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A zine produced by members of ARCH 5602, Kean University School of Public Architecture

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Vol. 1

Letter from the Editor - 
Davis Richardson
Reclaiming 432 Park Ave - Kamila Diaz Calderon
Ultrathin Worlds - 
Anyi Liranzo-Payamps
Finance Over Function - 
Jared Britton
The Housing Shepherd - 
Kacper Kowal
Livestream Dystopia - 
Jake Haenggi
VR Architecture - 
Ryan Barbour
Metaverse Architecture - 
Danny Gavino
From Fi-Fi to De-Fi - 
Scott Gleason
Realistic or Reality? - 
Stephan Argent
Dubaifying Saudi Arabia- 
Rasha Labibidi
NEOM’s Sustainability Mirage - Andrew Lazarte
Living in the Model - 
Bryan Tome
Planting the Illusion - 
Lauren Taravella
Critical Regionalism - 
Nolan Aucone

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CGZ-VOLNO1-ARCH5602-FA2025-E4

The Housing Shepherd: 
Against Corporate Residential Ownership
Kacper Kowal



Basic Biology

Every ecosystem relies on balance within food chains, habitats, and resource cycles, functioning properly only when no single organism is allowed to dominate beyond what the environment can sustain. Biology teaches that all living organisms require food, water, and shelter to survive. Humans are no exception. Yet unlike other species, whose access to these necessities is shaped by natural competition, we have built systems that artificially restrict our access to shelter. Housing—the most essential buffer between us and the elements—has increasingly been treated not as a human right or basic need, but as a luxury commodity.
   
This essay argues that the most destructive imbalance in the contemporary housing ecosystem comes from allowing corporations, LLCs, and other non-human entities to own and rent residential property. These entities have no material need for homes; they feed on them. Their reason for existing is profit, not community well-being. Allowing them to dominate the residential landscape is akin to allowing wolves to manage a sheep pasture. Only one gruesome and inevitable outcome follows.
   
Unfortunately, this imbalance has been reinforced by legal frameworks that ultimately removed the distinction between individuals and corporations. In the 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court held that “the Government may not suppress political speech based on the speaker’s corporate identity,”1  effectively extending First Amendment protections to corporations. Although this case concerned campaign finance, its broader implication is the legal elevation of corporations to the status of persons. Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent rejected this logic, noting that corporations possess “no voting ability, no individual morality or loyalty concerns, and eternal life.”2 This essay aligns with that dissent and proceeds on the hypothetical premise that corporations should not be treated as individuals.
   
Returning residential property ownership to individual people would restore accountability, improve tenant welfare, and reestablish housing as a functional ecosystem rather than a marketplace of extraction. This discussion begins at the micro-scale, examining the landlord-tenant relationship, then expands outward to the meso-scale of the building environment, and finally to the macro-scale of municipal regulation and policy reforms.

Micro-scale: The Individual

A balanced ecosystem begins with healthy relationships between individual organisms. If a squid were to settle in a bird’s nest, it would be obvious to any observer that something had gone terribly wrong. Yet something just as unnatural occurs when corporations inhabit the housing market. These entities do not sleep, eat, or use shelter. They cannot feel cold in winter or heat in summer. Yet they hold the power to decide who may rest their head indoors. They are squids occupying nests meant for people.
   
To correct this imbalance, residential property should only be owned and rented by individual humans, not corporations or LLCs. When an actual person serves as landlord, accountability becomes immediate and direct. A tenant knows exactly who is responsible for their living conditions. Liability attaches to a name, a face, and a reputation—not a faceless conglomerate hidden behind layers of legal insulation.
   
Historically, accountability was enforced even more directly. During colonial times, officials who violated public trust risked literal public punishment: “as awful as a punishment it was to be tarred and feathered, crowds and individuals would often use it as a threat [which] proved to be a powerful tactic of intimidation.”3 While such practices would be inhumane today, the underlying principle remains relevant: people behave differently when their actions carry personal consequences.


British customs agent John Malcolm being tarred, feathered, and forced to drink tea in Massachusetts on January 24, 1774, 39 days after the Boston Tea Party.4

The failures of large, impersonal housing authorities further illustrate the point of requiring direct responsibility. A 2023 audit of the New York City Housing Authority found that “forty-six percent of the value of all purchase orders [...] were found to be lacking evidence of work performed” and NYCHA had “no means to formally collect resident feedback.”5 Although NYCHA is a public entity with publicly accessible records, responsibility is so diffused that no single person is held accountable for outcomes. Housing authorities are de facto public management corporations. Building managers are often inaccessible, contractors are insufficiently monitored, and residents’ complaints rarely reach someone with the authority or incentive to act. Transparency without accountability proves insufficient; knowing that harm exists does little good if no one can be held responsible for fixing it.
   
Additionally, to further stabilize housing and reduce predatory behavior, landlordship must be constrained so that it remains a supplemental operation. Landlords should be required to maintain a primary source of income separate from rental property, and the rental income itself should be capped. Specifically, annual rental income should not exceed either the landlord’s personal earned income or 100 percent of the Area Median Income, whichever is less. This threshold prevents housing from becoming a primary extraction mechanism while still allowing individuals to benefit modestly from property ownership and helps maintain steadier rent prices across economic cycles. A landlord who depends on rent is more likely to raise prices, cut corners, defer maintenance, or treat tenants as liabilities rather than people. Just as no organism can consume more energy than the ecosystem can regenerate, no landlord should extract more income from shelter than the surrounding community can reasonably sustain.
   
Finally, businesses should not be allowed to rent residential units. A corporation renting an apartment is like a bear reserving a cave it never intends to sleep in. Hotels and commercial spaces already exist for temporary occupancy; therefore, residential units should remain for residents — people who physically inhabit the space. Preventing businesses from signing residential leases would drastically reduce the growing phenomenon of units left empty under corporate tenancy or misuse as unofficial office extensions.

Meso-scale: The Building

Expanding outward from individuals to the shared environment, the building itself becomes the next layer of the housing ecosystem. Buildings, like forests, thrive when all inhabitants participate in their upkeep — and decline when communication breaks down.
   
If individuals alone bear the responsibilities of landlordship, we must also design protections that prevent them from being overwhelmed by risk. One such safeguard is limiting lease lengths to a maximum of one year. Shorter leases — monthly, quarterly, or biannual—give landlords the flexibility to remove destructive or disruptive tenants without entanglement in prolonged eviction processes. Tenants also benefit because shorter leases allow them to leave harmful environments and negotiate renewals based on demonstrated responsibility.
   
Yet landlords naturally hold more power in this relationship. To level the playing field, the building must operate with transparency similar to local governance. Mandatory biannual, in-person tenant meetings would function much like municipal town halls. These gatherings allow tenants to voice concerns collectively, ensure the landlord must confront issues face-to-face, and keep the building’s internal ecosystem responsive rather than neglectful.
   
Transparency deepens further when landlords are required to maintain public financial records accessible to all tenants. This includes spending on taxes, utilities, maintenance, emergency funds, and profit margins. Just as a hive thrives when every bee understands its role in sustaining the colony, open financial records help tenants build trust and understanding in how their contributions support the building.
   
Accountability is strengthened further through a mandatory rating and review system—a resident feedback mechanism akin to Yelp. The New York City Comptroller’s office has already proposed a similar system, noting “Comptroller Lander proposes a new resident feedback tool on repairs in their units, on the model of Yelp reviews, that would generate vendor scorecards to hold contractors accountable.”6 This model can be adapted to housing where tenants rate landlords upon move-in and move-out, with optional review updates following tenant meetings or lease renewals. These reviews would be public, visible to prospective tenants, and provide a record of how a building is managed over time.
   
Though landlords may challenge unfair reviews, they cannot publicly blacklist tenants, which preserves fairness while also preventing abuse. Additionally, tenants may review each other within a closed system, fostering cooperative norms and discouraging disruptive behavior. A building with transparent communication and mutual accountability becomes less like a battlefield and more like a village—one where residents and landlords share stewardship.
   
Ownership structures in multi-unit buildings might also require rebalancing, which might resemble that of existing condo regimes in which individual owners hold title to their units while sharing responsibility for common elements. However, unlike conventional condo models, the framework proposed here imposes strict limits on absentee ownership, rental income, and speculative use, reframing shared ownership as collective stewardship rather than investment. So, if one wishes to rent a unit that they purchased within a larger building, they must also abide by the same rules as the primary owner, including maintaining their primary residence within the same ZIP code as the proposed rental unit. Individuals can continue to purchase and hold as many units for their own personal use as they’d like, but the defining line gets drawn when they decide they want to rent their unused space.

Macro-scale: The Town

Zooming out to the municipal scale, the ecosystem becomes a network of interconnected habitats—buildings forming neighborhoods, neighborhoods forming towns. Policies must therefore protect these environments from exploitation by outsiders who have no stake in their well-being.
   
To maintain proximity and accountability, landlords should be required to be U.S. citizens and maintain their primary residence within the same ZIP code as the properties they rent. This parallels Singapore’s residential property restrictions, where buyers must “be a permanent resident of Singapore for at least five years; and […] make exceptional economic contribution to Singapore” before purchasing certain residential properties.7 These regulations prevent absentee landlords — those who live in states or countries far away — from extracting profit without experiencing the consequences of their decision-making.
   
A New York City landlord living down the street from their rental unit understands local living conditions in a way an investor in Florida cannot. They feel the same weather, commute on the same roads, and share the same municipal services. Proximity breeds empathy; distance breeds detachment.
   
Developers may build, but they must sell residential units to individuals rather than retain them for rental portfolios. Just as a carpenter can craft a barn but cannot claim ownership of every stall, developers should focus on construction—not landlordship. Although this may pressure developers to sell quickly and have no incentive to invest in the longer term with higher quality systems/designs/etc., they ultimately will have to react to buyer pressure. Developers will have to respond to use-based demand rather than capital-based demand because individuals prioritize durability, comfort, and energy efficiency and are sensitive to lifecycle costs, not just purchase price. So, developers would be dissuaded from cutting corners and instead incentivized to design buildings that remain desirable over time.

Just as municipal regulations must also oversee new construction, each new owner who wishes to rent their property must obtain a permit, renewed annually, functioning like a second certificate of occupancy. This ensures continual compliance with housing standards and further prevents blanket corporate control of new developments.
   
A persistent problem in cities like New York is the proliferation of vacant residential units held under lease or ownership but left unused. Along Billionaires’ Row, for example, “some 44 percent of the building’s collective condos remain vacant.”8 These hollow towers act like abandoned hives — perfectly functional structures devoid of life — while thousands remain unhoused. Many of these Billionaires’ Row units are held through LLCs and shell companies which makes it easier to treat the residential space as a financial asset rather than a lived home. In one documented case at 220 Central Park South, a buyer paid $157.5 million for units on the 60th and 61st floors, but “the purchase was made through a limited-liability company” and the sellers’ “identities were also shielded by limited-liability companies.”9 If only individuals were allowed to purchase such units in their own name, many would be unable—or unwilling—to invest vast sums in homes they do not intend to use. Demand for purely speculative housing would decline, subsequently bringing prices closer to levels tied to actual habitation.
   
However, municipalities should also adopt policies that might prevent another, more uncommon type of artificial scarcity where the tenant actively pays rent for a unit but does not occupy it. Residential units under active leases would be required to show visible occupancy for at least 75% of the lease term. If an actively leased unit remains unoccupied for longer than this period, the landlord must promptly report this to the city, and in doing so, the lease agreement will be terminated, but the tenant will still be required to pay the remainder of their lease agreement amount to the landlord and an additional fine equal to 50% of the lease value to the city. However, if the landlord fails to report this and is caught violating this regulation, they must forfeit all rent collected from said unit thus far and pay out of their own pocket the remainder of the agreed-upon income from this unit, as well as an additional fine equal to 50% of the lease value to the city. The tenant would then also be required to pay a fine equal to 50% of the lease value to the city as well. For instance, if a leased unit is expected to earn the landlord $12,000 annually, it must be inhabited for at least nine months. Failure to meet this requirement results in $12,000 forfeited by the landlord to the city, plus a $6,000 fine, and the tenant also pays $6,000 to the city. If the landlord reports this violation to the city immediately when it occurs, only the tenant will be liable for paying a $6,000 fine to the city. If violations recur, landlords face additional tax obligations, potential liens, and eventual revocation of rental permits. Tenants who repeatedly misuse leases enter a municipal delinquency registry, subject to escalating penalties and, in extreme cases, criminal charges. Though this type of artificial scarcity is unlikely to occur, this regulation serves as an additional safety measure meant to help prevent any possible imbalance in the ecosystem.
   
Municipal governments and compliant landlords may also work together to recover debts by liquidating abandoned belongings or collecting funds from future lease agreements. As the IRS warns, it “can garnish wages, take money in your bank or other financial account, seize and sell your vehicle(s), real estate, and other personal property.”10 This multi-layered system creates a living housing ecosystem where empty units are not left to rot like unused burrows while others freeze in the open.

The Ecosystem

A healthy ecosystem wastes nothing. Empty residential units benefit no one and harm the entire community by inflating scarcity, raising prices, and deepening inequality. In cities like New York, thousands of people sleep on streets while thousands of furnished apartments sit untouched for all but a few weeks each year. This contradiction is the natural outcome of treating shelter as a speculative asset rather than a human necessity.
   
Ultimately, this essay argues not merely for solving the artificial housing crisis but for removing corporations from the residential landscape entirely. Homes should be nests, dens, burrows—places of refuge, not investment vehicles. Allowing individuals to shepherd the housing environment restores transparency, accountability, and human connection.
   
If we imagine the housing system as a sprawling pasture, corporations have long roamed it as wolves disguised in sheep’s clothing—silent, hungry, and unaccountable. Residents become anxious sheep, each hoping not to be the next one devoured. But ecosystems can be restored. Drive out the wolves, strengthen the fences, empower the shepherds, and the flock will thrive. Shelter was never meant to be prey.


  1. Anthony M. Kennedy et al., Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), Supreme Court of the United States, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/ 
  2. Ibid.
  3. American Battlefield Trust. “Tarring and Feathering.” Battlefields.org. Accessed December 9, 2025. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/tarring-and-feathering
  4. Philip Dawe, The Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man, or Tarring & Feathering, 1774. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Public domain. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/388949
  5. Office of the New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. “NYC Comptroller Lander Finds Rampant Failures in Repair Vendor Oversight at NYCHA, Calls for New Vendor Scorecard Based on Real-Time Resident Feedback.” New York City Comptroller. Published March 16, 2023. 
  6. Ibid.
  7. Singapore Land Authority. “Foreign Ownership of Property.” SLA.gov.sg. Accessed December 9, 2025. https://www.sla.gov.sg/regulatory/foreign-ownership-of-property
  8. Patrick Reilly. “Nearly Half of Luxury Units Empty in Billionaires’ Row Buildings.” New York Post, August 5, 2021. https://nypost.com/2021/08/05/nearly-half-of-luxury-units-empty-in-billionaires-row-buildings/
  9. Katherine Clarke and E. B. Solomont, “Mystery Buyer Pays $157.5 Million for Two Condos on New York’s Billionaires’ Row,” Mansion Global (Dow Jones), June 7, 2021, https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/mystery-buyer-pays-157-5-million-for-two-condos-on-new-york-s-billionaires-row-149033
  10. Internal Revenue Service. “Levy.” IRS.gov. Updated 2024.