The Georgia legislature’s historic distaste for common-sense housing policies has worsened an affordability crisis that’s affecting residents statewide. It’s time for a new approach.
In next year’s legislative session, lawmakers will be weighing critical measures to strengthen tenant protections, diversify housing types, and boost funding for affordable housing. Without major reforms, Georgia risks pricing out the workforce that’s essential to the state’s prosperity.
In metro Atlanta, for instance, the state’s longstanding ban on local rent regulation allows landlords to raise rents without any limits and makes it easier to evict tenants at will. Outdated state housing laws like this one have frustrated innovative residential development projects and contributed to the city’s widening income gap between the rich and poor.
In my four-plus years as Atlanta Civic Circle’s housing reporter, I’ve strained to ward off waves of cynicism and instead seek out sources of hope for the people in our city who can’t afford the ubiquitous $18 cheeseburger, the $70 haircut, the $100 gym membership—or the rent spikes that accompany posh developments and the amenities they bring.
Common-sense housing law
While Georgia lawmakers have been slow to respond to our statewide affordable housing crisis, it’s a situation they can no longer afford to ignore.
In January, they’ll be considering several housing bills that would ensure our teachers and grocers and firefighters and other middle-wage earners can afford to live in metro Atlanta or other jobs hubs statewide.
Take 2023’s Safe at Home Act, which would safeguard basic tenant protections by requiring Georgia landlords to provide “habitable” living conditions. Last year, lawmakers watered down House Bill 404 so severely that it neglected to even define the word “habitability.” Even with such weak language, the legislation failed to earn so much as a vote in the state Senate, after the House okayed it.
Chalk that up to time constraints, perhaps, but our legislature must consider housing as important an issue for Georgians as reproductive rights, voting liberties, education, immigration, and job creation, regardless of one’s political affiliation.
A Georgian’s housing status directly affects their quality of life. It determines where their children can attend school, where they can get jobs, how easily they can access public transportation, and which doctors, restaurants, or grocery stores (if any) they can visit.
HB 404’s failure last year should inspire politicians of all political leanings to push aggressively for legislation that simply says landlords can’t abuse their tenants, financially or otherwise.
The Safe at Home Act was among a small battery of progressive housing policies that shorted out during the last General Assembly.
Local control
House Bill 125, to repeal the state’s decades-old ban on municipalities regulating rent, shouldn’t have been so polarizing either. But it faced the same roadblocks as other efforts that many lawmakers have oversimplified as “rent control.”
For some, the term “rent control” evokes images of dilapidated apartment blocks blighting otherwise blossoming metropolises. However, HB 125, which will likely return during the upcoming session, didn’t impose rent price caps. Instead, it merely opens the door for municipalities and counties to pass their own measures to limit how much landlords can hike rent when leases expire.
Isn’t local control something we should all embrace? Why should the Atlanta City Council be prohibited from telling the city’s landlords they can’t double or triple a tenant’s rent price in a lease renewal?
Denser zoning
Density-focused zoning reform is another common-sense, low-cost way to promote affordable housing by allowing more housing to be built on less land. That can foster the kind of affordability Georgia needs to retain the working-class folks who play such a crucial role in our state economy.
Some of our state legislators insist that Georgia’s housing affordability crisis boils down to a supply and demand issue—and simply building more housing will solve the problem. But this thinking is unrealistic.
“If you just try to increase overall supply, it doesn’t help people at the lowest level of the income spectrum,” Natallie Keiser, the executive director of the advocacy group HouseATL, told Atlanta Civic Circle recently. “The problem is it ends up [producing] that trickle-down, unhealthy housing that we’ve seen, highlighted so aptly by the Atlanta Journal-Constutition’s [Dangerous Dwellings series].”
Housing Trust Fund
What’s more, if legislators do think that increasing housing production will solve our affordability crisis, shouldn’t the state put some financial resources behind that idea?
HouseATL, a coalition of Atlanta leaders from the private, public and nonprofit sectors, has just released 23 policy recommendations for state and local lawmakers. As a top priority, they urged Georgia leaders to use $100 million from the state’s nearly $11 billion budget surplus to fund its Housing Trust Fund for the Homeless. The fund supports groups that are building affordable housing and providing supportive services for people transitioning from life on the streets to living under a roof.
The state currently allocates about $3 million a year to the trust fund. While $100 million is not enough to solve the state’s housing crisis, it would be an investment in housing the likes of which Georgia has never seen. To illustrate the enormity of the housing crisis for working class Georgians, the nonprofit Urban Land Institute estimates it would cost $270 million a month to publicly subsidize all affordable housing needs in metro Atlanta alone.
Politicians of all stripes must make housing policies a priority. Our elected leaders are waking up to the fact that many of their constituents—often working two or even three jobs to stave off eviction—are scrambling to secure a place to call home.
“We want people to live in the community where they are working,” Gov. Brian Kemp said in January. “It cuts down on logistics. It cuts down on the need for infrastructure, and it just honestly makes for a better quality of life.”
As we head into 2024, Kemp and our state legislature must put their money where their mouth is.
Thank you, Sean!
I live in one of Frank Sinili’s 11 story so called senior communities. Cigarette smoke and bullying plus poor depressed tenants sitting on walkers in the lobby all day. Millenia housing keeps a steady stream of parties going along with puzzles and bingo. Maintenence is the only bright spot. Public housing is hell .