An Interview with Elora Raymond and Ben Miller, authors of "Gentrifying Atlanta: Investor Purchases of Rental Housing, Evictions, and Displacement of Black Residents"
Below is a transcript of our conversation with Elora Raymond (ER) and Ben Miller (BM) regarding their paper with Michaela McKinney and Jonathan Braun, “Gentrifying Atlanta: Investor Purchases of Rental Housing, Evictions, and Displacement of Black Residents” (DOI). Moderators: Claudia Aiken (CA) and Julia Sands (JS).
JS:
What led you all to be interested in doing this research? What are your personal connections to this research?
ER:
Our local tenant rights group launched a new eviction defense program back in 2019 and invited me to speak as a panelist, based on some research actually Ben and I had done on evictions in single family rentals. There was a comment by one of the tenant organizers during that panel that made me really rethink gentrification. I was presenting our earlier research and saying things like, ‘Well, we didn’t find any gentrification and we’ve been measuring it using census tract data and looking at demographic factors.This organizer pointed out that the areas of town where I was looking for gentrification wasn’t where she thought gentrification was. She mentioned some neighborhoods where I wasn’t really thinking about the types of investment that were happening, which were the types of investment we went on to write about. So I very much wanted to take that feedback we were getting from the community about what gentrification means to tenants in Atlanta, and write a paper about that and fit that into the formal gentrification scholarship, and make that link. And that took us years, 2-3 years, to take that seed of an idea to writing that paper. But that’s absolutely where that idea came from, from that comment.
BM:
As Elora mentioned, I got the chance to work with her on the first paper on evictions at a large scale in Atlanta that put some numbers to the sense of how severe the eviction crisis was in the city. In most of academia, it's hard to do work that really makes an impact and I was amazed at the reception and impact of that work and so when I had the chance to work again on a similar topic, I was overjoyed at the possibility. One of the main areas that I work on is as the editor for the Atlanta Studies journal, and that’s a general urbanism and historical focused journal that connects scholarship to the general public, and this work would fit squarely into the kind of concerns the readers would have, so as an opportunity to get a better understanding about the city and to potentially share that understanding through more formal academic publications, but also to connect it to Atlanta Studies.
JS:
The findings of your article have a lot of implications, both emotional and political. But it can be difficult to make those connections from statistics on a page. Do you have any stories or findings from this research that more personally involve interacting with the community affected by what you discovered in your findings?
ER:
We’ve all seen around Atlanta “affordable housing” bought up and transformed into luxury housing, or out of reach housing. We all have friends and neighbors who are struggling with where to go. As your family grows, or as you are trying to stay in a neighborhood, or close to your work, we are all feeling the effects of the affordability crisis generally. I don’t want to call out anybody I know individually, but this is a challenge that has been dealt with at higher levels of severity, maybe, in other parts of the country but we are feeling it now in Atlanta. And yet we don’t have the same social safety network that other states and cities have. So there’s nothing to catch people when rents become unaffordable. I think we need to respond more forcefully to help people who are dealing with overcrowding or who are trying to downsize.
BM:
As new people come to the city, I see students come to the city, and Emory has tried to become more connected to Atlanta and establish its relationship to the city in more concrete terms, I see students and colleagues move here and try to figure out where to live. It’s interesting to hear the neighborhoods that they identify as the places they can live. I’ve lived here going on thirty years, on and off, and the characters of neighborhoods have dramatically changed, both in terms of what buildings are there, but also based on who used to live there and who lives there now. Some colleagues and I did a series of interview projects with former and current residents of neighborhoods around where Turner Field is, to get a sense and feel of what the trajectory and history of the neighborhood is. This research, particularly the work around cluster analysis, helped me better understand what happened, like what forces happened, and the more sort of financial concerns that changed the built environment and the character of the neighborhood. When I’m able to talk to people who are just coming here, and they might know the names of some of these places, and they might have an imagination of the same of these places, but that imagination does not exist in the way that it used to.
ER:
I thought the cluster analysis was really revealing in that when we think of gentrification as a real estate driven process, the geography of displacement looks very different than when we measure that demographic transition. When you see look at the maps you typically see of gentrification in Atlanta they look very different. So this was a glimpse into what we think are the displacement processes. It’s very much about the housing and the real estate. So I thought it was a great map.
JS:
Your recommendations in terms of policy involve incorporating investor-owner purchases into early warning systems for displacement. But do you have any thoughts on how to prevent investor-driven displacement from occurring in the first place? In other words, if you had any amount of political capital at your disposal to solve this issue, like if you were made dictator of the world tomorrow, what would you do to address it?
ER:
I think if we were a genuine democracy we wouldn’t need a dictator. If we really had the participation and fantastic ability to vote in Atlanta, I think a lot of our social problems would go away. I just want to preface that first. But to answer your question, I think that ownership matters, that who owns buildings matters, that we should take public ownership more seriously, that we should not be selling public land but maybe leasing it or building on it. I saw recently that Rhode Island has started to do state level public housing. I think taking seriously the role that housing plays- a lot of people think about equity and they design solutions that don’t involve providing people places to live. I think we actually have to go back to that very material fact that if people can’t live and if they can’t meet their basic needs in an affordable and equitable way, we’re never going to be able to do all the other types of equity. So I would start with public land, and I would start with really fully committing to affordable housing in the city and, yeah, more negotiation, more engagement with folks that are investing. Part of our problem is the balance of power between large corporate entities and the city is not great. We’re having trouble collecting commercial tax revenue. We'll have a building appraise and sell for 200 million, but it is taxed at 100 million, and then we can’t find enough school buses for our elementary schools. So addressing some of the nuts and bolts of city government would solve a lot of our problems.
CA:
I know an issue for researchers has been a lack of transparency around what these entities actually are, like all the shells and LLCs. Did you guys run into that at all or did your data set allow you to bypass that?
ER:
That’s part of what we do that takes a long time. It shouldn't require multiple PhDs to determine who owns what. It should be really easy to know who your landlord is, or who is buying the block, but instead it's impossible. And our analysis is actually just a conservative estimate of large corporate ownership. There’s many shell companies where you can’t determine who the beneficial owner is. In other work, we’ve been absolutely pushing for rental property registries. I know some cities have them at the municipal level, I’d love to see them at the federal level and fully funded. And also with the analytics, we have a lot of datasets that are not accessible to policymakers,or tenant organizers, or the community, so not just making the data exists but making sure it's accessible.
BM:
I wouldn’t want to take away from any of the awesome recommendations that Elora made, but I would just double down on accessibility to data is what made this research take much longer than it otherwise needed to take. Elora working with a team took years to be able to get evictions data, and it was only through the efforts of someone who was incredibly determined and well positioned to crack the nut of “how do you get evictions data?” The data was available internally to the agency that collected it, and if they had been willing to share it in a more accessible form, this research would have been vastly accelerated.
ER:
Yeah I mean we actually used Eviction Lab data for our eviction metric because Fulton County at the time was… we’ve been intermittently allowed to scrape but, you know, the courts created barriers to scraping after 2016,so for the time frame of this project, we weren’t able to scrape.
JS:
Do you have any recommendations for what an average citizen of Atlanta, or anywhere that experiences gentrification and displacement, can do to help address these problems within their own local community?
ER:
So one of the challenges I see happening at the local planning level is that a lot of new housing is blocked. We have a proposal that is very vague and sketchy to develop a hundred and fifty new apartment units at a surface lot, you know, in an area of town where I live, and immediately there’s just an outcry about it. I think being interested in working with people who want to build new housing, and negotiating for affordability, and participating in your local planning process in a deep and engaged and sustained way can really help. Because there’s a lot of reactions to new development, and some new development is not great and it's the kind that we write about in our paper, but we do need to build new affordable housing and we need to build multifamily. And there’s a lot of anti-multifamily sentiment out there, so just pushing for that with your local planning orgs, and your city councilors makes a huge difference. You know, this paper came out of a suggestion from a tenant organizer…being part of community organizing and building that community power is, I think one of the things I always advocate for.
BM:
On the community power line of thinking, Atlanta has a pretty robust neighborhood planning unit structure, and a lot of these conversations take place in those meetings, so being aware of more of what is being discussed in the local planning level would help. And as a less concrete thing, I think helping to know the history and trajectory of the neighborhoods is meaningful. I don’t know if it leads to any concrete changes in terms of gentrification and displacement, but at least being aware of what preceded one’s entry into a neighborhood, and what that change might mean now that one might live there, matters historically.
JS:
From a research standpoint, what do you hope other researchers will take away from this study when they go into their own work? What answers do we need next to solve this problem?
ER:
It’s a little bit of a hard conversation to have with other housing academics that ownership really matters, and there’s a lot of economic theory that doesn’t really differentiate between different types of firms and the types of pressures they are under, so I think having a better picture of landlords in general, of different types of landowners and landlords, and what their incentives are. The frameworks we use today tend to rely on Allan Mallach’s four-part typology of distressed property investors. And today, we have a lot of non-distress property investors, and a lot of investors who are using financial markets in sophisticated ways that need to be better understood. So thinking more about landlords and more about how finance creates certain pressures to enact types of urban development that aren’t great for current residents, is where I'd push for things. At the policy level, I see a lot of census data to map gentrification shifting that over and using property data sets, which are more real time and closer to the issues, would be really helpful.
BM:
In some ways this was a challenging paper, a risky paper, because it applies three different methodologies to understand the problem. There’s parts of it as even one of the authors are beyond me, and there’s other that I feel very comfortable with. So what I hope the other researchers would take away is that being able to do more work like this means working across methodological boundaries, and accepting that there will be experts on the paper on different elements of it.
1. Data scraping is the use of a technology to extract data from a large body of information, such as court records, real estate listings, or tweets. Data scraping is a way of collecting this data and getting it into a useful format, such as an Excel spreadsheet.
JS:
What led you all to be interested in doing this research? What are your personal connections to this research?
ER:
Our local tenant rights group launched a new eviction defense program back in 2019 and invited me to speak as a panelist, based on some research actually Ben and I had done on evictions in single family rentals. There was a comment by one of the tenant organizers during that panel that made me really rethink gentrification. I was presenting our earlier research and saying things like, ‘Well, we didn’t find any gentrification and we’ve been measuring it using census tract data and looking at demographic factors.This organizer pointed out that the areas of town where I was looking for gentrification wasn’t where she thought gentrification was. She mentioned some neighborhoods where I wasn’t really thinking about the types of investment that were happening, which were the types of investment we went on to write about. So I very much wanted to take that feedback we were getting from the community about what gentrification means to tenants in Atlanta, and write a paper about that and fit that into the formal gentrification scholarship, and make that link. And that took us years, 2-3 years, to take that seed of an idea to writing that paper. But that’s absolutely where that idea came from, from that comment.
BM:
As Elora mentioned, I got the chance to work with her on the first paper on evictions at a large scale in Atlanta that put some numbers to the sense of how severe the eviction crisis was in the city. In most of academia, it's hard to do work that really makes an impact and I was amazed at the reception and impact of that work and so when I had the chance to work again on a similar topic, I was overjoyed at the possibility. One of the main areas that I work on is as the editor for the Atlanta Studies journal, and that’s a general urbanism and historical focused journal that connects scholarship to the general public, and this work would fit squarely into the kind of concerns the readers would have, so as an opportunity to get a better understanding about the city and to potentially share that understanding through more formal academic publications, but also to connect it to Atlanta Studies.
JS:
The findings of your article have a lot of implications, both emotional and political. But it can be difficult to make those connections from statistics on a page. Do you have any stories or findings from this research that more personally involve interacting with the community affected by what you discovered in your findings?
ER:
We’ve all seen around Atlanta “affordable housing” bought up and transformed into luxury housing, or out of reach housing. We all have friends and neighbors who are struggling with where to go. As your family grows, or as you are trying to stay in a neighborhood, or close to your work, we are all feeling the effects of the affordability crisis generally. I don’t want to call out anybody I know individually, but this is a challenge that has been dealt with at higher levels of severity, maybe, in other parts of the country but we are feeling it now in Atlanta. And yet we don’t have the same social safety network that other states and cities have. So there’s nothing to catch people when rents become unaffordable. I think we need to respond more forcefully to help people who are dealing with overcrowding or who are trying to downsize.
BM:
As new people come to the city, I see students come to the city, and Emory has tried to become more connected to Atlanta and establish its relationship to the city in more concrete terms, I see students and colleagues move here and try to figure out where to live. It’s interesting to hear the neighborhoods that they identify as the places they can live. I’ve lived here going on thirty years, on and off, and the characters of neighborhoods have dramatically changed, both in terms of what buildings are there, but also based on who used to live there and who lives there now. Some colleagues and I did a series of interview projects with former and current residents of neighborhoods around where Turner Field is, to get a sense and feel of what the trajectory and history of the neighborhood is. This research, particularly the work around cluster analysis, helped me better understand what happened, like what forces happened, and the more sort of financial concerns that changed the built environment and the character of the neighborhood. When I’m able to talk to people who are just coming here, and they might know the names of some of these places, and they might have an imagination of the same of these places, but that imagination does not exist in the way that it used to.
ER:
I thought the cluster analysis was really revealing in that when we think of gentrification as a real estate driven process, the geography of displacement looks very different than when we measure that demographic transition. When you see look at the maps you typically see of gentrification in Atlanta they look very different. So this was a glimpse into what we think are the displacement processes. It’s very much about the housing and the real estate. So I thought it was a great map.
JS:
Your recommendations in terms of policy involve incorporating investor-owner purchases into early warning systems for displacement. But do you have any thoughts on how to prevent investor-driven displacement from occurring in the first place? In other words, if you had any amount of political capital at your disposal to solve this issue, like if you were made dictator of the world tomorrow, what would you do to address it?
ER:
I think if we were a genuine democracy we wouldn’t need a dictator. If we really had the participation and fantastic ability to vote in Atlanta, I think a lot of our social problems would go away. I just want to preface that first. But to answer your question, I think that ownership matters, that who owns buildings matters, that we should take public ownership more seriously, that we should not be selling public land but maybe leasing it or building on it. I saw recently that Rhode Island has started to do state level public housing. I think taking seriously the role that housing plays- a lot of people think about equity and they design solutions that don’t involve providing people places to live. I think we actually have to go back to that very material fact that if people can’t live and if they can’t meet their basic needs in an affordable and equitable way, we’re never going to be able to do all the other types of equity. So I would start with public land, and I would start with really fully committing to affordable housing in the city and, yeah, more negotiation, more engagement with folks that are investing. Part of our problem is the balance of power between large corporate entities and the city is not great. We’re having trouble collecting commercial tax revenue. We'll have a building appraise and sell for 200 million, but it is taxed at 100 million, and then we can’t find enough school buses for our elementary schools. So addressing some of the nuts and bolts of city government would solve a lot of our problems.
CA:
I know an issue for researchers has been a lack of transparency around what these entities actually are, like all the shells and LLCs. Did you guys run into that at all or did your data set allow you to bypass that?
ER:
That’s part of what we do that takes a long time. It shouldn't require multiple PhDs to determine who owns what. It should be really easy to know who your landlord is, or who is buying the block, but instead it's impossible. And our analysis is actually just a conservative estimate of large corporate ownership. There’s many shell companies where you can’t determine who the beneficial owner is. In other work, we’ve been absolutely pushing for rental property registries. I know some cities have them at the municipal level, I’d love to see them at the federal level and fully funded. And also with the analytics, we have a lot of datasets that are not accessible to policymakers,or tenant organizers, or the community, so not just making the data exists but making sure it's accessible.
BM:
I wouldn’t want to take away from any of the awesome recommendations that Elora made, but I would just double down on accessibility to data is what made this research take much longer than it otherwise needed to take. Elora working with a team took years to be able to get evictions data, and it was only through the efforts of someone who was incredibly determined and well positioned to crack the nut of “how do you get evictions data?” The data was available internally to the agency that collected it, and if they had been willing to share it in a more accessible form, this research would have been vastly accelerated.
ER:
Yeah I mean we actually used Eviction Lab data for our eviction metric because Fulton County at the time was… we’ve been intermittently allowed to scrape but, you know, the courts created barriers to scraping after 2016,so for the time frame of this project, we weren’t able to scrape.
JS:
Do you have any recommendations for what an average citizen of Atlanta, or anywhere that experiences gentrification and displacement, can do to help address these problems within their own local community?
ER:
So one of the challenges I see happening at the local planning level is that a lot of new housing is blocked. We have a proposal that is very vague and sketchy to develop a hundred and fifty new apartment units at a surface lot, you know, in an area of town where I live, and immediately there’s just an outcry about it. I think being interested in working with people who want to build new housing, and negotiating for affordability, and participating in your local planning process in a deep and engaged and sustained way can really help. Because there’s a lot of reactions to new development, and some new development is not great and it's the kind that we write about in our paper, but we do need to build new affordable housing and we need to build multifamily. And there’s a lot of anti-multifamily sentiment out there, so just pushing for that with your local planning orgs, and your city councilors makes a huge difference. You know, this paper came out of a suggestion from a tenant organizer…being part of community organizing and building that community power is, I think one of the things I always advocate for.
BM:
On the community power line of thinking, Atlanta has a pretty robust neighborhood planning unit structure, and a lot of these conversations take place in those meetings, so being aware of more of what is being discussed in the local planning level would help. And as a less concrete thing, I think helping to know the history and trajectory of the neighborhoods is meaningful. I don’t know if it leads to any concrete changes in terms of gentrification and displacement, but at least being aware of what preceded one’s entry into a neighborhood, and what that change might mean now that one might live there, matters historically.
JS:
From a research standpoint, what do you hope other researchers will take away from this study when they go into their own work? What answers do we need next to solve this problem?
ER:
It’s a little bit of a hard conversation to have with other housing academics that ownership really matters, and there’s a lot of economic theory that doesn’t really differentiate between different types of firms and the types of pressures they are under, so I think having a better picture of landlords in general, of different types of landowners and landlords, and what their incentives are. The frameworks we use today tend to rely on Allan Mallach’s four-part typology of distressed property investors. And today, we have a lot of non-distress property investors, and a lot of investors who are using financial markets in sophisticated ways that need to be better understood. So thinking more about landlords and more about how finance creates certain pressures to enact types of urban development that aren’t great for current residents, is where I'd push for things. At the policy level, I see a lot of census data to map gentrification shifting that over and using property data sets, which are more real time and closer to the issues, would be really helpful.
BM:
In some ways this was a challenging paper, a risky paper, because it applies three different methodologies to understand the problem. There’s parts of it as even one of the authors are beyond me, and there’s other that I feel very comfortable with. So what I hope the other researchers would take away is that being able to do more work like this means working across methodological boundaries, and accepting that there will be experts on the paper on different elements of it.
1. Data scraping is the use of a technology to extract data from a large body of information, such as court records, real estate listings, or tweets. Data scraping is a way of collecting this data and getting it into a useful format, such as an Excel spreadsheet.
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