Non-Fungible People
Stop trying to prove that you're real
Contemporary real estate is an awkward marriage of two functions, shelter and investment, physically manifested in the form of the house. Lately, the American home’s financial role has grown relative to its traditional purpose, occasionally to such a degree that the shelter function becomes an afterthought. Like commodity derivatives, residential real estate is often just the physical substrate that backs a tradable asset, with vacant units in condo towers and suburban subdivisions sitting idle like bars of gold owned via ETFs that are bought and sold on Robinhood.
However virtual and liquid housing becomes, however, the actual buildings still exist, and one person’s underutilized asset can become another’s shelter, if they can find a way to access it. About 72,000 homes in the Atlanta metro area are owned by institutional investors—it’s the largest US market for institutional real estate investment—and squatters occupy a growing number of those homes, as a recent article reports:
“Around 1,200 homes in metro Atlanta recently have had squatters—or people occupying a property illegally without a landlord-tenant relationship—according to an estimate from the National Rental Home Council trade group. That’s far more than in any other US metro area tracked by the council…Landlords say evicting intruders can take half a year or more, due to backlogged court systems and overwhelmed sheriff’s offices.”
By one estimate, Atlanta’s squatter population may have quadrupled since the pandemic started. Rising housing costs during that period have increased the desire to squat while simultaneously rewarding the houses’ owners, who had amassed large portfolios of single-family rental properties in the wake of the 2008 foreclosure crisis.
And while the companies that own the houses have implemented solutions like smart-home devices and “notification systems to address trespassing,” the same digital technology has, ironically, also enabled squatters to identify and move into those properties.