At the same time, these narratives tap into and are reinforced by the metaphors of blight, crime, and aesthetic degradation that middle class residents and community leaders use to portray apartments as in need of redevelopment, while carefully avoiding any explicit reference to the racial and/or ethnic background of their residents. During interviews, everyday conversations, and social media posts, participants repeatedly used words such as “slums,” “filthy,” “blighted,” “run-down,” “terrible,” “dangerous,” and “crime-ridden” to describe the apartment complexes. Direct references to their tenants, albeit less frequent, included labels such as “Mexicans,” “illegal aliens,” “bad apples,” and “neighbors who will steal your things.” Apartment residents were also depicted as “a heavy transient community that is not invested in how the City of Sandy Springs operates” and whose presence affects the quality of local public schools. All these racially coded utterances stigmatize non-white social groups indirectly, by discursively constructing the social and built environments where they reside as dangerous, dirty, disorderly, pathological, and morally flawed. As other scholars have showed, such representations are often deployed to justify projects of neighborhood revitalization that will render an area “‘safe’ for investment by remaking a black [and brown] space white.”