A new Georgia State University study says rent checks from predominantly Black, lower income Atlanta neighborhoods are quietly helping to build wealth in some of the city’s priciest areas, including Buckhead. Researchers argue that the pattern of absentee ownership is channeling neighborhood income and property value away from the communities that have the least control over those assets.
Lead author Taylor Shelton and coauthor Ryan Pardue reviewed more than 250,000 City of Atlanta property records and pulled together a dataset of 43,495 absentee owned residential parcels. Using a multi scale definition of absenteeism, they find that roughly 72% of those absentee owned properties are still owned from within the five county Atlanta metro, rather than from out of state, according to Taylor Shelton.
Maps Track Rent Flow Toward Buckhead
The study’s maps highlight heavy concentrations of absentee ownership in predominantly Black westside neighborhoods, while a significant share of the owners live in wealthier parts of the city. Georgia State’s news release notes that Shelton and Pardue estimate 2,347 properties in lower income neighborhoods are owned by people or entities based in Buckhead, a pattern they describe as a form of localized extraction. Georgia State University breaks down those findings and the maps that accompany them.
Nearby Absenteeism, Not Just Out of State Investors
The researchers also push to widen how officials define who counts as an absentee owner. Instead of focusing only on big investors or far flung landlords, the paper includes owners who live outside a property’s immediate neighborhood but still within the city or metro area. As reported by WABE, Shelton says about 28% of residential properties in the city are owned by someone living outside the property’s neighborhood, and those owners control roughly 77% of Atlanta’s non owner occupied housing. That kind of “nearby absenteeism” can make it harder for tenants and neighborhood groups to push for accountability or meaningful reinvestment.
Policy and Accountability
The study arrives amid intensified scrutiny of big landlords and fresh state level attempts to rein them in. One Georgia law requires out of state owners of 25 or more single family rentals to keep in state staff on hand to address tenant maintenance issues. But that rule does not reach many multifamily properties or locally based absentee owners, according to reporting by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Housing advocates argue that this kind of patchwork will not fully touch the patterns the study documents, since so much of the ownership sits inside the metro rather than in another state.
Researchers’ Recommendations
Shelton and Pardue urge policymakers to treat absentee ownership itself as a direct policy target instead of viewing it only as a side effect of foreclosures or corporate consolidation. Their conclusion calls for stronger ownership transparency, local registries and enforcement tools that capture the “nearby” forms of absenteeism they mapped, according to Taylor Shelton. In their view, those steps could help keep more rental income and long term investment anchored in the neighborhoods that are currently losing them.
The paper builds on earlier investigations of corporate and absentee ownership in metro Atlanta and hands local officials a clearer picture of where rent dollars ultimately flow. Local news outlets and radio coverage have already folded the findings into a wider fight over how to hold landlords to account and steer investment back into disinvested communities, WSB Radio reports.
