Landlord Opposition to Rent Control and the Politics of Class Monopoly Rent (Anderson, Zickefoose, Andrie & Newton, 2024)

Summary

"Landlord opposition to rent control and the politics of class monopoly rent," by Matthew B. Anderson, Graham Zickefoose, Tate Andrie, and Tony Newton, appeared in Human Geography 18(1): 46–58 (2024). It is the third entry the wiki now covers in Anderson's "class monopoly rent" series — after Kyoto's cultural monopoly rent and Copenhagen's state monopoly rent — but with a distinct empirical focus: US landlord political mobilization rather than an urban-development case study.

The Argument

The paper analyzes landlord associations' opposition to Oregon's 2019 statewide rent control legislation (SB 608), arguing that their opposition strategy "represents deployment of 'class monopoly rent' concepts as political leverage." Per the abstract, landlord associations collectively advanced arguments that "effectively constitutes the discursive deployment of class monopoly power as a political strategy to lobby against tenant rights proponents." This inverts the concept's usual direction: class monopoly rent — the idea that landlords, as a class controlling a fixed housing stock, can extract rent above what individual competitive market dynamics alone would predict — is typically deployed by critics against landlords. Here, landlord associations turn the same conceptual toolkit around, arguing (in economic-sounding terms) that rent control itself distorts markets and harms housing supply, effectively using rent theory's own vocabulary as a rhetorical shield.

Relation to the Georgist Case

This is a genuinely distinct contribution from the wiki's other two Anderson pages: where Kyoto examines selective commodification of heritage character and Copenhagen examines a state development corporation's own rent-extraction incentives, this paper is about the political rhetoric of landlord opposition to a specific, real US policy fight — directly relevant to the wiki's rent-seeking and land monopoly coverage of how organized capital defends extractive positions politically, not just economically.

Nuances and Limits

• A single US state case study (Oregon, 2019). Findings about landlord-association rhetoric in this specific legislative fight may not generalize to rent-control debates elsewhere.
• Draws on Marxian rent theory and housing-market sociology, a related but distinct tradition from the wiki's core Georgist economic-rent framing — the paper's "class monopoly rent" concept, like the wiki's other Anderson-series pages, uses "rent" in this broader critical-geography sense.
• Abstract-level source (B-claim). The publisher page yielded only site-template content; this page is built from the verbatim abstract obtained via the Crossref API. The scanner's original metadata for this item omitted the paper's fourth co-author (Tony Newton) and misstated the publication year as 2025; corrected here to the confirmed 2024 publication.

Bears On

• Concept: Rent-Seeking — a case where an extractive class deploys rent-theory vocabulary itself as a political weapon, rather than simply lobbying with conventional economic arguments.
• Concept: Land Monopoly — the underlying "class monopoly rent" concept both this paper and the wiki's Kyoto/Copenhagen pages draw on.
• Research: Anderson: Kyoto Cultural Monopoly Rent · Anderson & Dascher: Copenhagen Land Rent — the other two entries in the same "class monopoly rent" series now covered on the wiki.

See Also

• Anderson: The Commodification Gap and Cultural Monopoly Rent — Insights from Kyoto
• Anderson & Dascher: The Land Rent Dynamics of Public Land Development in Copenhagen
• Rent-Seeking
• Land Monopoly

Sources

1. Matthew B. Anderson, Graham Zickefoose, Tate Andrie & Tony Newton (2024), "Landlord opposition to rent control and the politics of class monopoly rent," Human Geography 18(1): 46–58, DOI 10.1177/19427786241234546. journals.sagepub.com — publisher page returned only template content to this session 2026-08-30; verbatim abstract obtained via the Crossref API — used for the Oregon SB 608 case, the class-monopoly-rent-as-political-leverage argument, and the corrected author list and publication year (B-claim; abstract-level, full text not read).