Modern Redlining: The COVID-19 Impact on Housing Insecurity in Suburban Atlanta & the Role of Racial Capitalist Structures

Keywords: Housing insecurity, racial capitalism, eviction, mixed methods
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

The metro Atlanta region has one of the higher eviction rates in the country (Salviati 2017). Relative to its population size, the Clayton County Magistrate Court has the highest eviction and eviction filing rate of any of the five core counties of the Atlanta metropolitan area (Hepburn, Louis, & Desmond 2020). In recent decades, Clayton County has undergone dramatic change, transitioning from a primarily white suburban county in the 1980s to a predominantly impoverished black community with significant increases in multi-family and rental housing (Bullard 2000:11; Kruse 2005:245; U.S. Census). The COVID-19 pandemic allows researchers to view the housing crisis through a magnifying glass where the pandemic exacerbated already existing issues and problems. It exposed U.S. housing problems where housing insecurity and eviction regularly impacted people of color more often than white tenants prior to COVID (Desmond 2012; Finger 2019; Gold 2016:65; Maharawal & McElroy 2018:382). This study seeks to understand the racial capitalist nature of the pandemic responses from the federal government, the CDC, and the county combined with how an individual’s and families’ sociospatial locations worked to either disadvantage or advantage them through a combination of case record data collection and analysis, interviews, statistical, and critical geospatial analysis. Additionally, a social autopsy of the pandemic period will be performed by examining the conditions prior to and during the pandemic and whether they represent both physical and social racial segregation or modern redlining and abandonment of POC who society deems “disposable” (Pulido 2016:5).