It is also important to understand where this is happening. Cities hit hardest by the Great Recession saw the largest increase in rentals.86 In fact, private equity firms concentrated their acquisitions not just on specific cities but on specific neighborhoods or what one executive called “strike zones.”87 In one Atlanta zip code, for instance, Blackstone’s Invitation Homes bought 90 percent of the homes sold over a year and a half.88 This should be no surprise: these were the places where Fannie Mae owned foreclosed homes, which Fannie auctioned off to investors in the process that started the entire rental boom. But it meant that the people who lost the most during the Recession were the ones who regained the least in the years that followed. In fact, according to one credit rating agency, Colony’s tenants were typically former homeowners themselves, people who could no longer afford a home but who often retained some ties to the neighborhood.89 By concentrating their purchases—by exercising control over local markets—private equity firms made it difficult for people to leave. Or as Jennifer St. Denis, a single mother and renter in Atlanta, told the Mercury News, “At this point I’m stuck in a renting pattern because rent increases keep going up and moving out is expensive.”90 She noted that Invitation owned most of the homes in the area that she would want to live in anyway.