Anxious. Annoyed. Angry.
Those are just a few of the emotions expressed by the steady stream of Black folks seen walking in and out of the magistrate case information office inside the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta on Tuesday as some desperately sought legal aid before appearing in court for pending eviction cases.
Metro Atlanta native Brittani Sullivan, a 36-year-old single mom and resident at the GE Tower apartment complex in Mechanicsville for about 13 years, was facing eviction for unpaid rent.
Cases like hers are increasingly common in metro Atlanta, which led the nation in the number of eviction cases filed last year, according to recent data unveiled by Eviction Lab. The analysis released earlier this month showed Black renters in the metro area are being disproportionately impacted. It revealed around half of the five-county region’s 2025 eviction cases were filed on units located in majority-Black neighborhoods.
About 71% of all eviction cases filed in the region last year were against Black people even though Black residents make up about 53% of all the metro area’s renters, Eviction Lab found. White renters, in contrast, constituted just 15% of eviction cases in the area despite representing 31% of its renters.
Sullivan, who works as a manager at Peppers Hotdogs and has a second, part-time job as a local bartender, told Capital B Atlanta she stopped paying her $786 monthly rent about four years ago because the property management team failed to address repairs after a water leak flooded her and her 8-year-old daughter’s two-bedroom apartment.
“My home was destroyed and nobody did a damn thing about it,” Sullivan said. “For the past four or five years, because of the lack of continuity and care, and because they continuously fired and hired different property management companies, my home was in disarray.”
Court records reviewed by Capital B Atlanta show Sullivan’s dispossession case was resolved Tuesday after she agreed to pay $2,743 in past-due rent.
“When your wage or your income pay is $1,200 or a little bit less after taxes, you can’t afford a $1,700 one-bedroom home. The math is not math-ing.”
Cassandre Damas, managing attorney for the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation’s Housing Court Assistance Center.
The five county region of Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, Clayton, and DeKalb saw more than 144,000 eviction filings in 2025, according to Eviction Lab’s research. That’s more than cities like New York and the entire state of Virginia, according to Eviction Lab communication and policy manager Juan Pablo Garnham, who said Atlanta appears to have the highest level of housing instability in the nation despite having a much smaller population than other major cities.
“The amount of eviction activity that we see in Atlanta in these five counties we have data for is astonishing,” Garnham said. “That’s a huge and loud alarm that we should hear.”
Garnham said Atlanta’s eviction crisis began in 2023, after the city’s COVID-19 moratorium on evictions was lifted. More than 155,000 eviction cases were filed in the region in 2023. That figure dropped to about 144,915 evictions in 2024 and remained steady last year.
The elevated cost of rent after the pandemic combined with the shrinking stock of affordable housing and stagnant wages for disproportionately Black, low-income tenants are the root causes for metro Atlanta’s eviction epidemic, according to Garnham and Cassandre Damas, managing attorney for the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation’s Housing Court Assistance Center.
Damas’ three-member staff has an office inside the Fulton County Courthouse that provides legal advice and counseling to tenants facing eviction and helps them resolve disputes with landlords.
(Chauncey Alcorn/Capital B)
The veteran attorney, who has been doing housing law in Atlanta since 2017, said low wages are the main cause of eviction cases she sees. She said the minimum wage in Georgia — which is still $5.15 per hour and more than $2 less than the federal minimum wage — doesn’t pay enough for people to afford the average apartment in Atlanta.
“The general rule is that a person should only pay 30% of their income to housing,” Damas told Capital B Atlanta on Tuesday. “When your wage or your income pay is $1,200 or a little bit less after taxes, you can’t afford a $1,700 one-bedroom home. The math is not math-ing.”
Damas said tenants who can’t afford to rent apartments with suitable housing conditions often are forced to rent from landlords who decline to make repairs and are quick to file evictions.
Payton Prokes, a future law student and volunteer with the lawyers foundation, said raising Georgia’s minimum wage could help solve the problem.
“The cost of everything — housing, schooling, child care, health care — has [risen] exponentially when compared to how wages have,” Prokes said. “If people have more money from the work that they’re doing, that would certainly be a start.”
Garnham recommended establishing a right to legal counsel in Atlanta, creating more public and private philanthropic rental assistance programs, and changing zoning laws to promote more affordable housing construction in the region.
He said cities like New York and Philadelphia saw their eviction rates decline notably after implementing similar policies and programs.
“We want Atlanta and Black Atlantans to thrive, “Garnham said. “This is something we have to hear and we have to take action.”
Read More:
