I know, I know, “water is wet.” But read the article, where sociologists quantify how much people in poor neighbourhoods are exploited by slumlords.
I think it’s also important to point out that the original study also talks about race. I recommend it to everyone who is interested and it’s not even locked behind a paywall!
“The institutionalization of the black ghetto at the beginning of the 20th century increased the exploitative possibilities of landed capital. As the black population in northern cities grew, real estate developers saw an opportunity to make handsome profits by buying up properties on the edges of the ghetto and slicing them into flats. Legal segregation meant that ghetto landlords had a captive tenant base and “had nothing to gain by improving [their] old houses” (Spear 1967, p. 148). The rise of the dual housing market (one white, one black) allowed landlords to charge blacks higher rents for worse housing. In postwar Chicago, blacks paid 15%–50% more in rent than whites living in similar accommodations (Hirsch 1983, p. 29). As late as 1960, the median monthly rent in Detroit was higher for blacks than for whites (Sugrue [1996] 2005, p. 54). ”