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Abstract
There were 63,983 more single-family rentals (SFRs) – a free-standing, detached residential housing unit occupied by a renter – in 2018 Atlanta than six years earlier. Invitation Homes (IH), a company at the forefront of an industry that did not exist in 2011, acquired 18% of them. IHis a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) owning 85,000 SFRs across 17 markets. It acquired most of those, roughly 80,000, between 2012 and the end of 2018. Atlanta, Georgia, is the firm’s largest market, where it owns over 12,000 single-family rentals across 19 counties and 119 municipalities. There is nothing particularly new about Invitation Homes as a financial entity. Entities like this have owned apartments like this since the 1970s. Therefore, while single-family REITs are new, REITs are not. The single-family home was the last physical structure of American real estate that Wall Street firms consolidated ownership of to extract and securitize rent. These corporate actors applied an existing financial structure used on other forms of real estate to low-density residential space on the periphery. Simply, Invitation Homes flipped the downtown apartment skyscraper on its side. I contend it is the single-family home’s suburban geography and associated neighborhood demographics that make Invitation Homes an interesting case study. This dissertation argues that IH is stretching the geography of renting in metropolitan Atlanta. To do so, this dissertation analyzes the geography of IH’s Atlanta portfolio in comparison to the geography of the pre- and post-Recession housing markets. I compared IH with the static and dynamic comparative geographies of single-family rental units across income segregation, racial segregation, and suburbanization measures – as a political jurisdiction and a neighborhood-level measure of urban sprawl. I find that IH’s consolidation of housing ownership in recently developed, higher-income, and whiter suburban neighborhoods signals a historical cleavage in the urban problematic as this publicly traded financial landlord stretches the familiar social and spatial geographies of rental housing.