College Park Mayor Bianca Motley Broom told a national radio audience last week that large investors have made it hard for the people who staff her city to buy homes in it.
Motley Broom joined WBUR's "On Point" on Friday, Aug. 7. The mayor joined host Meghna Chakrabarti and two other guests in examining new federal limits on corporate ownership of single-family homes. Motley Broom spoke from WABE in Atlanta.
What College Park is Seeing
More than one in four single-family rentals in metro Atlanta belong to institutional investors, Motley Broom said, a figure matching a 2024 Government Accountability Office estimate that put Atlanta's share highest among the markets it measured. Renters make up roughly 78 percent of College Park households, close to the reverse of the statewide pattern.
Institutional ownership has made it hard for buyers trying to get a foot in the market for a starter home, Motley Broom said. "We have a lot of trouble having folks who work for our city actually live in our city." Police officers, teachers and other employees cannot match all-cash offers.
Investors have concentrated in communities of color, she said, including the historic neighborhoods south of Interstate 20 in majority-minority College Park. Homeowners there may not recognize what an all-cash offer costs the community, and every house an investor takes is one fewer chance for a resident to start building generational wealth. Motley Broom said she gets text messages every week from buyers who want her own property.
Motley Broom rents out the first house she bought in College Park, in 2008. She and her husband work with tenants who fall behind and do not charge above market rent, the mayor said, because "we have an interest in stabilizing the community." As a former magistrate court judge, she said an eviction becomes "a scarlet letter on your credit" and begins a cycle families rarely escape.
What the New Law Does
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law July 11 without President Donald Trump's signature after clearing both chambers by wide bipartisan margins. Title X bars for-profit entities that control 350 or more single-family homes from buying additional ones, with exceptions for build-to-rent and renovate-to-rent projects. It does not cap ownership and does not require anyone to sell. Penalties run to $1 million per violation or three times the purchase price, whichever is greater, and the restrictions take effect in early January.
Motley Broom credited U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock for pressing the investor limits. She said the law "provides us carrots, not sticks," pointing to new flexibility in Community Development Block Grant funding and lighter federal review for infill housing. Cities need both, the mayor said, because developers will not build one house on one block and another 15 blocks away.
The Debate Over the Cap
The other guests questioned how much the cap will accomplish.
Carol Camp Yeakey, a public health professor at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author of a forthcoming book on corporate landlords, said investors "are a symptom of the broader problem of housing affordability," not its cause, and pointed to stagnant wages and zoning that keeps multifamily housing away from jobs.
The cap also depends on knowing who owns what, Camp Yeakey said. Corporate entities operate behind a multitude of shell companies, and identifying a true owner often means digging through county assessor records.
Adrianne Todman, CEO of the National Rental Home Council, said her members own about 3 percent of single-family rentals nationally and that supply is the real issue, though "it's very difficult to point to anything as easy as it is to point to the boogeyman of Wall Street."
Motley Broom did not dispute that the cap is a partial answer. Earlier versions of the bill were stricter, she said, and getting anything through Congress is hard enough that compromises were unavoidable. "We have to take those incremental gains," she said.