Private Government at Home: Landlord Power and Rental Residential Domination in the United States (Karp, 2024)

Summary

"Private Government at Home: Landlord Power and Rental Residential Domination in the United States," by Shai Karp (Northwestern University), appeared in Politics & Society (2024). It brings a political-theory register the wiki has not previously applied directly to landlord-tenant relations: rather than treating housing insecurity as a market-failure or affordability problem, it argues rental housing is a site of domination — unaccountable power that structurally limits tenant autonomy — drawing on philosopher Elizabeth Anderson's concept of private government, extended through radical republican and feminist theory.

Structural and Interpersonal Domination

Per the paper's own abstract: "rental housing is a sphere where people are subject to substantial unaccountable power in ways that drastically limit their autonomy." The paper develops this at two levels. Structural power stems from the US state's near-total delegation of housing provision to private markets, giving landlords outsized cultural and political influence — including the ability to credibly threaten that tenant protections will shrink housing supply. Interpersonal power extends beyond the familiar threat of eviction into more paternalistic territory: landlords' access to tenants' intimate domestic spaces and personal data enables surveillance and harassment, while chronically unenforced maintenance obligations manufacture tenant dependence on delinquent owners who face little consequence for neglect.

Countervailing Power, Not Just Rent Control

The paper's proposed remedy is distinctive: rather than centering rent control, Karp argues for "countervailing power" built through legally protected tenant organizing — "an institutional framework legitimizing tenant unions, protecting organizing activity, and ensuring a right to bargain and strike," explicitly modeled on the National Labor Relations Act, adapted from labor to housing. The specific political-theory move is reframing the core harm as the power relation itself — arbitrary, unaccountable landlord authority — rather than any particular unfair price, which is why the remedy targets the power asymmetry directly (via organizing rights) rather than capping its output (via price controls).

Relation to the Georgist Case

This is a distinct register from the wiki's existing landlord/tenant material: landlords cannot pass LVT to tenants addresses tax incidence economics, and rental financialization and financialization of land address ownership concentration and REIT structures — none engage the political-theory question of domination directly. It is also a useful contrast to Anderson, Zickefoose, Andrie & Newton's class-monopoly-rent paper, which examines landlord political rhetoric against rent control; Karp's paper instead builds the underlying normative case for why landlord power over tenants is itself the problem, independent of any specific policy fight.

Nuances and Limits

• A political-theory contribution, not an empirical study. The paper's argument is normative and conceptual; it does not present new quantitative data on landlord practices.
• US-focused, reflecting the specific institutional and legal context (the near-total private delegation of housing provision) the argument is built on.
• Abstract-level for the peer-reviewed article itself (A-claim for the verbatim abstract; B-claim for supporting mechanism detail). The publisher page returned only template content; the verbatim published abstract was obtained via the Crossref API (matching an independently cached Semantic Scholar copy word-for-word), and additional structural/ interpersonal mechanism detail and the tenant-union policy proposal were drawn from the author's own companion public writing on the same argument (a LPE Project blog post), not the peer-reviewed article's own body text, which remains paywalled with no open-access copy found.

Bears On

• Objection: Landlords Cannot Pass LVT to Tenants — a different register (tax-incidence economics) on the same landlord-tenant relationship this paper analyzes as domination.
• Research: August: Rental Financialization — the ownership-concentration side of landlord power, complementing this paper's political-theory account.
• Research: Anderson, Zickefoose, Andrie & Newton: Landlord Opposition to Rent Control — landlord political rhetoric in a specific policy fight, contrasted with this paper's underlying normative domination argument.

See Also

• Objection: Landlords Cannot Pass LVT to Tenants
• Financialization of Land
• August: Rental Financialization
• Zimmerman & Anderson: Nefarious Algorithms — RealPage and Class Monopoly Rent

Sources

1. Shai Karp (2024), "Private Government at Home: Landlord Power and Rental Residential Domination in the United States," Politics & Society, DOI 10.1177/00323292241285289. journals.sagepub.com — publisher page returned only template content to this session 2026-08-31; verbatim abstract obtained via the Crossref API (cross-checked against an independently cached Semantic Scholar copy, word-for-word match) — used for the private-government/domination framing and the structural/interpersonal distinction (A-claim for the quoted abstract text). Additional mechanism detail (specific forms of interpersonal domination, the tenant-union/NLRA-modeled policy proposal) drawn from Karp's own companion public essay, "Landlords as Petty Tyrants," LPE Project blog — used for concrete illustrative detail not present in the abstract alone (B-claim; author's own secondary elaboration, not the peer-reviewed article's body text, which was not independently read).