City girl life apartments4/24/2023 ![]() School systems in Fulton, Gwinnett and Clayton counties and in Marietta refused to release the directory information. (John Spink / than 13,000 school-age children live in 144 of the complexes in Atlanta and Cobb and DeKalb counties alone, according to student directory data provided by their school districts. Police say that the crime that has become astonishingly routine in many complexes often is committed by people who do not live at the properties. This examination identified more than 250 chronically dangerous complexes beset by violent crime and, often, by horrific living conditions: rats and garbage, leaking pipes and unmitigated mold that sicken many residents, especially children.Ītlanta police talk to two young men in the wake of the shooting of a 15-year-old boy at Oakland City West End Apartments in March. ![]() The newspaper also interviewed dozens of current and former residents of substandard apartments, as well as housing experts, activists, lawyers and landlords. In its yearlong investigation, the Journal-Constitution reviewed crime and code-inspection reports, real-estate documents, lawsuits, financing statements, promotional materials for investors and other public records. ![]() Landlords get rich by breaking people in our community with the housing conditions that you and I are paying for.” “What we give people breaks bodies and breaks minds. “What we give people is deadly,” said Esther Graff-Radford, an Atlanta lawyer who represents tenants in disputes with landlords. This regulatory environment enables many complexes to remain perilous quarters for tenants. Government rental-assistance programs, tax credits and a disproportionate use of police, fire and other public services transform run-down complexes like The Life at Greenbriar into valuable assets for investors.īut government agencies provide minimal oversight of substandard complexes, hampered not only by laws that give them little authority and by inadequate resources but also, at times, by a lack of will to take on well-financed landlords. Often, the next owners repeat the cycle.Īlong the way, profits accumulate, often bolstered by taxpayers. Many flip the properties in short order, nearly doubling their money in no more than two or three years. These owners typically raise rents, perform merely cosmetic renovations and limit spending on security and maintenance. “There is no way - no way - that kids should have to live like this.”Ĭhristopher Martin’s killing, in March 2020, and the anxiety it provoked underscore the persistent danger that confronts tens of thousands of residents at many apartment complexes across metro Atlanta, according to an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.Ī potent mix of lax security, deferred maintenance, governmental inertia and Georgia’s weak tenant-protection laws has rendered much of the region’s affordable housing barely habitable, the Journal-Constitution found in an examination of more than 1,000 apartment complexes in Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton counties.Īt least three-fourths of the region’s most dangerous apartments, the Journal-Constitution determined, belong to private equity firms or other absentee investors under whom crime and squalor are not so much bad fortune as collateral damage from a widely followed business model. “There are children all around this complex who live in these apartments,” she said. “They shoot here all the time, even during the day,” Cargile, 29, said recently, sitting in the same room where the bullet landed. A few months earlier, a bullet had blasted through a wall before falling to the living room floor. “We’re going to leave that alone and mind our own business,” she remembers saying. In her downstairs apartment, she gathered her children close and kept the door closed. “All I was thinking,” Houston, 28, said later, “was, ‘My kids - what if my kids had seen it?’”Īlexis Cargile heard the same shot. “A man just got shot,” she cried into her phone. She was still screaming when she reached a 911 operator. Just outside her front door, Houston discovered her neighbor Christopher Martin facedown on the second-floor concrete breezeway, bleeding out from a bullet wound to the head. Tori Houston had just sent her children to their grandmother’s and settled in for a peaceful evening at home, in an Atlanta apartment complex with a name more aspirational than descriptive: The Life at Greenbriar.
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