Price to Rent: Racialized Accumulation and Institutional Single-Family Rentals

Recent scholarship on capital accumulation in housing markets has brought renewed attention to the importance of racial abstraction in value formation. Using parcel and sales data from fourteen North Carolina counties over nine years that we analyze with a quasi-experimental propensity score matching method, we show that racialized risk and dispossession are central features of a post-Great Recession restructuring project based on accumulation in certain housing and land markets. Specifically, we find that institutional investors of single-family rentals were more likely to purchase properties in census tracts with higher Black concentration, higher percentages of owner-occupants, and low price-rent ratios. Within this investor class, we also find that private equity firms tend to disproportionately target tracts with higher rates of Black concentration and even lower price-rent ratios. Based on our findings, we argue that racial abstraction plays a formative role in restructuring and spatial fixing processes through a framework of racialized risk.