Episode 4: Housing - The Foundation of Columbus’s Future

In this episode of So, Let’s Talk Columbus with Michael Wilkos, Michael takes you inside one of the most important issues shaping our region’s future: housing. He explores why Columbus is growing faster than its housing supply, what that means for affordability and stability, and why housing is about much more than buildings. It’s about whether the people who make our community work can afford to stay here.

Tune in to better understand the forces behind Columbus’s housing challenges and what it will take to keep our city vibrant and accessible for every resident.

**Bonus story at the end of the podcast! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So I literally slithered out of my chair like a snake and snuck out the back door and ran down the street. And I was vacuuming with one hand and I was Windexing things with the other. We put all the dirty dishes in the bathtub and clutts and closed the curtain. And literally I'm dripping with sweat and I'm doing everything I can to get my apartment presentable. And then all of a sudden it's ding dong. And there's Mayor Coleman and this entire group. Welcome back to So Let's Talk Columbus. I'm Michael Wilkes, Vice President of Community Engagement at United Waves Central Ohio. And today we're talking about an issue that touches every resident of our region, whether you realize it or not. And we're talking about housing. We're talking about affordability. And we're talking about what happens when a city grows faster than its housing supply. Columbus has long been one of the fastest growing cities in the Midwest. As recently as 2010, the city of Columbus had 787,000 people. Today it's up to 933,000. That's an 18% jump just since 2010. People come here for opportunity. It's a good job. Strong universities, vibrant neighborhoods, and a quality of life that has helped our region stand out nationally. But growth also comes with challenges. And one of the biggest challenges facing Columbus today is making sure people can actually afford to live here. Because housing isn't just about buildings or real estate, it's about stability, opportunity, and ultimately, it's about whether our city remains accessible to the people who make it work. So today, let's talk Columbus through the lens of housing. Let's start with the big picture. Columbus isn't just growing, it's growing quickly. Between 2010 and 2020, Franklin County averaged 16,000 new residents every year. That was about 44 new people every single day for a decade. Last year, the growth picked up to 17,000 new residents in a 12-month period, or 47 new residents every single day. And when people move to a city, they all need the same basic thing: a place to live. Now here's where the challenge begins. For years, Columbus has not been building enough housing to keep up with population growth. And when demand rises faster than supply, prices rise. Let me put that into a perspective a third grader might be able to understand. As recently as 2010, we had 107 housing units for every 100 households. That's a fairly good housing market, meaning at any given time, there are seven housing units sitting available in the marketplace by price, tenure, and location. By 2020, we were down to just 102 housing units for every 100 households. What I think happened between that 10-year period is the conversation in our community dramatically shifted. Where at one point we would talk about the term affordable housing, which is often a complex tool with income guidelines and set up by household size, that people don't really fully understand what affordable housing means. Just reverse the order of affordable housing to housing affordability, and by 2020, everybody was talking about housing affordability. Given the population growth of the region and the underbuilding of housing, we are on track to have just 96 housing units for every 100 households by the end of the decade, meaning the tight housing market that we are all experiencing is predicted to get even tighter. This is why home prices have increased so dramatically, rents have climbed all across the region, and many families are finding it harder to find housing within their budgets. But this isn't just a Columbus issue. Every growing city across the country is facing a similar challenge. But the difference is that Columbus is growing faster than any other Midwestern city, and clearly we're growing much faster than the U.S. average, and that makes the pressure here especially intense. I have good news to share. In the mayor's State of the City address in early March, he was able to release 2025 housing construction permitting data. And what we saw across the City of Columbus was a 50% increase in housing production in 2025, with more than 9,100 housing permits issued just within the City of Columbus. That is more housing that has been built in any year in at least a quarter of a century. While the City of Columbus was up 50% in residential permits, the region was up just 17%, meaning all of the increase in housing production across our region happened within the city limits of Columbus. This is due in many parts because Columbus has achieved zoning reform. First phase of zone in was completed in 2024, which increased the allowable number of housing on our commercial corridors to go from 6,000 units to 88,000 units. But also the City of Columbus rolled out a whole series of incentives to get more housing production within the city limits. And what we saw in 2025 is the market responded favorably. We have a regional goal to create 200,000 additional units of housing in the next decade. The City of Columbus has committed half of that goal or 100,000 units. What's really encouraging about the 2025 data is that with 9,116 permits issued within the City of Columbus, Columbus is within a hand's reach of meeting its annual goal of delivering 10,000 units of housing per year. The challenge is the remaining part of the metropolitan region is trailing the City of Columbus's leadership, where only 6,700 permits of housing were issued outside of the City of Columbus. Let me put that into perspective a little easier. The City of Columbus is just 42% of the metropolitan population, but last year the City of Columbus had 58% of all of the new housing that was permitted, which means Columbus is really taking its responsibility seriously to build more housing. In addition, things like zone in, which increased the allowable number of housing units to be built along our transit corridors, is helping us save farmland on the urban periphery. It's re-urbanizing existing neighborhoods and creating mixed-use, walkable, transit-oriented communities in many places, just like they once were. When people hear the phrase housing shortage, they often think of rising rents. But the reality is much broader than that. Housing shortages affect young professionals trying to start their careers, families looking for stable neighborhoods, seniors hoping to age in place, and workers who are essential to our local economy, like teachers, healthcare workers, service industry employees, and first responders. But before I get more into the data, let me share with you a story of something that happened to me just a year ago in mid-March of 2024. I happened to chair the Continuum of Care, that is the planning body that allows our community to respond to homelessness. I spent the day at a motel on the far east side of the city called Loyalty Inn that was being used as a warming center for people experiencing homelessness who had pets. As the motel was closing, the people in that motel needed to find new places in which to live as the warming center was running through its natural course of operations. One of the people I met in the motel that day was a gentleman by the name of Trent, 82 years old. He experienced homelessness for the first time at age 81. And as he describes it, he retired too early and he's lived too long. But he's struggling to make ends meet, and he lives on just$970 a month. As Greg Colburn, a researcher out of the University of Washington and author of the book, Homelessness is a Housing Problem, described it in the following way. And who misses the last chair is the person on crutches. Many people will interpret that scenario as thinking that the reason why the last individual didn't get a chair is because they were on crutches. But the reality is there simply weren't enough chairs. This is what's happening around our housing market. When there is scarcity, it impacts vulnerable people in different ways than it impacts many of the rest of us. If you're criminally justice involved, struggle with mental health or addiction, or you're extremely low income, you're a senior, that housing scarcity is becoming much more critical for you as you're navigating an environment where there are simply fewer choices for you. Bank of America did a study that said rents are rising across the country, but they are in fact not rising equally across all neighborhoods. Rents are rising at the slowest rate in high opportunity communities, moderately so in middle-income communities, but rents are rising the fastest in low-income communities. The reason for this is because almost nowhere across the country are we building enough housing for people at that lower income band. And what we do build tends to be luxury because that's the kind of housing that communities resist at the least level. In addition to the Bank of America data, Zillow reported in 2024 that in a 10-month period, rents in Columbus jumped nearly 9%. When Greg Colburn did his national research for his book, Homelessness is a Housing Problem, he said that there are only two indicators that will tell you whether or not you'll see an increase in homelessness in your community. And that it has nothing to do with weather, whether or not your community has strong benefits or weak benefits. It has nothing to do with whether or not there are higher rates of drug addiction in one community versus another. There is no correlation with weather. He says there are just two things that determine whether or not your community will struggle with homelessness. One is when rents are rising faster than incomes for consecutive years, and two, when your regional housing vacancy rates hit 5% and stay there. Both of those measures, Columbus hit in 2019, and we have been there ever since. Rising rents, faster than income, low housing vacancy rates, and the most vulnerable among us are being hurt at a faster rate than the rest of us. So back to my 82-year-old friend Trent that I met in spring of 2025. After leaving the motel, Trent wandered the city for several days with the entirety of his belongings stuffed into a book bag and carrying his cat tag wrapped in a blanket. I found Trent sitting on a park bench at Sulvent Garden Rec Center, and I told him to stay where he was, that I was going to come by with some friends and some supplies. And Trent ended up building a camp just outside the woods, outside that rec center. Even with all of the connections that I was able to make, Trent spent an additional 10 days living in that tent until he found access to an apartment that a social service agency made available to him, despite the fact that his qualifications for that unit were not quite in alignment with the program. They kind of looked the other way, just to make sure that an 82-year-old frail individual was not sleeping outside on the land. Trent was lucky to get into a YMCA facility on the west side of Columbus and has been stable in his housing ever since. He lives on just$970 a month, and fortunately, because of his tenancy in this YMCA facility, he's able to live on rent that totals just$180 a month. Trent turned out to be one of the lucky ones. Because he made contact with people who work in nonprofit organizations and have access to resources, and because he got connected to Adam H., the Community Shelter Board and United Way of Central Ohio, he was able to find housing and be stable in his life. My fear is that without those connections, Trent would still be living on the land. And I know that there are many people like Trent who struggle with their housing simply because there is not enough housing for people like Trent in our community. In addition to people like Trent, there are other vulnerable groups of people that really struggle in the current state of our housing market, and that's often single female households with school-aged children. I want to talk a little bit about evictions. Between 2021 and 2024, the number of evictions were going up considerably year after year, jumping from 15,500 to over 25,000 eviction filings. The good news was in 2025, eviction filings actually dropped by 2.3% in our community, stopping this consistent increase. The bad news is 2026 is not starting off as a good year, where we've seen eviction filings in the first two months of 2026 jump 8% higher than what we saw in 2025. What our community was really rewarded with federal dollars to keep these families stable, we were able to hire 28 positions at 27 nonprofit agencies, most of them United Way funded partners, and they were able to do intervention, diversion, and rapid rehousing with the dollars that we received from the federal government. In the final round of emergency rental assistance funding, the City of Columbus and Franklin County received more financial assistance than the entire state of California because there was no other place in the country that has done a better job of keeping people stable in their housing than us. When you look at who was served, it was really the most economically challenged among us, where 63% of all of that emergency rental assistance funding went to support households at 30% of area median income and below, another 21% between 30 and 50% AMI, and a small percent, just 16% of those that were served were between 50 and 80 percent AMI. Some additional demographic look at who was served by those dollars. 73% were female headed households, and 75% were black or African American. And collectively, between the city and the county,$154 million in rent and utility assistance has been dispersed in our community from 2021 through 2025. Those federal dollars have now ended, but the need has continued. While the City of Columbus is investing in a housing resilient initiative, it is very difficult for the City of Columbus and local philanthropy to be able to replace the dollars lost from the federal government. But the need in our community, as evidenced by what's happening so far in 2026, shows that the need is only growing greater. One of the groups that often goes unnoticed in the conversations around housing scarcity and undersupply, and that is children. As an example, in 2025, Columbus City School's Project Connect served 3,000 unique individual students who experienced homelessness at some point in time during that calendar year. This is why housing stability is one of the core focus areas of United Way's success by third grade movement, because if you're not stable in your housing, you won't be stable in your education. So we know in the success by third grade movement that absenteeism is the number one predictor as to whether or not a child is going to be on track and reading at grade level by third grade. To fully understand our housing challenges, we have to think about the entire housing ecosystem. Housing supply is influenced by several factors: zoning and land use policies, construction costs, labor shortages in the building trades, infrastructure and transportation access, and the availability of financing for development. All of these factors determine how quickly and how affordably new housing can be built. Cities like Columbus are beginning to explore a range of solutions, some focused on increasing housing supply, including building more apartments and mixed-use developments, allowing different housing types like duplexes, townhouses, and accessory dwelling units, and encouraging development near transit lines and job centers. Others are focused on preserving existing housing so that long-term residents can remain in their neighborhoods. Please join in at our next episode where we will interview Aaron Prosser, Assistant Director of Housing Affordability Strategies for the City of Columbus. So if you take one thing away from today's episode, let it be this. Housing isn't just about where we live, it's about our economy, it's about our schools, and it's whether or not we're going to see people experiencing homelessness on the streets of our city. Columbus is growing, and how we respond to that growth will determine the future of our region. Because understanding the challenge is only the first step. Preparing for it is the real work. Thanks for listening to So Let's Talk Columbus. This conversation made you think, share it. If it challenged you, good. If it made you proud, even better. Until next time, remember, there's not a problem Columbus can't fix. So I had the opportunity to have my apartment on the first downtown living tour because Mayor Coleman at the time really wanted to promote downtown living. Oh, this had to have been mid-2000s. And I go to a meeting in City Hall, and whenever I'm in the presence of an elected leader, I'm always inspired and in awe. And as I'm sitting in this meeting with the mayor of our city, he says, Well, at the end of the meeting, we're all going to walk down and take a look at Michael Wilkos's place. And no one had told me that they were going to come look at my apartment. And I'm not the neatest of housekeepers. And I also had a roommate who worked a night job. So I literally slithered out of my chair like a snake and snuck out the back door and ran down the street. And I was vacuuming with one hand and I was Windexing things with the other. We put all the dirty dishes in the bathtub and close and closed the curtain. And literally I'm dripping with sweat and I'm doing everything I can to get my apartment presentable. And then all of a sudden it's ding dong. And there's Mayor Coleman and this entire group of dignitaries. But I got ready in a matter of minutes.

unknown 20:43

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

That's my story of hosting the mayor at my house.