*Corporations are eroding the homeownership opportunities for Black families in Atlanta, according to a professor of public policy at Georgia Tech.
Brian Y. An of The Conversation reports that Wall Street investors are buying up single-family homes across the nation to use as rentals. “As of 2022, big investment firms owned nearly 600,000 such properties nationwide,” the author writes.
Per the report: “As a professor of public policy at Georgia Tech, I wanted to understand how this trend was affecting my neighbors. So I analyzed more than 1 million property sales in the Atlanta metropolitan area from 2007 to 2016. Since the study period included the mortgage crisis, I excluded bulk sales, such as the packages of foreclosed homes, that aren’t available to typical homebuyers. I examined only arm’s-length transactions of single-family detached homes, where buyers and sellers act independently.”
According to Brian Y. An, global investment firms are buying up local properties, which is “hurting Atlanta families – specifically, Black ones.”
He writes, “In my study, I found that large investors tend to snap up housing in majority-nonwhite, lower-income suburban neighborhoods. This makes homebuying even more challenging for middle-class families of color, as they get pushed out of the bidding market by global investors.”
The author also notes, “Since my analysis stopped in 2016, I can’t be sure that Black Atlanta residents are still affected by Wall Street firms buying up housing. Many investment firms have recently been switching from a buy-to-rent business model to a build-to-rent model, which could complicate matters.”
Read the publication’s full study here.
Meanwhile, a 2021 NPR article titled “Black Americans And The Racist Architecture Of Homeownership” attributes systemic racism to the decline in Black homeownership in America.
“Over the last 15 years, Black homeownership has declined more dramatically than for any other racial or ethnic group in the United States,” the NPR article states.
“In 2019, the Black homeownership rate was about as low as in the 1960s, when private race-based discrimination was legal,” the report said.
READ MORE: BLM Co-founder Says Black Homeownership Helps Disrupt ‘White Supremacy’
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