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Are Ohio's shrinking cities more affordable?💸 Yes and no.

Lots 'o links in this edition! 🔗

Are Ohio's shrinking cities more affordable?💸 Yes and no.

At the most basic level, areas experiencing rapid population growth are presumed to have more severe housing affordability issues. This makes sense when looking at housing from a supply point of view. New residents moving to the area need new housing, and are competing for the same housing units as existing residents. In an unplanned and unpredictable way, it’s up to private industry to construct new housing units that can absorb this unknown amount of population growth.

But looking at slow- or no-growth regions presents an interesting wrinkle to this general wisdom.

In Ohio’s shrinking counties, the rate of households spending more than 30% or more of their annual income on rent is just as high—and even higher—than in Franklin County. This reality pokes at the oversimplified thesis of housing supply and demand. Unlike typical commodities, the provision of housing is very complex. It’s a necessity, but also a product. It’s understood as a social need, but not a right. It’s used for shelter, but also for financial investment. It’s traded on the stock market, but also owned outright by many homeowners.

Take a look at this bar chart, showing both population change and the percent of households experiencing housing cost burden. Here, the continuing population loss of the Rust Belt is highlighted. From 2017 to 2022, Lucas, Summit, Mahoning, and Cuyahoga counties lost population. In the same period, Franklin County grew by 5.16%.

In much of the housing crisis narrative, the housing affordability issues in Central Ohio are attributed to our significant job and population growth. Yet, regions in economic stagnation and even freefall also have severe housing cost burdens. The crisis of housing affordability is not merely a result of economic growth, it’s both systemic and persistent.

Is housing cheaper in these shrinking counties than in Columbus?

Absolutely. In Youngstown, the median gross rent is $718 per month (2023 ACS 5-year estimates). In Toledo, it’s $880. In Columbus, it’s $1,124. But the relative cost of housing as a proportion of income is equally high between high-growth Columbus and Ohio’s shrinking counties. This is somewhat paradoxical, as one might assume that households in shrinking regions would spend less of their income on rent.

Housing is not affordable for many hundreds of thousands of households in shrinking regions. For these families, there is no singular crisis. There are many crises: housing, wages, healthcare, transportation, and so on. Even here—in prosperous Franklin County—39% of workers do not earn enough to make ends meet. Building new housing in Youngstown isn’t going to meaningfully reduce the housing cost burden of these struggling households, nor would the private market invest in such a scheme without sufficient consumer demand. Even if new housing is needed (perhaps due to aging housing stock), developers are not likely to build in a shrinking region.

Put simply, there’s a large group of households for whom housing is much too expensive—even in neighborhoods where housing costs are very low (in relation to regional or national averages).

In addition to the burden of rising housing costs, wages have not kept up with inflation or cost of living—despite increases in worker productivity. Between 1979 and 2019, “real wages fell for workers with lower levels of educational attainment and rose for highly educated workers.” To address the persistence of high housing-cost burden across geographies, government must invest in non-market housing solutions, like community land trusts. These arrangements effectively remove shelter from the arbitrary price-setting of the real estate market. Urban land trusts can hold properties in perpetuity and restrict their re-sale price through restrictive covenants, allowing eligible households to access housing they otherwise could not afford.

Land trusts are one way of taking properties out of the non-stop bidding wars of a winner-takes-all real estate market.

In their 2022 book, Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How structural factors explain U.S. patterns, authors Colburn and Aldern recommend taking a certain portion of housing stock off the market. This is because the housing crisis is largely persistent for those with little income, and “tool of the private market is not well-suited to the task” (Colburn and Aldern, 2022, p. 172). Non-market housing options, the authors say, are necessary to house people “with the lowest incomes” through strategies such as “public and nonprofit ownership of a portion of the multifamily housing stock” (Colburn and Aldern, 2022, page 173-174). While building more housing is absolutely necessary, making sure access to some of that housing isn’t solely determined by access to capital in a market increasingly attractive to corporate investors is also crucial.

Make walking one of your resolutions 🚶🚶‍♀️

This newsletter is about housing. But housing is connected to…pretty much everything else.

Think about something as fundamental as walking. Your access to safe and pleasant places to walk is often linked to where you can afford to live. Because of this, walking isn’t equally available to all. This fun new video highlights the many benefits of walking, as well as the benefits of living in walkable neighborhoods. This highlights the urgent need to build walkable communities with a mix of uses. Research consistently finds that walkable communities:

  • promote social interaction
  • reduce isolation, and
  • enhance community cohesion

Instead of more of the same low-density residential sprawl, public policy must shift to offer people viable choices in how they arrive at destinations, and allow those necessary destinations to be closer to where people live. This is what building communities under the traditional American development pattern can provide: short blocks, shops on the corner, duplexes and triplexes mixed in with single-family homes, and public schools with pedestrian-first orientations.

Local + Regional 🌳

Beyond Ohio 🚀

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