More work is needed to shrink affordable housing gap

Central Ohio is predicted to gain a million more residents by 2050, and wise leaders will ensure they have a place to live. Chief among their concerns must be a balanced focus on housing for all economic levels.

No, strike that. Developers will always cater to customers seeking higher-end accommodations in apartments, condos and single-family homes. Where they need an extra push is in providing new or renovated housing stock for low-income and even homeless residents.

That extra push can come from tax abatements such as Columbus City Council enacted Monday.

These tax incentives must also come with unwavering commitment by local government officials to hold developers accountable for making good on promises tied to the tax revenue being waived in exchange for doing the kind of lowerincome development than their balance sheets would otherwise dictate.

It doesn’t help that the city sent a message of lax enforcement in June when Columbus City Council forgave three commercial developers who came up short on promises of new jobs and payroll in return for millions of dollars in tax abatements for projects in the Short North.

In that case, developers Pizzuti, Elford Development and Schiff Capital had promised to create 271 jobs with $17.3 million in payroll. What they actually provided fell well short of the goal at just 155 jobs with $10.3 million in payroll. And using the city’s standard of counting only jobs that pay at least $12 an hour, the outcome was even worse with just 31 jobs rising to that modest level for a total payroll of $1.6 million.

The council took the recommendation of an advisory board not to ding the developers for failing to create the promised jobs and instead modified the city’s agreement with them to merely reflect what was done without reducing the developers’ abatements.

The city’s new regulations for residential developers’ tax breaks are meant to spur an increase in affordable housing. Those who are building new projects in neighborhoods deemed to be thriving would have to either provide a proportion of homes that would be more affordable to lowerincome residents or pay into a fund to be used to build affordable units.

In return, the developers would enjoy a 100 percent 15-year property tax abatement, which would make their properties even more attractive to buyers and likely also to renters.

How developers will respond remains to be seen. It might become too easy for them to simply pay the penalty for not including affordable units in their developments — and perhaps too hard for that penalty fund to provide enough actual affordable housing.

One major difference with the housing incentives from tax abatements to commercial developers is the results should be much easier to measure at the outset. The developers either will provide affordable units or pay the penalty.

But the need for more affordable housing is severe, and the city’s new incentives likely won’t do much to close the gap.

The Affordable Housing Alliance of Central Ohio has a 3-year Start-Up Plan to address a need for affordable homes for 54,000 Franklin County households. And Homeport is working with apartment developers to set aside more units for those making less than median income.

As Columbus grows, more attention is needed to ensure the affordable housing gap will shrink.