Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. (context pejorative English) A person who makes money by renting housing that is kept in poor condition.
Wikipedia
A slumlord (or slum landlord) is a derogatory term for a landlord, generally an absentee landlord with more than one property, who attempts to maximize profit by minimizing spending on property maintenance, often in deteriorating neighborhoods. Severe housing shortages allow slumlords to charge higher rents, and when they can get away with it, to break rental laws. Rent-control laws and ordinances, especially when imposed after a landlord has contracted to purchase a building for a given price and on a given payment schedule, may force a landlord to neglect maintenance in order to keep operating costs from exceeding expenditures so that the landlord will not go bankrupt and lose the property altogether (and in the process deprive tenants of even those substandard accommodations that they had before; see Hobson's choice).
As many of these neighborhoods are often populated by poor minorities, the term " ghetto landlord" has also been used. A "retail slumlord" is one who keeps a shopping mall in a bad shape until the government buys or confiscates it.
The phrase slumlord first appeared in 1953, coined by Newsday Reporter Edward G. Smith, though the term slum landlord dates to 1893.
Usage examples of "slumlord".
An eleven-year-old Times piece described a Vance Coury, sixty-one, of Westwood, as having been brought up by the city attorney on slumlord charges.
Garvey Cossack, Sr, had harbored similar tastes and I was willing to bet Slumlord Coury played in that league, too.
Just as she imagined Chan kept his home and family in some upscale suburb in New Jersey while he played slumlord of the Lower East Side.
He was in the business of rezoning property for multifamily usenot a slumlord per se, but one who paves the way for them.
To make matters worse, he never got enough rest because he owned property in Logan Heights and was up half the night doing slumlord collecting.
I knew that most of the dwellings in Lowtown were owned by white slumlords across the tracks.
Slumlord Gretch also starred in the only Sid Weinberg vehicle ever to lose money, a tear jerker called "Glenda" about a movie producer who falls in love with a starlet who disappears off the face of the earth.
While there was still a King at Ribroast, the boggies remained nominally his subjects, and to the last battle at Ribroast with the Slumlord of Borax, they sent some snipers, though who they sided with is unclear.
Most of the wages went to greedy slumlords, and sometimes the only food came from mother and children searching the streets or picking through garbage for festering fruit and vegetables.
The equivalent of a dollar to a dollar-fifty a week in rent was sometimes a fifth of a worker's salary, and when one of these Ebenezer Scrooge slumlords decided to raise the rent, sometimes a large family found itself homeless with nothing but a handbarrow to tote away all its worldly goods.
The equivalent of a dollar to a dollar-fifty a week in rent was sometimes a fifth of a worker's salary, and when one of these Ebenezer Scrooge slumlords decided to raise the rent, sometimes a large family found itself homeless with nothing but a handbarrow to tote away all its worldly goods.
In fact, it is exactly as it always has been: they can't get over what a success and a genius I am, my name in the paper, an associate now of the glamorous new Mayor, on the side of Truth and Justice, enemy of slumlords and bigots and rats ( to encourage equality of treatment, to prevent discrimination, to foster mutual understanding and respect my commission's humane purpose, as decreed by act of the City Council) .