High housing cost pushes low earners out
A bicycle is perfect for seeing – really seeing – our city.
A car goes too fast to notice all the details. Walking doesn’t cover enough ground. Riding on the back of a tandem bicycle, relieved of the obligation to steer, navigate and avoid hazards, is even better.
As I ride on the back of our beloved tandem bicycle with my husband up front on a recent trip, I traverse Bexley, Olde Towne East, the Mount Vernon Avenue area, Milo Grogan, the Short North, Weiland Park, the Ohio State University campus area and Clintonville. And what I see is heartbreaking.
I see shiny new houses replacing older, more affordable homes that had been in families for generations. Young professionals now own these new houses, unwittingly pushing out the historic inhabitants. I see multistory apartments and condos springing up almost daily, like the weeds trying to conquer my garden. I can control the weeds. But I alone can’t control the new building in Columbus’ Downtown and contiguous neighborhoods. And my heart breaks.
It breaks because people who perform the most common and, arguably, the most needed occupations in our city typically earn less than $30,000 annually, meaning they can no longer afford to live in these neighborhoods.
Food preparation and waitstaff, retail sales, hospital cleaning, child care, home health care – the people working those jobs do not earn enough to live in the new housing springing up around Downtown.
Instead of walking to work, low-wage workers must patch together transportation from the outskirts because, unlike other cities our size, we lack reliable public
transportation.
They are working essential jobs that don’t pay enough to live in our thriving city, and they are being driven out of their own multigenerational neighborhoods.
Heartbreaking.
This human tragedy posing as housing prosperity represents a willful failure of elected officials, in the form of deliberate public policies that accommodate building developers and affluent people without regard to the needs of low-wage residents, coupled with the failure to enact policies that would offer a more balanced approach.
The public officials perpetuating these blatantly unfair and even cruel public policies profess to support social and economic justice, yet refuse to enact equitable policies that would mitigate the well-documented affordable housing shortage.
Before the pandemic, the Affordable Housing Alliance of Central Ohio documented that at least 54,000 low-income families were paying at least 50% of their income on housing.
The pandemic, which caused massive job losses among low-wage workers, has greatly exacerbated the housing crisis. Worse, our public officials know what they can do to alleviate the human suffering caused by this horrific housing inequity.
They know because the Affordable Housing Alliance spelled out what they can do and B.R.E.A.D. (Building Responsibility, Equality and Dignity), a coalition of 44-plus diverse greater Columbus religious congregations, has been pressuring the city, through car caravans surrounding City Hall, demonstrations, testimony, calls and letters to City Council, and more.
Mayor Andrew J. Ginther refuses to meet with us, but he has read our Roadmap to Change. At B.R.E.A.D.’S Nehemiah Action on May 11, with more than 2,000 people either present in a church parking lot or streaming remotely, City Council member Shayla Favor committed to support what the Affordable Housing Alliance and B.R.E.A.D. called for: that, for all new multi-unit housing, a percentage of units should be affordable.
Imagine if all new housing in our downtown area had 20% of units set aside to be affordable for our essential workers making less than $30,000 a year? And second, that 30% of the American Rescue Plan funds coming to Columbus would be invested in affordable housing (following the plan detailed by the Alliance).
This isn’t rocket science, but it is science — based on thorough analysis of specific population needs and our current housing market, input from developers and what has worked in other cities to address the problem most efficiently.
All we need is the political will to do it. Shame on Mayor Ginther and other elected officials – and shame on each one of us who isn’t holding our public officials accountable to reverse this heartbreak in our own backyards.
Cathy Levine serves as co-president of B.R.E.A.D. (Building Responsibility, Equality and Dignity).