CHARLOTTE — Her 3-bedroom 2-bath house with vinyl siding had never attracted so many admirers. Every week, the mail brought more postcard offers: Sell now! Will buy as is! Everyone in the neighborhood was getting them.
To Valerie Hamilton, then president of the Potters Glen Homeowners Association, it didn’t sit right. Already, more than 20 homeowners in her Charlotte neighborhood had sold out to investors and their houses had been quickly converted to rentals.
“We were being bombarded,” Hamilton said.
Like hundreds of communities across the United States, Hamilton’s neighborhood had become the target of large companies amassing empires of suburban homes for rent. Since the Great Recession, when millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure, these companies have been expanding their portfolios of tens of thousands of single-family houses, a disproportionate number of them located in majority-Black neighborhoods like Potters Glen.
Read more at the Washington Post.