In Georgia’s ‘battleground county,’ housing looms large

Now, in the northeast metro Atlanta suburb, she is paying more than $1,800 a month on a $65,000 annual salary. She’s put off buying a new car or saving for a down payment on a home of her own.

“I have grandchildren now. I just want my family to be able to come visit me and all of us be in one place, rather than having to split up because I only have two bedrooms. But I can’t afford anything else,” Berry said last month, outside the Lucky Shoals Park gym on Britt Road.

Jeffrey Riley, a 66-year-old retiree, cited housing as among the reasons he’d voted for the vice president, including her proposed down payment assistance program of $25,000 for first-time homebuyers and her promise to crack down on high rent costs and corporate landlords.

“We need somebody who’s going to regulate that,” he said.

Matt Reynolds

Matt Reynolds

The Great Recession had a profound impact on housing in Gwinnett, leading to a construction free fall and a dearth of affordable housing. During the COVID-19 pandemic, housing prices exploded, interest rates soared, and rents rose by hundreds of dollars per month.

According to Gwinnett County’s blueprint for growth and community development, called the 2045 Unified Plan, roughly 56,000 households, or 18%, are burdened by housing costs — spending more than 30% of their income. A more recent study by S&P Global Ratings put the percentage of cost-burdened households in Gwinnett at 34% in 2022.

There is a large disparity between white and Black homeownership in the county. According to the Atlanta Regional Commission, though metro Atlanta has the highest rate of Black homeownership among the most populous U.S. cities, the gap is nearly 30 percentage points in Gwinnett.

‘Black eye’

Seeger Gray / AJC

Seeger Gray / AJC

Nicole Love Hendrickson, chair of the Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners and a Democrat, said the current cost-of-living crisis and the economy could be a “black eye” on the Biden administration and that high housing costs are contributing to the malaise.

Anecdotally, she had heard from voters that the Trump campaign was targeting the county’s Black male Democrats in a bid to flip their votes.

“I think Republicans feel like: ‘We can probably pull at the hearts and minds of some of the Democrats who are feeling the squeeze of the economy, and get them over to our side,’” she said.

The county’s changing politics go hand in hand with its rapid growth and diversity. In 1960, there were just 12,000 homes in what was then a mostly white, rural suburb northeast of Atlanta. Ten years later, the population was 75,000.

Flash forward five decades, and there are now close to 1 million people in a county marked by new developments, strip malls, and suburban sprawl.

For decades, the county was able to keep up with the surge in population by building new homes. Then came the financial crisis. Between 2010 and 2020, the county went from producing an average of 8,000 new units each year before the downturn to less than half that, building up a yawning deficit in new housing.

At the current pace, constructing 3,500 new units a year only meets 25% of the new demand for housing, with a projected housing gap of about 11,500 units per year, according to a 2022 county housing study. The Gwinnett County 2045 Unified Plan calls for 8,500 new and replacement units each year to help meet demand.

Pushing the needle

Arvin Temkar/AJC

Arvin Temkar/AJC

Gwinnett County Republican Party Chairman Sammy Baker said door-to-door canvassers are leaning on concerns about the economy under Biden and Harris, including the cost of groceries, rent and homes which are “lumped together.” He believes it’s unlikely Trump will flip a county that Biden won four years ago by 18 points. But in a race that could be decided by thousands of votes, pushing the needle even by a small amount could tilt the state in Trump’s favor.

Trump only won 40% of Gwinnett’s vote in 2020 but secured more votes there — 166,000 — than in any other county in the state.

“We only need to increase it 2%, 3%. We don’t have to win the county,” Baker said

On the first day of early voting at George Pierce Park Community Recreation Center, many of the Trump supporters the AJC spoke to mentioned the economy and cost of living. When asked about housing costs, homeowner Brian McGill cited high mortgage rates.

“If we got a new home, we’re looking at 6% to 7% interest rates with higher pricing. We have children who are starting to get into the housing market. What are they going to do? Rents are through the roof,” he said.

Retired schoolteacher Jill Allen said she was better off when Trump was in power. She’s not convinced that Harris’ plan to build more houses would ease the crisis. The Trump campaign is blaming the housing shortage on undocumented immigrants, and the former president says he plans a mass deportation program if elected.

Though Allen said, “It’s not their fault,” she agreed with Trump that it was making a bad problem worse.

“I also don’t like the fact that they’re housing illegal people and leaving the veterans not taken care of,” she said. “The veterans are struggling. They’re homeless.”

Back in Norcross, Ciara Smith was casting her first ballot. Wearing a peach sticker on her left cheek, the 19-year-old wants to eventually move out of her grandmother’s house and into her first apartment. She had voted for Harris and said her messages on housing had “sort of, kind of” gotten through. She earns $11.50 an hour and said most of the one-bedrooms she looked at were about $1,200 a month, or more.

“It’s hard to get a crib,” she said.

Gwinnett County Democratic Party Chairwoman Brenda López Romero said housing affordability and rent were probably a “close second” to cost of living among voter concerns. She believes that in the culturally diverse county, the disparity between Black and white people and housing is true for “all communities.”

“We can’t do a conversation solely about African American voters because that dismisses about 60% of the population,” she said.