Posted June 12, 20232:58 pm
Sharena Zayed and her siblings grew up on Cleveland’s East Side in a multi-generational household without a working shower or, at times, hot water.
Their living conditions improved in the late 1990s, when Zayed’s mother obtained a housing choice voucher through a federal program that covers the gap between what a tenant can afford and what a private landlord requires. Still, home never felt like a permanent address.
“It was always dependent on the temperament or stability of the landlord,” said Zayed, a 38-year-old neighborhood organizer. “And it just got worse and worse as time went on.”
When her mother died in early 2022, Zayed’s sisters lost their home.
After divorces and other disruptions, Tina Humphries and Amanda Hicks were living with their mother, sharing a rundown apartment.
But they weren’t covered by her voucher. They couldn’t afford to pay market-rate rent when that subsidy went away.
Like Zayed’s family, thousands of Ohioans are on uneven ground, in precarious living situations shaped by low wages, poor housing quality and a lack of supply. Housing insecurity ripples through the state’s economy, making it tougher for companies to find and keep employees. It disrupts classrooms when families move. It weighs on the health care system, where doctors treat patients for exposure to lead and mold.
“There is a huge, overarching benefit to having stable housing,” said Nicole Cratty, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland. “That is very clear. It has better outcomes. Better health and educational outcomes. It saves us money, us being taxpayers, municipalities, cities ... when we don’t have people losing their housing.”
Over the last three years, pandemic-relief initiatives have helped to keep many people in their homes. Now, that federal cash is drying up. Rent-assistance programs, which put money in landlords’ pockets and staved off evictions, are ending. A $280 million statewide aid program for homeowners facing foreclosure or utility shutoffs is draining fast.
Families are stretching their budgets to make rent and mortgage payments, cover rising utility bills and maintain aging houses. There’s a severe shortage of decent homes that Ohioans can afford. And housing costs have been climbing faster than wages for years.
The biggest burden falls on renters, who spend nearly twice as much of their income on housing as homeowners do. But longtime owners also are floundering as their property tax bills climb, along with the price of food and other necessities.
“I don’t think we’re prepared for what comes next,” said Lynn Rodemann, the housing outreach specialist for Slavic Village Development, a neighborhood nonprofit in Cleveland.
Zayed’s older sister, Humphries, needs dialysis treatments several times a week. At 46, she can no longer work as a nursing assistant because of health problems. In May, after months of staying with family, she finally made it off the waiting list for a subsidized apartment in Cleveland.
Hicks, 35, also moved into that income-restricted building. She’s caring for her 1-year-old son and working one day a week at a nearby diner. She and her son’s father hope, someday, to buy a house. But they can’t live together yet. Sharing an apartment would put them at risk of rent increases, beyond what the couple can afford.
Policymakers are paying more attention to the state’s housing deficits. So are business groups including the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, which says a scarcity of homes at a range of price points is hampering Ohio’s growth. Members of the legislature, meanwhile, are tussling over Gov. Mike DeWine’s proposal to create a state tax credit for affordable housing projects.
A few years ago, such broad discussions weren’t taking place. The pandemic helped turn a spotlight on a pernicious, and worsening, problem — one decades in the making.
“City and county and local leaders should talk about housing with the urgency that they talk about anything,” said Scott Skinner, vice president of development and director of public policy for the NRP Group, a national housing developer based in Cleveland. “This is, if not the top issue, a top-three issue facing our community and our region.”
‘You can’t afford to live’
In Cuyahoga County, 46.8% of renter households spend more than 30% of their income on housing. That’s the federal definition of being cost-burdened — paying too much.
Before life fell apart, Ed and Cassandra Linihan were spending well over half of what they made on rent and other housing costs for themselves and their five children.
Ed, 47, was a pizza chef at a local restaurant. Cassandra, 30, earned the bigger paycheck. A doula and lactation counselor, she provided support to women during and after childbirth.
When the pandemic hit, Cassandra lost most of her income. As health restrictions lifted, she still wasn’t permitted into some hospitals or delivery rooms. Customer demand was slow to bounce back. And the Linihans began to fall behind on rent for their house in Cleveland Heights.
They tried to get rental assistance through local nonprofits, but they ran into paperwork snafus. Facing eviction, Ed panicked. In late October of 2022, he attempted suicide.
He was hospitalized, then transferred to a recovery facility for months.
Bracing for a bailiff to show up at their door, his family crammed possessions into bags and left home the day after Ed’s suicide attempt. They stayed with family in Columbus. Then with a friend, for as long as they could. By mid-May, though, the Linihans found themselves in a homeless shelter.
“It’s not just the people that you see standing on the street corner that are homeless,” Cassandra said. “It’s people at your children’s schools. … It’s an epidemic.”
Most of Ohio’s most common professions don’t pay enough to comfortably cover the cost of a two-bedroom apartment. Those jobs include fast-food workers, cashiers and stockers. Several of the state’s fastest-growing industries pay less than $40,000 a year, on average, according to a recent workforce-housing report produced for the Ohio Realtors trade association.
In Cleveland, even federally subsidized housing is out of reach for many residents. The rents are based on calculations tied to median family income for the metropolitan area — a figure nearly three times that of median household income in the city.
“Incomes in our region just are not keeping up with the cost of living,” said Emma Petrie Barcelona, chief operating officer of EDEN Inc., a nonprofit Cleveland-area housing and services provider.
The gap between incomes and housing costs is not unique to major cities or low-income neighborhoods. In some rural pockets of Northeast Ohio, more than two-thirds of renters spend upwards of 30% of their income on housing, according to U.S. Census data. In Hudson, a suburb known for high-performing schools and historic architecture, 63% of renters qualify as cost-burdened. In well-heeled Beachwood, that figure is almost 48%.
“At any moment, anyone could lose a job and not have the reserves to be able to sustain their family for the next month, or the next two or three months. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Cleveland or whether it’s Pepper Pike,” said Sara Parks Jackson, Cuyahoga County’s director of housing and community development.
The triggering event might be a divorce, a death, a medical emergency or a crash with an uninsured motorist. But there doesn’t have to be a single turning point.
“If you’re paying more than 50% of your income in rent, it’s a shell game. You’re just moving things around,” said Amy Riegel, executive director the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio, a nonprofit advocacy group. “So in some cases, you don’t even need that big catastrophic thing to happen. It’s just that time will catch up with you.”
A few years ago, Michelle Sokol was a homeowner, living with her husband and children on Cleveland’s West Side. In May, though, she was renting an apartment without reliable heat or a working oven and cooking the family’s meals in an Instant Pot and a toaster oven.
During the pandemic, her marriage started to collapse. She and her husband sold their house, which needed repairs, for only $100,000 and paid off their mortgage. She ended up in a custody fight with a former boyfriend, all while working at home and raising young children.
In May, Sokol was scouring the rental market for better options, in search of a house or apartment with functioning appliances — and a landlord who would accept her tattered credit.
“I didn’t want to start picky and risk being rejected because I don’t have time to waste,” said Sokol, 35. “And I don’t have money to waste on applications. I don’t have any bankruptcies. I don’t have any evictions. But there are lots of people that do. And I think, where do they live?”
Cassandra Linihan spent months seeking housing in the Columbus area. Landlords didn’t return her calls. Subsidized rentals had yearslong waiting lists. It’s hard enough to find an apartment, she said, let alone a home for a family of seven with eviction filings on their record.
Last month, though, the family’s network kicked in. Cassandra’s boss and a local pastor helped the Linihans find a house in Sheffield Village, where they’ll be able to live rent-free this summer while figuring out how to rebuild.
“Pride is something that I think gets in the way of a lot, because it’s tough to say I can’t afford to live,” Ed Linihan said. “But sometimes, you can’t afford to live.”
‘There’s just too much property’
Bob Galivan believes that the solution to housing insecurity lies, at least in part, in fixing what we’ve got. In Cleveland, which has been shrinking since the 1950s, there are more homes than households. But many of those properties are obsolete, dilapidated or unsafe.
Galivan, a real estate investor and former building contractor who moved to Northeast Ohio from south Florida a few years ago, is appalled by the conditions he sees: Abandoned houses. Poorly renovated properties that are being passed from investor to investor. Construction that’s taking place without permits or city inspections.
“There has to be a way to salvage these houses,” said Galivan, who is renovating a two-family home on the East Side as a rental for low-income families with housing vouchers.
Conditions are particularly bleak in Cleveland, where homebuilding peaked in the 1920s. Most of the houses were built before 1978, when the federal government banned residential use of lead-based paint, which can require encapsulation or abatement.
Quality is a challenge across the state, though, from manufactured housing parks in rural areas to suburbs where elderly homeowners can’t keep up with repairs.
In North Olmsted, a suburb with a median household income of nearly $75,000, officials received more than 120 applications last year for a home-repair program funded with $405,000 from the American Rescue Plan Act. The program, offering forgivable or low-interest loans of up to $15,000, might help a few dozen households, said Max Upton, the city’s director of economic and community development. The need is much greater.
“Frankly, we were kind of blown away by the response,” he said, describing applications from residents who were pulling cash out of retirement savings accounts or choosing between paying for cancer medication and a new heating and cooling system.
“Some of the stories, they’re just heartbreaking,” said Upton, who hopes North Olmsted can establish a permanent fund for critical home repairs to windows, roofs, mechanical systems and foundations. “These are folks that worked hard, played by the rules, but they’re kind of too rich to be poor and too poor to be rich. So they are kind of in this permanent state of limbo.”
Not far from Shaker Square, on Cleveland’s East Side, John Burton was forced out of his longtime apartment this year. After pipes burst, the property manager asked the tenants — many of them low-income, some parents of young children — to leave the modest brick building.
Burton, a disabled veteran who relies on a voucher to pay most of his rent, struggled to find a new place to live. He submitted several applications, put his belongings into storage and stayed with a friend. After six fraught weeks, he moved into an apartment in April.
“I was one of the lucky ones. Or one of the blessed ones. Because only God could have did this,” said Burton, who is 67. After 11 years of sobriety, the prospect of becoming homeless filled him with fear of backsliding into addiction.
Less than a mile away, tenants at a cluster of historic apartment buildings along Shaker Boulevard are protesting over poor property conditions and slow-moving repairs. In March, the city of Cleveland, which is trying to put neglectful property owners on notice, took the unusual step of filing a nuisance lawsuit against their landlord in an attempt to compel fixes or to bring in a court-appointed receiver to clean things up.
“There is a big, big gap between what the city should be doing and what the city can do,” said Gale Jacobsohn, an 89-year-old tenant at one of those properties. “They don’t have enough people. They don’t have the tools, the teeth, to enforce these rules. And there’s just too much property. You see it all over Cleveland.”
Zayed and her sisters watched the decay firsthand during their mother’s final years.
Linda Hicks was 69 when she died last spring, from complications of COVID-19. But her daughters wonder whether unhealthy housing was a contributing factor.
Even with a voucher, Hicks had a difficult time finding a home. Each place she lived was a little rougher than the one before it, her daughters said. Her last apartment was infested with rats and blighted by mold, hazards that her family documented in photos.
“Safe housing is a human right,” Zayed said. “How do you determine who deserves it and who doesn’t?”
‘All it takes is one thing’
Since early 2019, rents in the Cleveland metropolitan area have climbed by more than 30%, according to Zillow, which tracks changes in pricing for the same apartments over time.
The median sale price for a house here, meanwhile, jumped by 37%. It’s approaching $200,000. That’s cheap by national standards, but unattainable for many local families.
“Housing is an issue pretty much across every part of Ohio right now,” said Steve Stivers, CEO of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, which has identified housing as a lobbying priority.
The chamber and other business groups are particularly concerned about the erosion of so-called workforce housing, places that hotel employees, store clerks, teachers and health care workers can afford. They’re pushing for a new state tax credit for affordable housing, along with efforts to increase homeownership and homebuilding.
Those proposals are the subject of state budget bartering in Columbus — and part of a bigger discussion about ways to address housing instability through boosting new construction.
“We need more supply,” said Katie Fallon, an Ohio-based principal policy associate at the Urban Institute, a think tank focused on economic and social policies. “We need more supply of missing-middle rental and households for purchase. And this probably means that we need to change the requirements for what it means to build. … How do we deal with zoning? How do we deal with local resistance? How do we deal with financing issues?”
Last year, the NRP Group fielded more than 2,200 inquiries about 5115 the Rising, a new mixed-income apartment project in Slavic Village. Before opening, the 88-unit complex received roughly 400 applications. That’s more than four hopeful households for every apartment.
The Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority has a waitlist of 20,000 people for nearly 16,000 housing choice vouchers, which are awarded through a lottery system. Thousands more applicants are waiting for an apartment at one of the agency’s public housing complexes.
At the current rate of building, it would take almost half a century to close the state’s affordable housing gap, according to the Ohio Housing Finance Agency.
In Northeast Ohio, dozens of organizations are trying to chip away at the problem. Local governments are committing federal pandemic-recovery funds to home repair, more long-term rental-assistance programs and construction of new houses. Nonprofit groups are talking about ways to build less expensive properties, such as modular homes, for rent or for sale.
Meanwhile, tenants’ advocates are championing programs including Cleveland’s right-to-counsel, which provides attorneys for certain low-income families facing eviction, and initiatives designed to keep tenants in place or to give them access to a broader range of living options.
Those are meaningful, but small, success stories. Researchers and service providers say there’s an imbalance in the landscape. There is still far more support available once people lose their homes than there is when they’re teetering, barely managing to get by.
“There’s a lot of this wait, wait, wait, wait. And then right before they hit the ground, let’s swing in,” said Josiah Quarles, director of organizing and advocacy for the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless. “And then all it takes is one thing. One miscommunication. Your phone gets cut off. There’s some rigidity to some of these systems and programs that just doesn’t fit what the flexibility of the need really is.”
Today, Zayed is a homeowner — a dream her mother never achieved. She paid $5,000 for her house, in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood, at a tax-foreclosure auction in 2014.
Like many homes in Cleveland, that house is arguably a liability. It would cost more to fix than it’s worth. But buying the property gave Zayed room to breathe, a break from struggling to pay rent as a single mother of three working two low-wage jobs at the Cleveland Clinic.
She hopes to finally renovate her kitchen and bathroom this year. And she’s helping to craft a nascent home-repair grant program in Slavic Village, where she now works for University Settlement, a social services organization focused on one of the poorest stretches of the city.
“A lot of people are just in survival mode,” she said. “They’re so stressed out from being unhoused or working a job that doesn’t get them what they need. They can’t even think.”
Source: Crain's Cleveland Business -Housing insecurity in Northeast Ohio puts thousands at risk