Only a few months ago, Housing Is A Human Right detailed Greystar’s shocking track record in its mistreatment of tenants, and now the corporate landlord has created yet another disturbing scandal. The New York Times recently reported that a watchdog group found that Greystar, the largest landlord in the United States, has “systematically refused” to accept Section 8 housing vouchers in a number of states where that’s illegal. It’s no small thing.
“Greystar has been committing mass civil rights violations at a scale unlike anything our organization has ever seen,” Aaron Carr, executive director of Housing Rights Initiative, told the New York Times.
Greystar, based in Charleston, South Carolina, and helmed by CEO Bob Faith, owns more than 119,000 apartments in multiple states, including California, Texas, Colorado, and Georgia. It also manages more than one million units. According to the National Multifamily Housing Council, Greystar owns and manages the most apartments in the country. On its website, Greystar touts a commitment to integrity and equality, but in reality, based on cold-hard facts, that simply isn’t the case.
In 2022, Greystar was cited in an explosive investigation by ProPublica about RealPage: the Big Tech firm offered a software program that appeared to help corporate landlords to collude and wildly inflate rents in cities across the U.S. At a time of skyrocketing rents, the story turned into a nationwide scandal filled with lawsuits and government investigations – and Greystar was at the center of it.
Nearly two years later, in August 2024, the Department of Justice and a group of state attorneys general filed an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, which was later expanded to include several corporate landlords. Guess who was named? Greystar.
Around the same time, the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Colorado investigated Greystar for alleged deceptive advertising, which also resulted in higher rents. Greystar would advertise one price for rent, but once a tenant moved into an apartment, he or she would suddenly be hit with hidden fees that would jack up the rent.
“According to the complaint filed by the FTC and Colorado,” a Federal Trade Commission press release stated, “these hidden fees have cost consumers living in Greystar properties hundreds of millions of dollars since at least 2019, and consumers often have not discovered the fees until after they have signed a lease or moved in.”
In fact, in Las Vegas, Greystar charged a 93-year-old mother a $25-per-month hidden fee for a parking space she didn’t even use.
After deviously grabbing millions of dollars in tenant cash through RealPage and hidden fees, Greystar CEO Bob Faith settled with the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission in 2025. Now there’s the newest scandal – and once again tenants are the victims.
The New York Times reported that since October, “testers” trained by Housing Rights Initiative have been calling Greystar offices throughout the U.S., posing as prospective tenants with Section 8 vouchers, which help lower-income people pay the rent for an apartment. The organization wanted to see if Greystar would refuse to do business with such tenants.
Landlord participation in the Section 8 program is voluntary, but many states have laws that require landlords to accept the voucher, so Housing Rights Initiative testers called Greystar in Maryland, Hawaii, New Jersey, Michigan, California, Virginia, and Washington D.C. The organization found more than 100 violations of fair housing laws in those states – Greystar refused to accept Section 8 vouchers or put illegal requirements on the use of them.
Housing Rights Initiative Executive Director Aaron Carr told the New York Times that declining the vouchers can be a way to keep low-income tenants out of an apartment complex, especially the kind of luxury-housing buildings that Greystar operates.
Now it’s a matter of what will happen next.
Will the federal government finally clamp down on Greystar and not only look into the Section 8 scandal, but take things one step further and carry out a more sweeping investigation of Greystar’s business practices? At this point, after three major scandals, it seems like a reasonable idea. After all, tenants across the country are continually suffering the consequences of Greystar’s harmful, and illegal, conduct. It’s a troubling pattern that needs a deeper look.
Patrick Range McDonald is a veteran investigative reporter and the award-winning advocacy journalist for Housing Is A Human Right.