College Football and the Housing Crisis

As I’ve said many times, those who respond to the housing and homelessness crises by saying BUILD BUILD BUILD are just pushing a simplistic talking point that serves to diminish just how complex these issues are. Yes, build all you can. 100%, I completely support this. But it’s not just about building. It is about how you build, what the pricing is on it, the size of what you build. It’s about not only building, but forcing people to live in the housing, which as anyone who has spent time on the west coast where homelessness encampments are endemic knows, a lot of those people don’t want to do. You have to deal with all the social problems that lead to people becoming homeless, outside of just not being able to afford housing, which is a big part of it of course. But it’s also about lifestyle choices, about drug addictions, about mental health. You don’t solve the homelessness issue without dealing with all of this. Then you have what happens when rich people buy up huge amounts of housing stock in apartments and remodel it to create themselves a palace, which is a huge issue in New York.

Then in smaller cities such as Athens or Tuscaloosa or Ann Arbor, you have people buying up homes for the AirBNB market and mostly they just sit empty except for seven weekends a year, when you can charge a few thousand bucks for people to stay in them when they come to watch college football.

Rashe Malcolm loves her son Wayne and his girlfriend, but she’d also love it if they could move out of the three-bedroom home in Athens, Ga., that she shares with the couple, both 23, as well as her husband and two of her three other children.

But the rent is too high for anyone to go anywhere, at least locally.

“If you go to these newer units, I mean if you can get one for $1,800, that’s considered cheap,” said Ms. Malcolm, 48. “For a one-bedroom — a one-bedroom. It’s like $2,100 on average.”

Life in Athens, a city of about 127,000 residents, centers on its largest employer: the flagship campus of the University of Georgia, which enrolls more than 40,000 students and employs about 10,000 people. Like many U.S. cities, it has seen rents rise over the past few years, even as developers have added new units to the market. Much of the construction is luxury off-campus housing for the growing student population.

But Ms. Malcolm believes that the rent issue in Athens has more to do with football.

The Georgia Bulldogs — the two-time defending national champions — draw some 90,000 spectators to Sanford Stadium for six or seven home games every fall, essentially creating an alternate market for short-term rentals that lasts about three months. Real estate investors are buying and building homes for fans who will pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a weekend of housing for a home game, and the effects are impacting local residents all year long. According to AirDNA, which tracks the performance data of Airbnb and VRBO vacation rentals, there are currently 1,135 short-term rentals available in Athens — up from 865 in November 2022 — with 88 percent of them comprising an entire private home.

Ms. Malcolm, who lives on the west side of Athens, runs a nonprofit called Farm to Neighborhood and a food truck and catering company, Rashe’s Cuisine, on the city’s east side, not far from Sanford Stadium. “It is a historically Black area,” she said, “so when football games happen, you do start to see more non-Black people coming through the neighborhood and walking over to the liquor store to get beer to go back to their rental.”

Athens is no outlier. Around the United States, in small cities reliant on college sports to keep their economies humming, short-term rentals are destabilizing housing markets, fueled by wealthy fans and investors who transform single-family homes into de facto hotels for a few weeks out of the year, and often leave them sitting empty the rest of the time.

“College athletics, in particular college football, have become so enormous in this country, particularly in the Southeast, that it has caused this phenomenon of short-term rentals,” said Adrien Bouchet, director of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program at the University of Central Florida. “On one hand it creates value, but on the other hand, it definitely hurts people that have lived in and around the university for a long time.”

Mr. Bouchet pointed to similar market trends in Southern college towns like Auburn, Ala., Tuscaloosa, Ala., Gainesville, Fla., and Oxford, Miss., where football rules the economy during the fall. Over the past year, the supply of short-term rentals has grown 34 percent in Tuscaloosa (home to the University of Alabama), 33 percent in Columbia, Mo. (University of Missouri), and 11 percent in South Bend, Ind. (University of Notre Dame), according to data from AirDNA. Bookings typically peak in November.

So yeah, you have to deal with what homeowners can do with their homes too.

In other words, if you want to solve the housing crisis, you need to get off of the BUILD BUILD BUILD mantra and look at the entirety of the situation. The SEC is not going away. We need a ton more regulations. AirBNB basically needs to be banned, or at least taxed out of existence in most places. You should not be able to combine apartments. And yes, you need to facilitate building densely without parking too. But this is a really complex problem that at its core comes down to the idea that we should be able to do what we want with a property when we buy it, which is a vile insidious form of libertarianism. And yet, if you leave it up to neighborhood associations, doing things collectively is also a complete disaster. This is why it has to be at the government level.

And to be clear, when many of us LGM front pagers get together for the Drive-By Truckers Homecoming in Athens this February with The Paranoid Style opening, we are staying in hotels, not AirBNBs.