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Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and you're listening to The Takeaway. Earlier this month, Atlanta Mayor, Andre Dickens delivered his first State of the City Address and he emphasized the plans to bring more affordable housing to Atlanta.

Mayor Andre Dickens: Our administration is committed to creating or preserving 20,000 units of affordable housing over the next eight years, which will be overseen by our affordable housing strikeforce. A one-stop shop to oversee all of our affordable housing needs. It's an ambitious goal, but with your help, I know we will get there.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Over the past year, Atlanta's median home prices have increased nearly 24%. According to the real estate brokerage firm Redfin, Atlanta home purchases have been particularly targeted by investors. That means flipping and reselling for even higher prices. Let me break this down for you. Housing is considered affordable when it costs 30% or less of your household's annual pre-tax income. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the median annual income in Atlanta has increased by roughly $1,000 since 2020.

Meanwhile, the median home price has gone up by more than $100,000. You don't even need a calculator to realize that those numbers don't add up to affordability. As housing prices rise, the city's racial demographics are shifting. White residents coming to Atlanta have vastly outnumbered the arrival of new Black residents. That's a reversal of trends from previous decades when Black residents made up the majority of Atlanta's population.

For our ongoing series, Georgia at the Intersections, we're talking about what this all means for Atlanta residents and Georgia politics. I spoke with Jim Burress, a reporter who's been covering Atlanta's housing market for nearly 14 years at Atlanta's public radio station, WABE.

Jim Burress: If you're coming from San Francisco or New York City, then the prices here are going to look cheap, but let me put it into some perspective maybe a decade ago or a little longer when we had the housing bubble burst, Atlanta suffered more than just about anywhere. That brought to the average home prices well below $200,000. Now, they are approaching $500,000. We've really seen prices more than double in the past decade.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Have salaries in the Atlanta market kept up?

Jim Burress: Mine hasn't, most haven't, I would say.

Melissa Harris-Perry: [chuckles] It hasn't doubled for you?

Jim Burress: No, not in 10 years it hasn't, but we do have a lot of tech jobs that are new, and Atlanta's labeling itself anyway as the tech hub of the south. Those are relatively high-paying jobs. We have a lot of people moving from traditional tech hubs, like San Francisco with a higher income, and then some new jobs here that are technology-related that do pay somewhat higher. That's able to sustain the market. Those of us who are in a more moderate type of income, it's really priced us out of being able to live where we want to.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Typically, when we see those housing prices rise so swiftly, it ends up benefiting folks who already own their homes because suddenly their homes become more valuable. For those who are trying to get into the market, it creates this barrier. Are we seeing something similar in Atlanta or are we still seeing that even those who already own are finding this market challenging?

Jim Burress: It depends on where you own. Some parts of the area have really appreciated very, very quickly and those being closer to the city proper itself. The farther you go out into the suburbs, maybe it's less of an issue. If you're a first-time homebuyer, you're really going to have to make some compromises to be able to afford to buy here. I can speak personally to this, my home has appreciated quite a bit since I bought it in 2014. However, if I were to try to buy in my own neighborhood, even that appreciation, I wouldn't be able to. I simply couldn't afford anything around here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, is this just affecting home prices for those who are purchasing, or is this impacting the rental market as well?

Jim Burress: Definitely, the rental market. There seems to have been a lag that's more of a recent development, but Atlanta's traditionally had relatively affordable rents too. I know that now they have doubled, tripled in many cases, say compared to five years ago. We're hearing now of rental bidding wars, much like you would hear for the cost of a house that's hot on the market. People are actually willing to pay more than what landlords are asking in order to get into an apartment that they want.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What does this mean for people's lived experience?

Jim Burress: It means that you have a lot of more affluent people in any one neighborhood than you did before. Of course, we talk about gentrification. We talk about displacement. We talk about identity. Atlanta specifically is a city that's known for its neighborhoods and the community focus and feel that individual neighborhoods have. There's a real danger of those being pushed out and lost just because of this homogenization of wealthy people are being the only ones able to afford to buy.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What kind of neighborhood? What has changed and what difference does it make if wealthier people live there? Don't they just make the place nicer?

Jim Burress: [chuckles] Perhaps on the surface you could argue that they do but Atlanta is not been known traditionally as a rich city. There's a great income disparity here, but there's always been a place for people of different socioeconomic backgrounds. One of the first stories that I did when I started back in 2008 on housing was the $10,000 neighborhood. There was a neighborhood in the city of Atlanta where almost every house on the street was valued at $10,000 or less.

Now, these were falling apart. It was a blighted area. It was high crime. That neighborhood now you can't find a home, even the same home for less than $300,000. That's because developers are now keen to its proximity to things like Downtown Atlanta and new arenas and places that people want to be. If you lived in that neighborhood, maybe your entire life or nearby, you're finding yourself priced out with really no hope of being able to stay.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As we are emerging into another part of the pandemic here, we've really seen housing prices increase in every way. For people who are building new homes through the effect of the supply chain on the cost of material, to what I understand to be simply a good old fashion supply-demand problem. Many more people wanting to buy and wanting to rent than there is available stock.

Jim Burress: I think that that's of course at play here for sure. That's probably the large majority of what's driving prices. You can't deny the market and its effect. However, it does seem to be taking away something that-- As you mentioned, Atlanta was known for affordable housing and this notion that no matter how much money you made, you could live in the city. Now, that's just becoming something that a lot of other people are able to achieve.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jim Burress, reporter at WABE, thank you for joining The Takeaway,

Jim Burress: Melissa, it was my pleasure. Thank you.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: We've been talking about the challenges of finding affordable housing in the city of Atlanta. Let's expand a bit and talk about what these trends look like throughout the state. Bambie Hayes-Brown CEO of Georgia Advancing Communities Together, an organization representing nonprofit housing and community development groups in Georgia. Bambie, thanks so much for being here.

Bambie Hayes-Brown: Thank you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We've been talking a little bit about the increase in housing prices in Atlanta and part of how that's being driven by investors, but what does that look like across the rest of the state?

Bambie Hayes-Brown: It's a significant issue around the state. Many people think that the affordability gap as it relates to home prices, as well as rentals are limited to our urban areas, such as Atlanta or Metro Atlanta. It's also true for our smaller urban communities and our rural communities especially those rural communities that have significantly less wages such as minimum wage. It is an issue that we are seeing around the state, unfortunately.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Say a bit more about those rural communities? Because I do feel like so frequently when we talk about Georgia, we go straight to the Atlanta area for important reasons, but politically, socially, and then really your point you're making economically. Tell us about some of these other communities.

Bambie Hayes-Brown: One of the things that I always remind people is that Georgia has 159 counties. It's a pretty big state. As someone who travels the state of Georgia and I am a native of rural Georgia, I am able to see from a different lens than most other people. Throughout the state, especially in our rural areas, there's not a lot of business and industry. Even though I know that their chambers of commerce and other entities and joint development authorities are really trying to lure business and industries into our state is mostly retail labor work that makes up a significant portion of our labor pool in rural Georgia.

Unfortunately, the prices are still rising. There is a shortage of especially affordable housing, that is housing for those who are at the lowest of incomes. People with fixed incomes, people who make minimum wage, and because of that shortage, that is driving up the cost of rentals, as well as home prices. For example, I have seen some home prices in rural South Georgia that are over $250,000. Some may say, "Well, that's affordable for Atlanta," but not when you're making $7.25 an hour and only working 20 hours per week.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm assuming also rural areas may have simply fewer rental units. These are places where typically it had been somewhat affordable to buy into, for example, moderate-sized homes, small homes, and therefore there probably hadn't been a lot of investment in rental housing.

Bambie Hayes-Brown: That is correct, especially as it relates to multifamily housing. Most of the rental housing specifically is from small mom-and-pop landlords. It may be someone that has anywhere from one to five rental units, and the stock is just not there. When you have that shortage in the rural areas, it really exacerbates the issue.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Also maybe help us to dispel some myths about rural areas in the South, which as someone from the South and currently living in the South, I know often folks presume that they are racially homogenous places. I'm always like, "Oh, no, actually, [laughs] you find a fair bit of diversity in our rural communities as well."

Bambie Hayes-Brown: That is correct. Our rural communities are very diverse. When Georgia Act, we did some nonpartisan voter engagement in 2020, and 2021, we were able to bring along some people who were from the urban areas, and a lot of people was really surprised to see that our communities are very diverse. There's the Black population, the Asian population, the Latinx population, is throughout the state of Georgia, and also in our rural community. We're not a monolith.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Indeed. When you make the point about nonpartisan voter engagement, talk to me a little bit about how you expect to see these issues about finding affordable housing showing up in this year's midterm elections. I'm wondering if people are thinking of this at all, as a political issue, or if it's seen as more of a general economic issue, or folks are like, "Hey, I need some relief here for my representatives."

Bambie Hayes-Brown: I would say it's a combination of the two, but more so housing is a part of the platforms now. This was especially brought to light after COVID because even though those of us who have been in the housing industry for a long time knew that there were significant housing challenges, the wealth gap was getting wider, when COVID happened, it began to affect all people. It wasn't just the lowest of incomes. What we saw in 2021, 2022, as well as the latter part of 2020, that we have elected officials begin to run on the platform of affordable housing.

Now is brought to the forefront and so many campaigns and candidate forums, the issue of affordable housing continuously comes up every time.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me about some of the state-level policies that might be able to make housing more affordable, particularly protections for runners.

Bambie Hayes-Brown: Well, unfortunately, Georgia is not very renter-friendly as it relates to our state legislation but back in July of 2019, we did pass House Bill 346, which is a bill that protects renters against retaliation from landlords if they complain to code enforcement for unhealthy or unsafe living conditions. That was a significant win in Georgia. We have continued that fight for rental protections, strengthening our fair housing laws, as well as most recently looking at ways to ensure that landlords get at least a seven-day right to cure a default before they file for eviction for a renter.

For example, if a person is late on their rent, they can get an eviction filed on them. Most of the time when we're talking about our low-wage workers, many of them get paid by the week. They just need that seven days to come up with the rest of the rent in order to make their payment. Those are some of the things that we are looking at on the state level. Then there's also some federal legislation such as universal housing vouchers. We're asking for significant investments in our Housing Trust Fund and our National Housing Trust Funds and protecting our state and federal housing tax credits that will be able to spur investment into affordable housing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: April is in fact, Fair Housing Month. As you look at the state of Georgia, what gives you hope about housing in the state?

Bambie Hayes-Brown: What gives me hope that I have not seen in my 25 years plus of being in this industry are that people are actually talking about it now, it's not like this hidden thing that only affected one segment of people. Now people are actually talking about the lack of affordable housing, how people need affordable housing, how we need fair housing with this being Fair Housing Month.

Even employers, schools, everything intersects with housing. That's what gives me hope is that now we're building a broad-based ecosystem of people that now see how housing affects everything that we do in our society.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Bambie Hayes-Brown is the CEO of Georgia Advancing Communities Together. Bambie, thank you so much for joining us.

Bambie Hayes-Brown: My pleasure.

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