Financial violence is racial violence: geographies of housing financialization spatialize hierarchies of death-dealing racial difference. However, research concerned with housing financialization rarely addresses the inextricable relationship between racism and capitalism. Racial division and subordination have always been necessary to producing value in real estate; financialization materially reproduces racial capitalism by reconfiguring the death-dealing abstraction of racism from systems of individual bias and racialized bodies into automated systems. Rather than reducing racially subordinated communities to experiences of oppression and domination, producing life-giving geographies of housing requires bringing collective resistance for emancipatory social change into the analytic frame.

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Displacement of Black communities through gentrification is a major concern among policymakers, community groups, and advocates. This research investigates whether investor purchases of multifamily rental housing predict evictions and the displacement of Black residents from Atlanta, Georgia, between 2000 and 2016. In a series of quantitative analyses, we identify the financialization of rental housing and subsequent eviction-led displacement as key neighborhood-level processes in racial transition and the gentrification of Atlanta. We find that eviction judgments grew by 8% annually in the Atlanta region, and same-site apartment sale prices increased by an average of $5.5 million. Investor purchases of rental housing in a neighborhood predict a spike in eviction judgments in the same year, and presage racial transition. Neighborhoods with investor purchases of apartment buildings lose 166 Black residents and gain 109 White residents over a 6-year period compared with adjacent neighborhoods with no investor purchases.

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