Shifting investment trends in rental housing through sequential housing crises have had important consequences for communities. Following the foreclosure crisis, large corporate landlords and institutional investors entered the single family rental business with finance from the GSEs and the creation of new securitization structures. Through the entrance of large corporate landlords, foreclosure-driven housing insecurity of the late 2000s translated into eviction-driven housing insecurity. A study co-authored by Dr. Elora Lee Raymond finds that post-foreclosure homes in Atlanta are 58 percent more likely to have an eviction filing than single-family rentals with no foreclosure history, and this effect is driven by large corporate owners, who are 68 percent more likely than smaller landlords to file eviction notices.
The foreclosure crisis was soon followed by the affordability crisis in the late 2010s. I examine the role of investor purchases of multifamily rental properties, and the impacts on forced moves and neighborhood change in the past decade. Investor purchases of apartment buildings in a neighborhood are uniquely associated with spikes in the neighborhood eviction rate. Additionally, neighborhoods with investor purchases of apartment buildings lose 166 Black residents and gain 109 White residents over a 6-year period when compared with adjacent neighborhoods with no investor purchases.
Dr. Raymond will close with thoughts about the current COVID-19 crisis, implications of the current recession for private equity investment in rental housing, and policy recommendations.
About the Speaker
Elora Lee Raymond is an urban planner and Assistant Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning in the College of Design at Georgia Tech. She is interested in the financialization of housing and property in land, displacement and dispossession through housing systems, housing and disasters, race, and segregation.
Dr. Raymond has explored widening housing wealth inequality following the real estate and financial crises of the 2000s, and the relationship between financialization of rental housing and eviction-led displacement. She has studied the effect of the foreclosure and affordability crises on Pacific Islander communities in Los Angeles. Dr. Raymond has ongoing projects on housing, displacement and disasters, including work on eviction and migration following disasters.
Elora has published articles in Cityscape, JPER, Urban Geography, Housing Studies, Housing Policy Debate and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Community and Economic Development Discussion Paper Series. Her research has been featured in the Economist, New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Bloomberg’s Businessweek, NPR’s Morning Edition, ABC’s Good Morning America, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Univision, and Radio New Zealand, among other news outlets.