Pato opened his backpack and began drinking from a tall can in a brown paper bag. I smelled beer. He spoke longingly about Guatemala and the home he was building there. I eventually learned that, however lucky Pato felt about his housing situation in Corona, his housemates saw things differently. Not long after the dump run, his phone number went out of service, and María told me that she and the other tenants had kicked Pato out because he was drinking too much. When I finally tracked him down, six months later, he told me only that he’d had “personal problems” and was now living in another shared house in Elmhurst. I tried on several occasions to meet him again, but he always cancelled. He sometimes called me randomly; twice, he rang in the middle of the night. One morning at ten, I answered, and Pato’s speech was so slurred that I could hardly understand him.

The owners of properties where new migrants live are often immigrants themselves. Having arrived in New York a few decades earlier, perhaps from China, Ecuador, or the Dominican Republic, they settled in Queens and eventually achieved homeownership. Some, such as the owners of the East Elmhurst house, live in the basement, maximizing their own margins by renting the upper floors and minimizing liability by likewise living in the shadows. Other property owners rent out multiple units and reside elsewhere. In New York State, such people are known as “small landlords,” which means that they own no more than ten units. Many are middle class and view their rentals as necessary to offset high living costs.

From public records, I learned that the landlord of one crowded Corona migrant house—some of whose renters I’ve known for a while—owned at least four other properties across Queens and the Bronx. I couldn’t reach him directly, but one of his tenants told me that he was kind. He went by Jack, but she referred to him as El Chino. “El Chino treats us well,” she told me. “When he comes to the house, he asks us what’s bad, what’s not bad, and fixes things. At Christmas, he gives a toy to each of the kids.” Jack spoke only Chinese and English, she said, so her eldest daughter, who is eleven, translated his instructions—“how to put the bottles where the bottles go, the plastic where the plastic goes, the cardboard where it’s cardboard, the food where it’s food.” The tenant added that her daughter has a protocol for translating. “Mami, first I’ll listen, and then I’ll talk,” the girl likes to say.

Small landlords often know about overcrowding or other irregularities in their units, but they tend to ignore such matters as long as the rent is paid on time. Sometimes they just want to avoid conflict. Roy Ho, the president of the Property Owners Association of Greater New York, an organization that he founded, in 2020, to support Chinese small landlords, told me, “Landlords are aware that this problem exists. They trade stories. Their tenants might come in and say, ‘I’m renting for me, my wife, and my kid.’ Then, two months later, they go to fix the water or the plumbing and realize it’s so many more people.” Attempting to resolve the issue in court is a long, costly process that can end up being more of a financial risk than accommodating such renters. “They are reluctant to address the problem, even if they want to,” Ho said.

Hongyao Chen, a forty-one-year-old hospital worker based in Bayside, Queens, manages a two-family rental property in Maspeth for his elderly parents. He told me, “We were tenants ourselves in the beginning.” After the family of four moved to New York City from Fujian, China, in 2001, they shared a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown for nearly seven years. “We were never late paying rent,” he said. “My parents worked super hard, and they encouraged us to finish school. Luckily, my sister and I were able to go to college.” In 2008, during the housing bubble, Chen’s parents bought the home in Maspeth for nine hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars. To afford the mortgage, they rented out the second unit to the employees of a company based in Poland. Nine years later, they moved into a five-bedroom home in Bayside, along with Hongyao, his wife, and his children, and started renting out the entire Maspeth property to supplement their monthly Social Security income of about eight hundred dollars.

Chen told me that he and other small landlords he knew used to be quite content to accept tenants on the margins of the economy. “Some people maybe had a cash job, or didn’t have a stable job, but we had no problem renting to them,” he said. Chen also acknowledged that it was a common practice to rent out basement apartments at lower rates, mainly to undocumented tenants. Small landlords often consider undocumented renters to be among the most reliable tenants—because they don’t want to attract any legal trouble. “I know landlords who prefer undocumented tenants, for this reason,” Ho said. “The renters might not have a pay stub, but you know they will pay on time.”

For Chen’s family, everything changed during the pandemic. In New York State, eviction moratoriums lasted until early 2022, and in 2024 the state passed the Good Cause Eviction Law, which solidified eviction protections for renters. At the time, Chen’s father, who speaks no English, was still in charge of managing the Maspeth property. “He got scammed by a real-estate agent,” Hongyao Chen said. The agent, who he says was unlicensed, presented false proof-of-income documents, saying that a man would occupy a three-bedroom unit with his wife and two children. Nine people ended up living there, and they all stopped paying rent after the first month. “They slept in the living room—everywhere,” Chen said. The utility bills were extremely high. Chen felt that he had no recourse but to contact the police. The tenants eventually left. “My parents are talking about to transfer the ownership to me,” Chen texted me recently. “But I don’t want it. I hate being a landlord. That is more than a full time job and too much problem to be a landlord in nyc now. One day I want to sell it. Life is too short, I want a peaceful life.” (Chen’s sister, who is now married, at one point owned two rental properties of her own, on Staten Island. She has since sold them, he said.)

Such stories led Ho, a small landlord himself, to found his group as a way of organizing Chinese landlords in the city. Asian households have the highest rate of homeownership in New York City, partly because in immigrant communities there can be a lack of knowledge about securities such as stocks and bonds; a dearth of legal status can sometimes make utilizing such options difficult. “They may have a nail salon, a restaurant, retail, even a cash business—and a 401(k) is not accessible to them,” Ho told me. “Real estate is one of the only assets that they understand.”

Several activist groups in the Asian American community have since embraced the landlords’ cause, as part of organizing campaigns that often include unrelated issues popular with conservatives, such as opposition to affirmative action in college admissions. Ho told me, “The impression that you get is that Chinese landlords have become more vocal than they used to be, and they have become more vocal than other ethnic landlords.” He said that in New York the issue was a major driver of the community’s rightward shift in recent elections.