it removed an important component of landlords’ ability to know about and avoid potential high-risk tenants.

“This Is a Societal Problem, Not Just Our Problem”: Drawing Boundaries between the State and Market

Landlords’ sense that the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance was illegitimate was grounded in a vision of property that clearly demarcates the proper responsibilities of private market actors vis-à-vis the state. In this regard, landlords envisioned two distinct worlds: one for government, which held responsibility for collective problems, and one for private market landlords, which was governed by private property and its protection of owners’ business decisions. Landlords explained this divide in two related ways first, through attributions of fault and responsibility for the social problems associated with criminal records and, second, through conceptions of private landlords’ obligations to tenants and the legitimate protections of property.

In public and closed-door meetings, both industry representatives and individual landlords alike argued that the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance targeted the rental market, forcing landlords to assume responsibility for solving problems that originated in the criminal justice system. This stance formed part of the legal challenge to the law. Court documents filed in Yim et al. v. Seattle (2019, Doc. 28, at 22) argued that “the plaintiff landlords do not question the problems of recidivism and housing stability for the formerly incarcerated. Landlords, however, are not major contributors to these problems.” Instead, landlords argued that the state was at fault and should therefore be held responsible for resolving problems produced by the legal system. One landlord articulated this notion at a public meeting: “Ex-offenders need housing, but it is not the responsibility of private landlords to provide that housing. The government needs to step forward to provide the structured, transitional housing opportunities that are needed.”

By requiring landlords to serve a needy population without compensation, owners claimed, the law overextended their legitimate duties and obligations. Private landlords described the landlord-tenant relationship in bare, quid pro quo terms. In exchange for rent, landlords provide shelter. An industry representative, who used to run a small building, clearly expressed this understanding of owners’ responsibilities:

An involved rental relationship, in which tenants need more than a roof over their heads—which landlords assumed people with criminal records would require—was therefore seen as undesirable.Footnote ⁸

Landlords therefore argued that, by changing their obligations without financial incentives or risk mitigation, the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance would breach the protections afforded by private ownership. When articulating these notions, landlords often used the language of coercion, claiming that the law would “force” them to rent to people with records. This amounted to a fundamental breach of property ownership. In the initial legal complaint filed in King County Superior Court, landlord groups argued that “landowners have a constitutionally protected right to rent their property to whom they choose, at a price they choose, subject to reasonable anti-discrimination measures” (Yim et al. v. City of Seattle 2019, Dkt. No. 1-1, at 2). Outside of the political debate, these views were widespread. A survey of Seattle landlords reported that over 80 percent of respondents believed that the ordinance would place “an unreasonable burden” on rental owners (Crowder et al. Reference Crowder, Carll, Herting and Hess2018, 24).

Moreover, landlords argued that the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance fundamentally misrecognized the driving force of the rental market. As one industry representative put it, rental housing is “an industry driven by economics, not by feelings.” And property decisions, landlords argued, are economic:

The frustration expressed in the above explanation was palpable for landlords throughout the debate. Landlords expected property to protect an owner’s capacity to control their risk exposure and felt that the ordinance would undermine that basic protection. Within this notion of ownership, risk avoidance is an owner’s legitimate prerogative and primary concern. Though profit remains the primary goal of rental ownership, landlords reframed this interest as savvy self-protection. To act in self-interest is to protect oneself through risk management techniques designed to identify and reduce potential sources of risk, over which landlords should retain a certain degree of control.

Rather than the proposed antidiscrimination format, landlord groups suggested that the city support the private market through a risk mitigation fund, a private-public partnership where the city would offset any costs incurred by renting to someone with a criminal background. “If you’re gonna ask us to be a part of the solution to the ills of society, why don’t you back us up a little bit,” one industry representative said. “Let’s have some backstops for owners.” Others asked the city to indemnify landlords, thereby eliminating potential legal liability. Consistent with their culture of ownership, all of the solutions that landlords proposed were grounded in attention to, and preoccupation with, risk. Importantly, in the public-private scenario, landlords would retain the right to choose to rent to someone with a record and have their financial risk underwritten by the city. Landlord policy recommendations, therefore, kept intact the central orientation of private ownership: the ability to identify and act on perceptions of risk.

Unintended Consequences

As it became clear that the city would pursue a fair chance law, industry representatives and individual landlords argued (and a wealth of comment board responses reiterated) that the ordinance would prompt negative, unintended consequences. As one industry representative told me, “for every regulation you pass, the market is gonna react.” In private meetings, industry publications, public hearings, and conversations with reporters, landlord representatives warned that if the law was passed, Seattle landlords would mitigate their risk through other means. One landlord representative explained:

Other landlords similarly claimed that without access to criminal history information they would raise rents, tighten other screening criteria, or simply sell their properties, thereby taking what were once affordable units off the market. Such actions, they argued, were necessary reactions to the city’s refusal to acknowledge the increased risk rental owners faced. Similar sentiments appeared repeatedly in comment boards, where users expressed opposition in more direct statements. Some reflected the rental industry’s threats to legally avoid the law:

While the above statements come from anonymous comment boards, landlords publicly expressed plans to legally circumvent the law consistently toward the end of the political debate. Other online commenters, however, pointed to extralegal means: “Set your minimum financial standards real high. Run their criminal histories or have a friend do it. You can always rent to someone below your financial standards. Bingo. No felons.” The fact that there are legal avenues to circumnavigate the law does not diminish the many illegal ways landlords can act in opposition to the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance. Because criminal records can be found easily online, landlords do not have to order screening reports to view criminal history information. A simple Internet search can accomplish the same result, presenting a challenge for proving this form of discrimination.

Culture of Ownership

The political debate over Seattle’s Fair Chance Housing Ordinance shows that risk discourse and notions of property were central to landlord resistance to regulation. Landlords’ ideas about criminal records and tenant screening, their responses to government policy, and their threats to evade the ordinance all emerge from a culture of ownership grounded in the expectation that property entitles owners to control their exposure to risk. Furthermore, embedded in landlords’ culture of ownership are both frameworks for action and normative assessments about what property is and what entitlements property rights confer. The culture of ownership, therefore, captures the patterns of shared assumptions, orientations, and practices—ways of knowing and acting—that are anchored to property ownership.

Research shows that landlords draw on a mix of professional and on-the-job knowledge of neighborhoods, tenants, law, and government programs when making decisions about their properties (Rosen Reference Rosen2014; Desmond Reference Desmond2016; Greif Reference Greif2018; A. Travis Reference Travis2019). Landlording is increasingly seen as a vocation, and conventions of how to perform and succeed form a strategic, cultural “tool kit” that allows owners to navigate the rental market (Swidler Reference Swidler1986). When Seattle landlords spoke of the “tenant from hell” or potential lawsuits, they mirrored the landlords in Greif’s (Reference Greif2018) study, who circulated tall tales that helped justify professional dos and don’ts. Beyond word of mouth and message boards, these ideas are circulated in institutional settings. A growing industry of screening companies, professional guidebooks, and membership-based trade groups offer guidance on how to effectively screen applicants (avoiding renters with criminal history is common advice) (Thacher Reference Thacher2008). Evolving business strategies, such as the law-skirting techniques described by Seattle landlords, therefore draw on existing practices and frameworks present in owners’ “tool kits.”

The Seattle case suggests that practical landlording knowhow is embedded within a larger set of beliefs about landlords’ duties and responsibilities, which are informed by taken-for-granted expectations about what exactly property protects. Although cultural constructions of property vary across time, context, and property type, sociolegal and property scholars suggest that the political culture of property coheres into observable patterns. Lore of a Blackstonian conception that property protects owners’ absolute dominion over that which they own belies the historical fact that property rights have always been limited by other rules, including nuisance ordinances, zoning law, and building safety codes, which were not understood to infringe on owners’ prerogatives (Novak Reference Novak1996; Valverde Reference Valverde2011; Becher Reference Becher2014). Some scholars conclude that common sense understandings of property are not, at their core, expectations of absolute autonomy but rather expectations of profit (Macpherson Reference Macpherson1978). More precisely, Deborah Becher (Reference Becher2014) argues that a notion of property as “investment,” a subjective assessment of both personal and financial value, best explains how most people think and act toward property. Nevertheless, Seattle landlords expressed ideas of property that included expectations of both profit and decisionmaking—value and control. That conceptions of property may vary does not, however, diminish their salience. Indeed, landlords’ assumptions of property in terms of control over risk exposure were at the heart of their responses to regulation. The Seattle case shows that ideas of property not only guide assessments of government policy, as Becher (Reference Becher2014) has argued, but are central to a larger culture of ownership that informs how owners strategize and ultimately exercise their legal rights.

Legal Rights

Legal rights structure the role, freedoms, and duties of property owners. Property law, for example, produces the social role we thinking of as landlords: law positions rental property owners as decisionmakers over a unit or building (Dagan and Heller Reference Dagan and Heller2005). These powers, of course, are not unlimited. Tenant protections, building codes, zoning law, and other regulations all constrain owners’ (legal) actions. Instead, property law establishes “domains of freedom or decisional authority” that are both authorized and limited by law (Claeys Reference Claeys2011, 208). In other words, black-letter law provides the legal scaffolding for owners’ actions.

Legal realists define property as a collection of disaggregated rights, each a “stick” in the property bundle (Hohfeld Reference Hohfeld1917; Penner Reference Penner1996; Merrill Reference Merrill1998). In this framing, ownership is composed of fragmented rights, which in practice are regulated by different government agencies. In Seattle, for example, the Department of Construction and Inspections and the Office of Civil Rights, among other departments, oversee various aspects of the rental process. Viewing property as a bundle alerts us to the fact that these rights are varied and can be altered without nullifying ownership. Seattle’s Fair Chance Housing Ordinance reshapes the legal rights of ownership by plucking one stick from the property bundle. In response to the ordinance, landlords claimed they would utilize other rights to avoid renting to people with criminal records. The adaptation tactics that Seattle landlords detailed—raising rent, setting minimum criteria for credit scores or income, or simply selling their properties—are all legally enforceable claims protected by property law, none of which are affected by the ordinance. Landlord threats comport with arguments made by other legal scholars, who contend that what defines property is the right to exclude—powers that situate owners in an agenda-setting role (Penner Reference Penner1997; Merrill Reference Merrill1998; Katz Reference Katz2008). Although property is not necessarily an exclusionary institution (Blomley Reference Blomley2004), many of the decisions that landlords make in the course of their work—setting rent and tenant screening criteria, selecting tenants, specifying move-in and lease conditions—are rights by which landlords can selectively exclude renters they perceive as potential risks.

Because the property bundle contains an array of rights, private property protections allow owners to creatively adapt to changes in legal and regulatory environments. Even when the legal environment shifts in ways that, on the surface, restrict their control, owners retain other means of acting, enabling them to circumvent regulation, such as the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance, without breaking the law. Research has shown that landlords utilize these rights, including those detailed by Seattle landlords, in response to regulations of the rental market (Listokin and Hattis Reference Listokin and Hattis2005; Greif Reference Greif2018; Bartram Reference Bartram2019). Importantly, these loopholes are not found in regulation itself but reside within the flexible and malleable powers of property ownership.

Rather than viewing property as a set of fragmented, disaggregated rights, property is better understood as conferring a bundle of rights bound together by a common purpose. For Seattle landlords, this was the preservation of their ability to act on perceptions of risk, ideas central to their culture of ownership. Furthermore, these rights are contextual. The importance and efficacy of various sticks in the property bundle are interconnected and shift alongside changes in regulatory and market environments. Property, then, is a dynamic bundle of rights, which grants owners discretion over how, when, and by whom their property is used.

Regulatory Environment

The local regulatory environment shapes both the specific bundle of rights owners possess and the norms at work in the localized culture of ownership. Certain laws, such as rent control and antidiscrimination protections, can directly affect an owner’s actions by restricting particular rights in the property bundle. Seattle, for instance, does not have rent control protections; therefore, landlords can raise rent however they see fit. Other laws, such as just cause eviction protections or rules regulating limited liability corporations, will indirectly influence how landlords approach their properties and tenants (A. Travis Reference Travis2019). Indeed, Seattle landlords claimed that strict screening practices were necessary given the city’s eviction protections. Landlords were also aware of how local officials enforced rental protections. In Seattle, the city attorney has filed cases against local landlords, and the city’s Office of Civil Rights is known to test for discrimination through audit studies.Footnote ¹² The regulatory environment, therefore, can shape how landlords respond to new laws. This may manifest in a concern over legal liability, a sense of impunity—the history of housing politics is rife with extralegal action, including physical violence (Bell Reference Bell2013)—or in oppositional behavior. For example, one law may be accepted, but a flurry of regulations might promote an antagonistic stance to new legislation. Thus, local regulatory environments not only determine the precise bundle of rights that owners possess but may also shape how owners make strategic decisions over their property.

More broadly, the decentralized nature of the private rental market makes the housing context particularly difficult to regulate. Lacking reporting requirements, formal decision-making structures, or public visibility, much of the rental market operates in the shadow of law, where blatant law breaking can be difficult to police. In Seattle, survey data shows that 59 percent of rental owners are in charge of just one building, and nearly 50 percent manage a single unit (Crowder et al. Reference Crowder, Carll, Herting and Hess2018, 15). Nationally, individual owners, who are not generally required to undergo any training or licensing procedures, control about half of all rental units (Joint Center for Housing Studies 2018; Schwemm Reference Schwemm2007). Despite a growing professional industry, many of these owners run their units independently, without formal bureaucratic rules or oversight from professional management companies. Unlike employers, landlords do not have to report the racial and ethnic makeup of their renters to government agencies. Therefore, even increased enforcement may not offset the low likelihood of detection in the decentralized housing market.

Market Dynamics

Finally, owners’ discretion also depends on market dynamics, which influence the extent and conditions of owners’ choices. Independent of legal change, the powers of ownership, particularly the right to exclude, expand and contract alongside market dynamics. Seattle landlords’ claims to restrict qualifications and raise rent might be idle threats in other contexts, but Seattle’s housing market, like those in many growing urban centers, is crowded. Vacancy rates are low (Ellen and Karfunkel Reference Ellen and Karfunkel2016), and rents have nearly tripled in the past two decades.Footnote ¹³ When markets are saturated, landlords with open units receive greater numbers of rental applications. Presented with larger pools of potential tenants, landlords can be highly selective, putting the most marginalized renters at a severe disadvantage. Seattle landlords were well aware of these dynamics. A landlord representative told me: “As an owner of rental property in the city of Seattle, I can afford to have higher criteria, cuz there is such huge demand for people who want to move here and a lot of them are making good money. I can afford to be more discerning.” Under these market conditions, landlords have significant discretion over price and screening criteria, which they are able to adjust in pursuit of profit or to offset perceived risk. Market context, therefore, shapes the relative importance of various sticks in the property rights bundle.

In short, the property-in-action framework helps make sense of the conditions that enable Seattle landlords to legally circumvent an antidiscrimination regulation intended to limit certain aspects of their decisionmaking. Moreover, the framework attends to the fact that property is both heavy and light (McCann Reference McCann2014). Like rights, ideas of property are fungible yet nevertheless powerful and inspire claims and political action by both powerful and oppressed groups alike (Connolly Reference Connolly2014; Krippner Reference Krippner2017). At the same time, property law confers material power in the form of legally enforceable claims backed by the state. And, while the legal institution of property is not inherently individual or exclusionary, the rights of private rental ownership, as they stand now, certainly are (Blomley Reference Blomley2004; Valverde Reference Valverde2011). Together with other contextual factors, private property rights enable the possibility of (exclusionary) legal action in ways that undermine state intervention, such as antidiscrimination law. By focusing on property, the field in which the targets of many government regulations operate, I suggest we can better understand how legal regulation plays out on the ground.

It is important to note that this approach to property was developed from a single case study, in which industry representatives and vocal, independent landlords provided the bulk of data. Nevertheless, while the framework inevitably bears the imprint of its formation, I suggest that this conceptualization of property may provide a useful guide for future research in a number of fields, including studies of antidiscrimination law, urban governance, and rental housing, as well as for other property contexts, such as intellectual property law. But for now, I leave further applications and honing of this approach to other researchers.