The last year has seen plenty of attention from local lawmakers to the problem of large, “out-of-state” landlords who are buying up our city’s and state’s housing. While the primary focus of these actions has actually been on the growth of corporate housing ownership, the language used to discuss these issues shows the close connections with the distinct – but sometimes overlapping and often neglected – issue of absentee ownership.
Absenteeism is a politically powerful analytic because it makes clear the essentially extractive dynamic of landlordism writ-large: some people and places benefit at the expense of others through their control over land and housing. But our understandings of how exactly to define and measure absenteeism aren’t always fully developed or made explicit. Most often though, we tend to define absenteeism in precisely the way discussed above: by ownership relations that cross jurisdictional borders, with a landlord living outside the city or state where they own property. We tend to think of this as a problem because greater spatial distances imply greater social distance through a removal from the everyday needs and concerns not just of the property and tenant who lives there, but also of the larger community in which that property sits.
But spatial distance and social distance aren’t entirely reducible to one another, and one need not live in an entirely different state or country to be divorced from the experiences and interests of the people who live near the property one owns. Indeed, a landlord might live just a few short miles from their property but still exist in a world totally separate from that of their tenants if, for example, the landlord’s home is in an affluent community like Buckhead and the property they rent out is a dilapidated complex in Vine City. We can think of this dynamic as a kind of intra-urban absenteeism, to highlight the ways that different neighborhoods are linked through these extractive relationships of housing ownership, with poverty and immiseration in some places producing significant affluence and extravagance for others, even when it isn’t crossing jurisdictional boundaries.
In a newly published paper in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research1, my PhD student Ryan Pardue and I make the case for analyzing absentee housing ownership in precisely this way. Using a multi-scalar definition of absenteeism that accounts for these gradations in distance, we identified a total of 43,495 absentee-owned residential properties within the City of Atlanta alone.2 While these properties represent a significant minority of all residential parcels across the city (only about 28%), in their more expansive definition they also represent a significant majority of all non-owner-occupied properties. And, as the chart below shows, the vast majority (roughly 72%) of those properties we classify as absentee-owned are still owned within the five core counties of the Atlanta metro. In other words, these are exactly the kind of properties that would be left out of a conventional understanding of absenteeism that is limited to properties owned outside of the state or country.
The location and spatial concentration of these absentee-owned properties throughout the city further illustrates just how important it is to take a multi-scalar view of absenteeism. The map below visualizes concentrated absenteeism simultaneously across two axes: the total number of absentee-owned properties (as represented by the size of the hexagonal symbols) and the share of residential properties that are absentee-owned (as represented by the shading of the symbols).
Three key areas stand out in the map. First is Midtown, where we see the highest total numbers of absentee-owned properties; however, they represent a smaller share of all residential properties in the area due to the large total numbers of residential units, particularly in newer luxury towers. The second key area is Atlanta’s westside, where we can see an extensive cluster of neighborhoods where over half of all residential properties are absentee-owned. Third and finally, we can see a small cluster in Buckhead, which shows both a fairly high total count of absentee-owned properties and high shares of absentee ownership as a proportion of all properties. The concentrations in parts of Midtown and Buckhead are notable because, in contradiction to some previous work on rural land ownership, they highlight that concentrations of absentee-owned properties in the urban context are not entirely synonymous with concentrations of poverty. Instead, the pervasiveness of absentee ownership in affluent white neighborhoods like Midtown and Buckhead show that their affluence and luxury residential characteristics are part of what attracts outside investment, a fact that makes more sense when we disaggregate these spatial concentrations for each of our discrete scales of absenteeism.
As the series of maps above shows, different scales of absentee ownership have very different spatial concentrations. It’s only those furthest definitions of absenteeism – with owners outside the metro and beyond – that drive the concentration of absentee-owned properties in more well-to-do neighborhoods like Midtown and Buckhead, which defy our conventional understanding of where absentee-owned properties are and what absentee ownership means on the ground. Instead of dilapidated and neglected housing, these absentee-owned properties are second homes and pieds-à-terre for the wealthy who jet in and out of the city without making it their primary home.
But at the same time, we can see that most of the absentee-owned homes in Atlanta’s predominantly Black and poorer westside neighborhoods – places that have long been known as sites of exploitation by unscrupulous landlords and investors – are owned by others within the City of Atlanta, primarily in the city’s wealthier and whiter north and northeast neighborhoods. This fact shows just how limited our understanding of absenteeism’s extractive dynamic is – and just how easy it is to underestimate the full extent and impact of absenteeism – if we’re only looking outside of official jurisdictional boundaries to identify it. Instead, as we argue in our paper, it is the substantive relationship of exclusive control over urban space and extraction of wealth that requires our attention, even (or perhaps especially) when these ownership relations remain within a single city.
- The full-text of the paper is available to download for free from my personal website. [↩]
- We are unfortunately limited to describing the extent of absentee housing ownership in terms of the number of residential properties rather than the number of housing units due to incomplete data provided by the tax assessors offices for both Fulton and DeKalb counties. [↩]
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