New laws meant to protect renters from bad landlords can actually end up making housing even worse for the people they're trying to help.
March 25, 2026
Original Paper
The Failure of Law Reform: Housing Codes, Bans on Retaliatory Eviction, and the Implied Warranty of Habitability
SSRN · 6461621
The Takeaway
This paper argues that 1960s-era 'pro-tenant' wins—like housing codes and bans on retaliatory eviction—failed because they ignored market power. By trying to fix symptoms without changing the commodified nature of housing, these laws often incentivized landlords to abandon properties or raise costs, ultimately harming low-income renters.
From the abstract
<span>This article critiques three important reforms in landlord-tenant law, namely, housing codes, bans on retaliatory eviction, and the implied warranty of habitability. Although widely praised in the 1960s and 1970s, these reforms have done little to improve the deplorable rental housing for poor and working-class households, many of which include people of color. Indeed, some argue that these reforms have actually contributed to the worsening situation of low-income renters. While largely we