Ohio holds virtual Holocaust remembrance
Gov. Mike Dewine sat beside a photograph of his father with a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp for Ohio’s 41st annual commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“It made such an impression upon him,” Dewine said. “The horrors that he saw.”
About 11 million people (6 million of them Jewish) perished in the Holocaust, and speaker after speaker said it’s personal stories like the one Dewine’s father told him that will connect future generations to the tragic event and prevent it from happening again.
“You suspend that sense of time and place and you listen to the person and their story,” said Stephen Smith, director of the Shoah Foundation, a nonprofit that tapes interviews with survivors and witnesses.
The state of Ohio itself is receiving $91 million.
According to HUD, the money can be used for affordable housing, rental assistance, supportive services, and acquisition and development of non-congregate shelter units in buildings such as hotels so residents could be separated or quarantined as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. Funds must be spent by 2030.
Faith said he sees that the money could be used in different ways, from developing long-term housing options to creating permanent supportive housing to converting hotels into housing for homeless people.
“Not just any affordable housing – the type of thing we wanted to see,” Faith said. “We want people to look beyond shelters, longer-term solutions.”
Michelle Heritage, executive director of the Community Shelter Board, said the money should be used to build permanent housing for homeless people. She said the Columbus area lost about 20,000 units in recent years for the poorest residents because rents went up to levels they can’t afford.
Heritage said incomes, if any, for most homeless people are less than 30% of the area median income, which in 2021 was $17,650 for one person and $26,500 for a family of four.
“These dollars should be to replace units where they got priced out,” she said.
When asked how far $16 million could go in Columbus, Heritage said, “That can do a lot of good. We could bring hundreds of units on.”
Carlie Boos, executive director of the Affordable Housing Alliance of Central Ohio, rhetorically asked of the federal funds, “Is this going to be what we need to cure the housing crisis? No.”
But Boos called it a great down payment.
The local money will flow through Columbus and Franklin County. Cynthia Rickman, a spokeswoman for the Columbus Department of Development, said the city is working through the details as to how the money will be used, and developing a plan with homeless organizations and others.
The funds are coming to the city through the HOME Investment Partnerships Program (HOME) fund allocation that it receives from HUD to go toward affordable housing.
Faith’s group said there were 10,655 people experiencing homelessness in Ohio during a point-in-time count during one day in January 2020. A pointin-time count in January 2021 in Columbus found 1,201 people in homeless shelters. mferench@dispatch.com @Markferenchik