Corporate landlords are gobbling up U.S. suburbs. These homeowners are fighting back.

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Business

Corporate landlords are gobbling up U.S. suburbs. These homeowners are fighting back.

Using authority that lets them punish homeowners who fail to cut the grass, one predominantly Black neighborhood in North Carolina slows the pace of investor purchases

By Peter Whoriskey and Kevin Schaul
March 31, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

CHARLOTTE — Her 3-bedroom 2-bath house with vinyl siding had never attracted so many admirers. Every week, the mail brought more postcard offers: Sell now! Will buy as is! Everyone in the neighborhood was getting them. ... To Valerie Hamilton, then president of the Potters Glen Homeowners Association, it didn’t sit right. Already, more than 20 homeowners in her Charlotte neighborhood had sold out to investors and their houses had been quickly converted to rentals. ... “We were being bombarded,” Hamilton said.

Like hundreds of communities across the United States, Hamilton’s neighborhood had become the target of large companies amassing empires of suburban homes for rent. Since the Great Recession, when millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure, these companies have been expanding their portfolios of tens of thousands of single-family houses, a disproportionate number of them located in majority-Black neighborhoods like Potters Glen.

The rise of investor purchases has spawned complaints that the companies, flush with Wall Street money, are pricing out first-time home buyers and renting to tenants who have not been properly screened. In Potters Glen, one house owned by Invitation Homes, a $24 billion company created by a Wall Street firm, drew several reports of illegal drugs and gunfire, according to police reports and neighbors. ... Facing the influx, Hamilton started asking: “Can’t we stop them?” ... The answer, it turns out, appears to be yes.

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Using the same legal authority that allows homeowners associations to punish people who fail to cut their grass, the Potters Glen board erected a hurdle for investors: a new rule required any new home buyer to wait two years before renting it out. ... Since the board adopted the rule in 2019, property records show the pace of investor purchases has dropped by more than half. ... “We didn’t want to become a renter’s paradise,” said Hamilton, a retired executive assistant from Ohio. “We want people who are going to plant flowers and trees because it’s their home.”

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By Peter Whoriskey
Peter Whoriskey is a staff writer for The Washington Post whose investigative work focuses on corporate accountability and the economy. Twitter https://twitter.com/@PeterWhoriskey

By Kevin Schaul
Kevin Schaul is a senior graphics reporter for The Washington Post. He holds corporations accountable using data and visuals. Twitter https://twitter.com/kevinschaul