Lift Georgia’s Ban on Rent Control

Housing in our country is broken, and when you begin to interrogate our financial system it is not hard to understand why. Housing is increasingly commodified and controlled, not by communities and individuals, but by corporations and investors thousands of miles away. More and more, Georgia’s homes and apartment complexes are being bought up, bundled into securitized investments, and traded on Wall Street by private equity groups such as Blackstone, Sylvan Group, and the Brookdale Group. Once these investors own entire streets and neighborhoods, they control the local markets. Because our state has a ban on rent control, these investors are able to gouge rents to unbelievably unaffordable levels. In the entire state, there is not a single zip code where minimum wage covers the cost of housing.

It is time to bring power back to cities, communities and individuals, to re-establish the freedom in Georgia to opt-in to rent control, and begin protecting our state’s renters from long-standing exploitation.

Georgia legislators, you have a choice to make: Continue letting private equity firms package and bet on our housing and gouge our rents, or repeal the ban and start fighting to restore tenants’ power. We believe not only in citizens’ rights to safe housing and stable rents, but also in cities’ and counties' right to choose their own approach to our housing crisis. State law should not be an authoritative force that dictates the destinies of local renters. Repealing the ban restores and protects the freedoms of our millions of renters, and re-establishes municipal authority. We demand the long-overdue repeal of Georgia’s rent control ban.