About this investigation

Years of tracking homicides across metro Atlanta revealed a bleak and persistent reality: Murders cluster at certain apartment complexes. As crime escalated in the city and its suburbs, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution attempted to find out why.

Doing so took a year of reporting, including the creation of a standardized database of serious felonies investigated by 15 of the area’s law enforcement agencies. It is the first of its kind for the region and matches crime reports to apartment complexes, some of which have dozens, if not hundreds, of street addresses.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also examined five years of code-enforcement records from 19 jurisdictions, lawsuits, property records, corporate documents and files from local and state housing agencies. Through analyzing all the records, the Journal-Constitution identified more than 250 persistently unsafe and unhealthy apartment complexes.

The newspaper supplemented the documentary material with interviews with dozens of residents, housing experts, police and government officials, and apartment owners. The evidence showed that high crime and other dangers can go hand in hand with a business model that relies on scarce affordable housing and government inaction.

The pandemic posed special challenges to this research. Door-to-door canvassing was unsafe for reporters and tenants, so the Journal-Constitution relied on eviction filings, code complaints and other public records to locate residents. Reporters and photographers made in-person visits using masks and social distancing.

Corporate secrecy presented another obstacle. Most of the property owners are shielded by limited liability companies, and identifying them required intensive research using publicly available databases. In a few instances, the identity of owners could not be determined.

Some government agencies balked at providing data or at explaining how they responded to complaints about dangerous conditions.

DeKalb County, for instance, provided code-enforcement data only after the Journal-Constitution told the county attorney it was considering litigation to obtain the material.

Only three school districts — Atlanta, Cobb County and DeKalb County — released data showing the number of schoolage children living in certain complexes. And Clayton County police said that technical problems converting data from their old mainframe computer to a new system complicated providing crime information.