ATLANTA — Atlanta city councilmembers are scheduled to vote next week on a resolution urging state lawmakers to change the Georgia law that bans rent control, in order to allow local governments to enact rent control if they wish.
It’s an idea that resonates with many people who love Atlanta, but moved away -- including three women who were walking together Wednesday evening along the BeltLine in Midtown Atlanta.
“We’re all nurses, so we make a pretty decent living,” said Amanda Cohn, who now lives in Dunwoody. “But living here, near Ponce City, in the Midtown and Downtown area, it’s too expensive.”
Their rents in Atlanta increased to well over $2,000 a month for one bedrooms.
Nike Amosun, who now lives in Smyrna, said she and the others had no other choice.
“I moved to the suburbs,” Amosun said. “Left Atlanta altogether. Just because of the rent.”
They could be Exhibits 1, 2 and 3 for the case that Atlanta City Councilmember Keisha Waites is trying to make, again, to the state legislature.
“We’re becoming a city where working families simply cannot afford to live here,” Waites said Wednesday.
Next week, Waites will ask the City Council to approve a resolution urging the state legislature to vote to allow cities in Georgia to decide if they want to pass their own local ordinances imposing rent control.
“We’re not trying to mess with the marketplace, we believe that that takes care of itself,” she said. “But we have an affordable-housing crisis right now in the city of Atlanta. I’m getting calls from families that work 40 hours a week and more, and simply cannot maintain any cost of lodging because the cost is just simply high.”
Critics of rent control say it discourages developers from building new apartments, knowing they might not be able to charge what they want for rent, and that, in turn, decreases the housing supply.
Waites said her plan would focus only on landlords who received government tax breaks and subsidies to build their apartments — regulate the rents that they charge, she said, and leave other landlords alone.
“We’re not messing with luxury homes, luxury high rises,” Waites said. “That’s a different conversation. We’re simply saying if you’re receiving any public dollars or public subsidy, that you would be required to have a set-aside for affordable housing in the city of Atlanta.”
Waites knows that a majority of state lawmakers are, so far, against allowing government to regulate rents, but she hopes a resolution from Atlanta City Hall might help sway some minds — and ultimately, maybe, help keep residents of Georgia’s capital city from moving away.
“If we are locked into this one price that we can afford right now, today,” Amanda Cohn said, “if you can guarantee me that for the next five years, then I might stay where I’m at.”