Marcus Tullius Cicero, who owned several villas for his own use, was also a landlord. To judge from his own writings, Cicero seems to have been guilty of neglecting his rental properties.

Two of my shops have collapsed and the others are showing cracks, so that even the mice have moved elsewhere, to say nothing of the tenants.

More than one hundred years after Cicero admitted his negligence as a landlord, Romans still complained about poor living conditions in urban tenements. Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis (Juvenal), in one of his satires attacking the vice and social problems of his society, indicates clearly the magnitude of this housing issue:

Here we live in a city which, to a large extent, is supported by rickety props; that's how the landlord's agent stops it falling. He covers a gap in the chinky old...