by Ty Tagami | May 7, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Institutional investors who vacuumed up single family homes when prices cratered after the Great Recession are drawing more political heat as renters complain about the impact.
U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia announced Wednesday that he is launching inquiries with several of the top companies in the sector, following a congressional hearing last year when tenants complained about roach infestations, water-damaged ceilings, and sewage leaking into showers.
The Democrat’s announcement came after Republican Gov. Brian Kemp said Monday that he will not seek to unseat Ossoff, triggering speculation about who the GOP primary candidates will be for next year’s election.
State Republican lawmakers have also targeted the housing industry, illustrating the political traction of the issue.
Last month, lawmakers sent Kemp bipartisan legislation that would require tenants of houses or duplexes to give code enforcement officers contact information for their property manager.
Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, D-Decatur, the chief co-sponsor of House Bill 399, said it would require out-of-state investors, such as hedge funds, to have a local broker and a local property manager.
A more aggressive bill that sought to cap each big owner at 2,000 properties didn’t get far after constitutional concerns were raised by former state Attorney General Sam Olens, who testified for the industry.
Seven corporations own more than 51,000 single-family homes in the 21-county metro-Atlanta region, according to a blog by the Atlanta Regional Commission late last year.
Metro Atlanta was the top region nationally for this investment activity, with 25% of the single-family home rentals — 71,832 homes — consolidated in the hands of large investors in 2022, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported last year.
The 2008 recession forced many homeowners into foreclosure, flooding the market with cheap housing. Institutional investors, such as publicly traded real estate investment trusts, leveraged their access to capital to buy them at scale.
Algorithms allowed investors to identify desirable properties while online management portals allowed them to attract tenants and efficiently manage geographically dispersed portfolios, the GAO report said.
It noted a 2018 report by one organization that said the difficulty in scaling the acquisition and management of properties before the advent of this technology “was the primary reason large-scale investment in single-family housing did not develop sooner.”
by Ty Tagami | May 6, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – With Republicans’ top potential candidate on the sidelines for Georgia’s next U.S. Senate election, the 2026 GOP primary promises to be a live one.
When Gov. Brian Kemp announced on Monday that he will pass on a bid for Senate, he kicked off fervent prognosticating about who in his party could unseat the Senate’s top fundraiser.
Democrat Jon Ossoff has piled up $32 million, nearly twice as much as the next Senate incumbent.
Several Republicans from Georgia’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives are considered likely contenders. Representatives Buddy Carter, Mike Collins, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Rich McCormick could simply re-aim their House campaign funds at a bid for Senate, giving them a head start on fundraising.
Other high-profile Georgia elected officials, such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner John King, may also have enough name recognition and connections to launch a campaign.
Veteran Georgia political activist Cole Muzio, an influential figure in conservative politics, said he thinks those are all probable contenders, but said the field is likely much larger. At this stage, there could be as many as two dozen state politicians and business leaders considering a run in what he called a “shadow primary.” They are probably trying to reach donors and influential leaders, including President Donald Trump and Kemp, to gauge support before announcing their candidacy next week or after, he said.
There were no big announcements Tuesday. Greene was posting on X about transgender athletes and drug cartels. Collins had a post about the anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster.
Meanwhile, Charlie Bailey, the newly elected chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia, taunted the potential challengers, asserting that they would “squabble and grovel for Trump’s favor” before going up against a dug-in Ossoff.
“While they attack one other and cater to the MAGA extreme right, we will build the most effective and unstoppable turnout effort in state history,” he said.
Muzio, a close Kemp ally as founder and president of the Frontline Policy Council, said he is interested in watching whether Trump and Kemp back the same candidates. The two leaders famously fell out in Trump’s first term but have been cordial lately.
Kemp posted on X that he had spoken with Trump before announcing that he would not run against Ossoff, pledging to help the Republican that does.
Though many were shocked by Kemp’s decision, Muzio said he was not surprised. He described the governor as an “alpha” executive who is “wired to be a decision maker.” Kemp would not have relished being one of 100 members of a deliberate and “very” slow legislative body “that’s all about making speeches in empty rooms,” Muzio said. “It’s just not a job that’s going to appeal.”
by Ty Tagami | May 6, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – As a generation of teachers retire and their burned-out younger colleagues quit sooner, complaining about the workload and the pay, public schools have struggled to keep their classrooms staffed.
Georgia lawmakers thought they had found a solution, passing House Bill 385 three years ago. It allowed retired teachers with 30 years of service to return to the classroom with full pay and pension from the Teachers Retirement System (TRS), provided they sat on the sidelines for one year.
The newly deepened bench helped, but not much, a new state audit has found.
The number of retirees who returned to the classroom represented less than 1% of the state’s teacher workforce, said “Retired Teachers Return to Work,” a report by the Georgia Department of Audits & Accounts.
“HB 385 has had a minimal effect on the continued need for teachers and on TRS,” the performance audit said. “The number of full-time retirees employed each year (approximately 350) is substantially smaller than the statewide teacher population.”
One reason, said the report, is that requirements for 30 years of service and the one-year timeout are more restrictive than similar laws in many other states.
Georgia lawmakers adopted the one-year timeout because they didn’t want to encourage teachers to retire earlier, since that could have exacerbated turnover.
But school systems told the auditors that a waiting period longer than a semester caused retirees to find jobs elsewhere, for instance at private schools, or to get a taste of retirement and decide they didn’t want to work anymore.
With HB 385 expiring next summer, lawmakers started rethinking their plan. They proposed a slightly different approach during this recent legislative session.
Georgia public schools were short 5,300 teachers as of December. Senate Bill 150, sponsored by Sen. Billy Hickman, R-Statesboro, chairman of the Senate Education and Youth Committee, would allow former teachers to return to the classroom 60 days after they retire following 25 years of service.
Lawmakers did not advance the bill, but the Senate Retirement Committee did refer it for a cost analysis. It will still be in play when lawmakers return in January for the next session of the General Assembly.
by Ty Tagami | May 5, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The lawyer who secured the legal visitor status for 133 international students in federal court last week is seeking to expand his lawsuit to potentially include thousands of plaintiffs.
Charles Kuck filed a motion late last week seeking permission to roll his case into a class action lawsuit. It seeks to add Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a defendant, “challenging the legality of Secretary Rubio to coordinate the mass revocation of student visas without notice.”
The motion added that “Congress delegated the authority to revoke ‘a visa,’ but it could not delegate the authority to revoke all visas at one fell swoop.”
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Victoria Marie Calvert of the Northern District of Georgia issued a preliminary injunction in favor of Kuck and his clients, extending the temporary restraining order she had already issued against the administration of President Donald Trump.
The original lawsuit, which named U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi as lead defendant, argued that the federal government had unlawfully revoked the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVIS) authority for those 133 current and former students, stripping them of the right to work and barring them from re-entering the country if they happened to leave.
Calvert’s order required U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to restore the visitor status of the 27 foreign nationals who were attending a Georgia college or university or doing post-graduate work. It also required ICE to do the same for 106 similar plaintiffs in other states.
Calvert determined that Kuck’s clients had a good chance of winning their case by proving that the government had acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” way against them. She also agreed with Kuck’s request to bundle the cases of the 106 plaintiffs outside the Northern District of Georgia with those within the district to reduce legal costs and the workload on the court system.
Kuck is using similar logic to expand his case to class action status.
A 204-page exhibit to his new motion, which was filed on Thursday, said 4,000 to 8,000 students had their visitor status terminated since March 24, “without due process, without notice, and in violation of the regulations.” It said a class action “is now the only avenue to keep from wasting judicial resources and the protection of the class members’ rights.”
It accused the government of unlawfully subjecting foreign student visitors to the risk of incarceration and deportation.
by Ty Tagami | May 2, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – A federal judge in Atlanta ordered the Trump administration on Friday to maintain the legal status of 133 current and former international college students who were legally admitted into the United States for school only to have their status suddenly revoked.
The preliminary injunction by Judge Victoria Marie Calvert of the Northern District of Georgia was anticipated after she issued a temporary restraining order in favor of the plaintiffs last month.
A federal attorney for the administration officials named as defendants, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, produced no evidence to justify revoking the plaintiffs’ status under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVIS), Calvert wrote.
“Defendants have had ample opportunity to provide the court with additional information about the SEVIS terminations but have consistently failed to do so,” says her order, which prohibits the government from repeating the revocations during the duration of the lawsuit. “Defendants’ failure to provide a single plausibly lawful explanation for its action is the exact circumstance contemplated by the arbitrary and capricious standard.”
Calvert concluded that the students would likely win their case, which accuses the government of acting in an arbitrary and capricious — and unlawful — way.
The anonymous plaintiffs include 27 foreign nationals attending a Georgia college or university or doing post-graduate work, the order says. Another 106 are in other states, and their attorneys argued that the cases should be bundled to reduce their legal costs and the workload on the court system.
Calvert allowed all 133 to proceed in this one case.
Calvert’s order indefinitely extends the temporary restraining order she issued two weeks ago that required U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to restore the plaintiffs’ visitor status.
The agency’s prior revocation of the students’ status stripped them of the right to work and would have barred them from re-entering the country if they left to visit home. Their attorney, Charles Kuck, argued it would have caused irreparable harm that outweighed the harm to the government, and the judge agreed.
Assistant U.S. Attorney R. David Powell failed to convince her that President Donald Trump’s administration would face irreparable harm from a ruling against the government that would “interfere with the executive’s right to control immigration.”
Calvert’s order is the latest legal setback for the president’s immigration policy after a string of court decisions favoring foreign students whose visitor status was similarly revoked without notice or explanation. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., also recently accused the Trump administration of “arbitrary and capricious” actions.
During last week’s hearing on this preliminary injunction, Powell said ICE has been busy restoring students’ status, with judges’ orders coming weekly, daily and “sometimes multiple per day.”
