Category: inequalities
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Corporate Landlords Redux
Last month, we shared a snapshot of the landscape of large corporate single family landlords across metro Atlanta, showing that just the top ten of these companies own over 30,000 properties here in the five core counties. Since then, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an investigation into these landlords that lends additional credence to the countless…
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Atlanta’s Corporate Landlords
For the last decade, the Atlanta metro has been ground zero for corporate investors buying up single-family homes to turn into rental properties. Studies have consistently shown that more so than any other single metropolitan area across the country, these firms have focused on Atlanta and its suburban fringes, leading Dan Immergluck to label Atlanta…
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Placing the Police
For the last two-plus years, the place of the police in our society has been at the forefront not only here in Atlanta, but nationwide. But given the murder of Rayshard Brooks at the hands of an APD officer in the summer of 2020 and the city’s total lack of a meaningful response, followed by…
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Landownership Inequality in Georgia, Past and Present
Across the state today, 1,120,314 acres of agricultural land, or about 3% of the total land mass, are owned by foreign investors who own the land not as a way of sustaining life and livelihood, but as financial assets to be mined for profit. Given that our figures from 1900 are close approximations of the…
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University Lands
Over the course of the next week, colleges and universities across Atlanta will restart classes for the fall semester. But teaching classes and offering degrees is only one – sometimes small – aspect of what universities do nowadays. While fielding sports teams is obviously one element of this larger project, universities are just as oriented…
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Appraising Gentrification
If you’re a Fulton County homeowner, it’s that time of year to have just recently received your latest property tax assessment. And chances are, that assessment has gone up, meaning you’ll be paying more in property taxes. But those increases in property taxes aren’t equal across the county. Thanks to the fact that Fulton…
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Absentee Exploitation
Over the past week, the AJC has been running an excellent multi-part investigation of the housing conditions at some of Atlanta’s most notoriously dilapidated complexes, broadening out from the case of the now-condemned Forest Cove Apartments. While the whole situation is infuriating, I was particularly taken with the second part of the series investigating the…
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Atlanta’s ur-choropleths
To begin this indefinite experiment in mapping all things Atlanta, I thought it worth starting with what I already know to be Atlanta’s ur-choropleth; the one variable whose spatial pattern will be mimicked by so many other spatial patterns, regardless of how tangential the two may seem.
mapping atlanta 