The city of Atlanta is embarking upon perhaps its most aggressive crackdown on predatory and negligent landlords to date, as it steps up oversight and enforcement against those providing substandard living conditions to low-income renters to bring them up to compliance with the city’s housing code.

Mayor Andre Dickens’ top housing advisor, Joshua Humphries, shared some details of the city’s new Safe and Secure Housing initiative exclusively with Atlanta Civic Circle. It specifically targets 57 “high-priority” properties with a “high number of code violations and/or violent crime,” he said in a statement, and 16 apartment complexes are already in “some stage of the enforcement process.”

To have the manpower to do this, the city is increasing funding to its code enforcement team and law department, and hiring new staff for the solicitor’s office “to initiate litigation on each and every property that merits legal action,” Humphries said. He did not say how much additional staff would be hired. The city is also hiring outside law firms to file and litigate cases.

By mid-2022, the city had initiated enforcement actions against five of the 16 properties: Trestletree Village in Ormewood Park, Forest Cove in Thomasville Heights, Daron Village on the Westside, Pavilion Place on the southside, and the Fairburn Gordon Apartments in Adamsville. 

Since then, the city has launched enforcement actions on 11 more properties, with plans to expand the program this summer, Humphries said. That includes dispatching multi-agency inspection teams to log violations, criminal citations against non-corporate ownership, and civil litigation against corporate owners. In some cases, property owners could voluntarily enter into settlement agreements with the city to resolve the violations or security issues.

The city is taking a more comprehensive, data-driven approach to spotting problems at…

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