Affordable housing has become a hot topic in the community now that two mixed-use residential and commercial developments are planned at 2300 E. Livingston Ave. and 420 N. Cassady Ave.
According to its website, the Ohio Housing Finance Authority has awarded the projects grants totaling more than $2.5 million.
Affordable housing was the topic of a June 13 panel discussion at the Bexley Public Library, 2411 E. Main St. The event was hosted by the city and Building Inclusive Communities, an initiative designed to bring awareness about the need for affordable housing.
Mayor Ben Kessler said the city is working to identify solutions that will make affordable housing more widely available and more integrated into the fabric of the community.
“Today in Bexley, we do have affordable housing,” he said. “Too often, that affordable housing is not connected to other neighborhoods. It is segregated; it is dilapidated; it’s a source of stress to those who live in it.”
The Livingston and Cassady developments will have a range of rents for different income levels, Bexley city officials said when they were announced in December 2020.
The Bexley Community Improvement Corp. and The Community Builders, the two nonprofit entities that initiated the developments, are expected to submit building plans for approval by the city’s architectural review boards in July or August. Kessler said there is no timeline for construction to begin.
“They’re going to be having meetings with neighbors – some additional education about the developments and what they mean,” he said. “We’re looking really hard at how we can take that (senior center) that’s there at Cassady and keep it in that development as a first-floor use.”
The developments will expand housing options in Bexley, Kessler said. The panel discussion focused on how Bexley and other central Ohio communities can increase the availability of affordable housing.
Panelists included Rachel Kleit, professor of city and regional planning and associate dean of the Ohio State University College of Engineering; Kim Campbell, director of Admissions and Recruitment at Mount Carmel College of Nursing; and moderator Carlie Boos, executive director of the Affordable Housing Alliance of Central Ohio.
Columbus and surrounding communities are experiencing a housing shortage because construction isn’t keeping pace with the population growth, Boos said.
“We should be building 14,000 new houses a year – single-family homes, multi-family homes, accessory building units,” she said. “And even in our best year, we’re building 11,000. So every year, we are digging that hole deeper and deeper and deeper, which is why we are seeing the costs (of housing) go up so significantly.”
Boos said with $300,000 as the average sale price of a home in central Ohio, more than 54,000 households are paying more than half their monthly income to cover mortgage or rent payments in Franklin County. The upside, she added, is that numerous organizations and scholars are studying how to increase affordable housing.
“Central Ohio is so well-positioned to be the first community in the world to solve this (housing crisis),” Boos said. “One of the things that people don’t know is we are a hub for the affordable housing industry. People who do this for a living call central Ohio home, have their headquarters here.”
One of those organizations is Move to Prosper, a program that provides parents of school-age children with three years of rental assistance, life coaching and support services to enable them to live in communities where they believe their children will get the best public education.
“We work with single moms to give them opportunities to choose where they would like to raise their children, instead of that choice being dictated by where they can afford,” Campbell said.
In addition to working with organizations such as Move to Prosper, Campbell, Kleit and Boos offered several suggestions on how Bexley and neighboring communities can increase affordable housing.
Strategies include incentivizing the construction of multi-family units such as duplexes that increase a neighborhood’s density but don’t have an impact on congestion as much as larger buildings; working with developers to set aside a percentage of housing that will remain at a certain cost threshold; and recruiting corporate sponsors to “adopt” neighborhoods and underwrite the costs of developing affordable housing.
Kleit said such strategies must be implemented across neighboring communities to discourage developers from abandoning one community to build in another with fewer restrictions.
“It has to be regional for it to work effectively,” she said. “It will require resources as well as the political will.”
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