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    $200 Million Bond Package Part of City’s New Housing Strategy

    A new Columbus Housing Strategy calls for increased investment, updated policies, and help from the city’s neighboring suburban jurisdictions to tackle a housing affordability crisis that is only predicted to get worse as the region grows.

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    Mayor Andrew Ginther and others spoke about the strategy at a press event held yesterday at Kenlawn Place, a new affordable housing complex in Linden.

    “Housing is essential infrastructure, just like transportation and utilities,” he said. “We’re creating jobs, but our housing creation isn’t keeping up.

    “No household should pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing; if you’re able to work in this region, you should be able to live here, too.”

    Many of the items outlined in the strategy have already been announced or are existing programs, like a plan to re-write the city’s zoning code, an upcoming update to tax abatement policies, and a new initiative designed to increase the number of people from underrepresented groups working as developers in Central Ohio.

    One significant new item, though, is the announcement that $200 million from this fall’s planned bond package will be dedicated to affordable housing, an increase from the $150 million initially announced by the mayor this past spring.

    The last bond package, in 2019, raised $50 million to support affordable housing, which the city says spurred a total of nearly $300 million in investment.

    Other highlights from the strategy:

    • A “green tape development program” designed to make the home-building process easier for individuals and smaller developers.
    • A new focus on preserving existing affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods by working with community partners to buy key properties.
    • Increased support for “innovative housing products” like modular or manufactured housing.
    • A goal to find the funding to continue effective programs started during the pandemic like Emergency Rental Assistance.

    Carlie Boos, Executive Director of the Affordable Housing Alliance of Central Ohio, is encouraged by the attention the issue of affordable housing is receiving, and by the scope of the city’s latest plans to address it.

    “This plan is bold, strategic, rigorous, and completely achievable,” she said. “Combining policy improvements with impact investments is the right move for Columbus and we’re proud to support the mayor’s work.”

    Erin Prosser, the city’s assistant director of housing strategies, told Columbus Underground in a recent interview that a lot can be learned by looking at other cities that have seen dramatic population and job growth in recent years.

    “They built roadways, they built utilities to accommodate the job creation, but they did not build the housing infrastructure,” she said. “And what we see in these other cities, is the moment that they accelerate residential construction, that is where their affordability gets locked in.”

    In Columbus, the group struggling the most to find affordable housing right now is people earning $50,000 or less per year, Prosser said. As the imbalance between jobs added and housing built increases – as more jobs are added relative to how many units are produced – that number can be expected to rise, so that even families at a much higher income level will find it hard to complete for housing.

    Austin and Nashville are both now building about 40,000 units a year, Prosser said, which is much closer to what is needed to keep up with job growth than what we are building in Columbus. That increase in production started too late to actually make a dent in affordability for lower income families, though – it is mostly just helping to ensure that the problem does not get any worse.

    And with the median sales price for a home in Columbus rising about $100,000 in the last five years, the window for action in Central Ohio is closing.

    “Raleigh and Charlotte are doing pretty well, they’re kind of ahead of the curve [in terms of building housing],” Prosser added. “When we look at where they’re building, though, it’s very far away; they’re meeting the amount of housing, but they are not making the decisions we feel are best for Central Ohio, which is to not rely on sprawl in order to accommodate that new housing.”

    That’s where the new zoning reforms come in, as well as the LinkUs initiative, which aims to build high-capacity transit and also encourage new, transit-supportive development.

    “It has to be stable housing that meets families needs,” Prosser said. “If it is affordable because you are doubled up or living in the middle of nowhere, that is not going to meet the objective for us.”

    More information on the city’s housing strategy is available at columbus.gov.

    The housing strategy sets as a goal for the region 1.5 housing units per job. All graphics courtesy of the city of Columbus.
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    Brent Warren
    Brent Warrenhttps://columbusunderground.com/author/brent-warren
    Brent Warren is a staff reporter for Columbus Underground covering urban development, transportation, city planning, neighborhoods, and other related topics. He grew up in Grandview Heights, lives in the University District and studied City and Regional Planning at OSU.
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