Episode 5: A Place to Call Home: A Conversation with Erin Prosser

Don't miss this episode of So, Let's Talk Columbus with Michael Wilkos! Michael sits down with Erin Prosser, Deputy Director of Housing Strategies for the City of Columbus, to move beyond the problem and into the solutions. Together, they explore the strategies the city is using right now to expand housing access, preserve affordability and ensure Columbus remains a place where opportunity is within reach for everyone.

Tune in to hear from someone working on the front lines of one of our region's most pressing challenges and to understand what it will actually take to make sure a growing Columbus is a Columbus that works for all its residents.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I was speaking somewhere and someone's phone went off, and I was like, okay, who can't get their phone turned off more quickly? And it was my own phone. Welcome back to So Let's Talk Columbus. I'm Michael Wilkes, Vice President of Community Engagement at United Way of Central Ohio. In our last episode, we talked about housing, the growth happening in Columbus, and the pressure it's putting on affordability. Understanding the challenge is important, but the real question is, what are we doing about it? That's where we're going today. I'm joined by Aaron Prosser, Deputy Director of Housing Strategies for the City of Columbus. Erin is helping lead the city's work to expand housing access and improve affordability across our community. Erin, welcome to So Let's Talk Columbus.

SPEAKER_02 0:49

All right, well, thank you, Michael. Thank you for having me. As you know, I'm always happy to talk about housing and uh the work that we're doing and the challenges facing the community. So I'm excited about this conversation.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Erin, you and I go back about 20 years when we were both working in the Wyland Park neighborhood. I was at the Columbus Foundation at the time, you were at Campus Partners, and I was also a resident of the neighborhood. At that time, probably 20% of the houses in the neighborhood were boarded up. There were lots of challenges, and we might have had 14 or 15 different housing strategies going on simultaneously. What is uh some of the work in Wineland Park that you were most proud of in your role at campus partners?

SPEAKER_02 1:32

Yes, so when we were working together in Wineland Park, it really was the kind of start to our conversation around housing scarcity, right? And we understood at the time that there was a reason people weren't choosing Wineland Park, which was largely around crime and safety issues. And as other folks around us kind of worked to address those issues, the proximity of it to the short north, which was starting to thrive, the university, I think all of us understood that at some point it was going to be a high-demand neighborhood. And left to its own devices, it was going to price out the families that were there at the time, but certainly not be an option for families outside of really high wage earners. And that felt like something, an outcome that we didn't want to see. That the access to the Ohio State University, that that neighborhood should be available to families of all income levels. And I think we had this finite amount of time while they were addressing the crime and safety issues through some of the other interventions to add as much affordability as we possibly could and to lock that down so that there was access for different uh income levels, different families. How what how could we intervene and invest in that neighborhood so that it continued to be accessible? And it was really the first time we'd had that kind of deliberate investment. And I think the exciting part about it was we did have a lot of different housing strategies going because we were working in a neighborhood that was open to those conversations, that was willing to let us pick different pieces and parts to start to experiment and see what worked, what didn't. How can we get more housing that's affordable through the subsidy and through that investment, but also looking at different housing types and how could we bring those all to the community so that there it when it was a neighborhood of choice, it was still also a neighborhood that was accessible to the families that had been there, but also families that would like to come and join that place. And I think what it became was this proving ground of how do you create a mixed-income community working with the neighbors, working with stakeholders, and working with uh partners like the city and figuring out how do you do that. And it was a monumental effort that included all the sectors, all the people. We went to a lot of meetings back in the day with 100 people, 150 people. I mean, the neighborhood is highly engaged. We were all on this sort of experiment to figure out could you truly create a mixed income neighborhood? I think we did, and we did such a good job of making sure that the affordable housing does not look any different than the market rate. And you and I have talked about this a lot over the years, that at times it is, it looks as if it's not accessible because we did high-quality investment and we did really good work to make sure that you don't know what the income is of the family behind that door. But it has somewhat been a challenge, I think, for both of us to talk about the work and make sure that we understand and that we're communicating the mixed income nature of that neighborhood that remains today.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Yeah, so you know it's interesting because the logic model around revitalization was comprehensive. It was economic development, education, health, housing, resident engagement, safety, youth development. But the only pieces of that that you could really see was housing. You can see the real estate. And often people make their mental model of place based on the quality of the built environment. So uh left to its own devices, Wineland Park would have definitely experienced whole-scale gentrification. Uh, talk a little bit more deeply about um why the Wineland Park model did not become gentrification, even though as people drive up North 4th and Summit Streets, that's what they think they might be looking at. But in fact, they're looking at a truly mixed-income neighborhood.

SPEAKER_02 5:17

I think a couple of big things. One, we had a really large portfolio of project-based Section 8 housing that had been in the neighborhood for a long time, was very poorly managed, not invested in, the management and oversight was very limited. It had created a lot of the challenges in the neighborhood. But the ability to see it as an opportunity and change that from a challenge for the neighborhood to one that has now become an anchor while maintaining that affordability. The crime rate, I think, as we were working in that neighborhood, dropped about 80% in the course of the work. The families in those units, the income levels of those families never changed. Those families, different families, albeit over the years, but their circumstances are very similar to what was there when there was high crime. And what we see is when we improve the operations and management of that portfolio, and there was really supportive services and wraparounds for those families, what we see is it's not the families that were creating the criminal or public safety issues. It's not that they were in that income bracket, but the fact that the property management wasn't showing up and being a good neighbor. And so we had this opportunity to shore up that portfolio, invest in it, make it something that became really high-quality affordable housing with supportive services for those residents, and also invest in additional new affordable housing. And when we say affordable, uh, we mean income restricted and protected. So that it's not just less expensive, it's not just cheaper housing, but it is calibrated to the household incomes and it is protected across time.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

What is the income uh percent that people should be spending to qualify as affordable housing?

SPEAKER_02 7:01

So we would like you to not spend more than 30% of your income on your housing. We don't necessarily want you at that level, but when we what we do know is that when you cross over 30%, you start to make compromises in other areas that are supporting your family. So it could be you move from high-quality childcare to more of identifying a babysitter so that you can get to work. You may have a less reliable uh car so that it gets you get your ability to get to work becomes more challenging. Those are things you're gonna compromise when you are spending more than 30%. We know we have families in Columbus and Central Ohio that are paying more than 50%. And when you cross over that threshold, we know that that's when you start to compromise on really critical items like medicine and food and the ability to just maintain that roof over your head starts to compromise everything else. So when we talk about affordability, we are gonna keep those families from paying past that 30% so that they can have the uh 40-hour a week job, see their kids, join the PTA, do all the other things that we want to do in life, but also be able to pay that rent every month and make sure that that's something they can do.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

So during the years in Wyland Park, there was intervention with Habitat for Humanity, there was low-income housing tax credits, philanthropically funded home repair, supportive housing, uh, lots of different tools. So now you have a new role, which is not just neighborhood specific, but you are in a citywide role. Uh Deputy Director of Housing Strategies. What does that mean? And how have you taken that Wyland Park experience to this now citywide lens that you've been charged to do?

SPEAKER_02 8:38

Yes, so the role was created in 2021 with the idea that as we were intervening in housing, it was not going to be as much these specific programs or interventions to serve specific needs, but how was the city and the community going to look more broadly at the market? And how are we showing up in a more comprehensive way, not just utilizing the tools that we have from our state and federal partners, but also how is the city showing up in this space? And the ability to talk about things like mixed-income neighborhoods for the city. And in some cases, that means adding affordability in places that haven't been historically affordable. In other cases, that's going to mean similar to what we did in Wineland Park, we're shoring up and preserving that affordability. So that as the market changes around you, you still have those options. Being able to take the lessons from Wineland Park and think comprehensively about the city in total. Um, I couldn't have picked a better proving ground or you know, learning space than Winland Park. Um, the importance of the community engagement component, how much better the interventions we did do got because we were so engaged with the neighborhood, and they were we were a trusted partner with each other and they could identify things that they needed to see. Um, the ability for us to look again at the full spectrum of household incomes and how they impact each other. And you can't just make an isolated intervention in one section of the income bracket, right? Because they're going to impact each other. All of those lessons start to create that understanding of a comprehensive housing market as opposed to individual programmatic interventions to support particular families. We have to historically in Columbus, most of our affordable housing was naturally delivered by the market. And when we know that all these new folks have joined, we didn't build the housing accordingly, suddenly the market isn't able to deliver a lot of affordability to families across the income spectrum. And so that scarcity, which we knew was coming in Wineland Park given its location, now that scarcity is spread throughout the city. And that high demand is just the city of Columbus now.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

So talk about the last you know decade, 15 years. Uh, what has the production of housing uh looked like in our region relative to demand for housing production?

SPEAKER_02 10:56

So we've added a lot of new residents, new neighbors for lots of different reasons. People choose this place because we do have jobs, we have opportunity. We are a high quality place to live. And people recognize it largely from other parts of the state of Ohio or coming even internationally. There's a place, there's a reason people choose Columbus, and that's really important. But as they come, we have to be able to build the housing. And we were at a every every new job we added, we only added uh, you know, not enough housing to support even that job or that household. We kept losing ground over the last decade. And in that, as we started to see there were indicators of impacts broadly on families, right? We start to see things that you and I pay attention to around how many folks in our community are experiencing homelessness, how many are housing unstable, um, what are we seeing in terms of overcrowding and doubling up? How do we start to identify some of these early indicators and act more quickly than I think we saw some of our peer cities do around the country where they we really waited until the situation was so dire that unwinding it became a pretty monumental task. And I think what we did as a community in Columbus that's different is everybody from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors stood up and said, we can see what's coming. We know what the outcome is if we don't change the trajectory. And if we wait too long, unwinding that and getting us back to a place where we're naturally affordable will be nearly impossible.

SPEAKER_01 12:29

So I know in your current role, you track pure cities and you want to compare Columbus to other similar markets to see if we are doing well or not. And I think you recently shared with me some data about 2025 and the performance of Columbus relative to other markets and uh share with our listeners some of that perspective.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

So big, a big, big contributor again, the challenges we're facing is the scarcity of housing available to households, not only coming into the community, but those of us living here already. That scarcity needs to be combated with additional supply. We know this, we've seen it. There was a recent article yesterday, I think, out of the Pew Charit Charitable Trust, um, that we're seeing the real indicators of that supply changing and slowing rent growth, if not depressing rent growth, which is nice. Um, when we look at what the city of Columbus and our region are doing in terms of just supply construction, it's remarkable compared to the other cities. So this is not an economic condition of the national level. Um, the city of Columbus is up 50% over 2024 to 2025. That's a really remarkable number, a little over 9,000 units permitted just in the city of Columbus. That puts us on track to deliver what the mayor has called for for the city of Columbus over the next 10 years to deliver 100,000 units. And we look at the region, they were up 17%. So we're starting to even see the conversations that we're all having, the ability for a lot of different folks that weren't ever in the housing conversation are suddenly uh interested, excited in joining that conversation. I think we're seeing the fruits of that. When you look at the other cities in that same year to year, we didn't see even most of them decrease in their unit production. And I think Houston was up one or two percent, like was pretty modest. Those are things that, again, it's not a national economic trend. This was something unique happening in Columbus.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

And what do you attribute a 50% increase? I think it was you that told me that that was the most amount of housing built within the city in at least 25 years. What do you attribute such a huge increase in 2025? Why did that happen?

SPEAKER_02 14:36

I think a big part of it was conversations around things like the zone in. Uh, the modernization of our city zoning code. We completed the first phase in the summer of 2024, where that rezoned our primary corridors to allow for greater flexibility, um, but most importantly, greater density. It lowered requirements around parking, eliminated parking requirements, all of the things that typically trip up a development. It's extremely difficult to build housing, and it's getting more and more difficult. And the reasons are primarily related to cost. And it's it's getting more expensive. And I don't think any of us want a world where that expense is then passed on to our renters, and then rents have to keep pace with that construction increase. And so the ability also to use our residential tax incentive to start to figure out how do we address that. There's not very many levers we have to address the cost of construction. We want to use the ones we have well and smartly, but certainly that impact of projects we know would have stayed on the drawing board and now are places where people live. How do we come in and make it more feasible to build housing?

SPEAKER_01 15:46

So in the fall, uh the voters of our city approved a half billion dollar affordable housing bond package. Uh, how will those dollars be used?

SPEAKER_02 15:55

That's a great question. And I think it is speaks to, again, that community-based uh work we're all doing together. And we can't, the city can't do it without the city, without the community being a part of it. And the voters, the third time the voters said yes to having bonds specifically for affordable housing. The city of Columbus has long bonded for infrastructure, things like parks and rec facilities, uh, utilities, roadways, that was stuff we all understood as we grew, we had to keep investing in. What changed in 2019 when we put up the first affordable housing bond was the mayor saying this is housing is infrastructure and we should treat it accordingly and we should invest accordingly. In 2019, there was a $50 million bond put up for the the voters. Uh they supported it and they felt like that wasn't that was something that they felt was true and they wanted us to invest in affordable housing. 2022, we had 200 million voters again said yes. Uh, and then in 2025, we put up the 500 million. So, what we do with the dollars, and the 500 million is going to allow us to have a much bigger conversation and do some other things. What we have done to date with those dollars is couple them with other public and private funding sources to get affordable housing. And again, when we say affordable, it's income restricted and protected. Okay. So these are units, again, calibrated to those household incomes. We were able to utilize other funding sources to stretch our dollars as far as possible. As of today, we've deployed about 200 million of the total $250 million capacity that the voters gave us, about 6,000 rental units, about 300 affordable homeownership units, 7 million in low-income homeowner repair programs to keep homeowners housed in the housing that they have. Really making those investments, it has to be invested in capital improvements, it has to be permanent improvements, it can't go for operating. So these are ways that we essentially buy down the cost of the debt on that construction. We contribute a chunk of cash that that development doesn't no longer have to pay back as debt that they would from a bank loan. So that allows the rents to be lower, and then there's mechanisms in place for compliance that the rents are again calibrated to those families and protected over that affordability period.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

So other cities are also desperate to build more housing and they have used bonds to get that going. How does Columbus's uh voter approved bonds compare to what's happening in other cities as far as scale?

SPEAKER_02 18:25

It's interesting. There's definitely there was there was a wave of these affordable housing bond packages around that 2022 time space. And we saw a number of cities, when you look around the country, there's really about a dozen that are utilizing this tool at the city level. And we saw again that big surge in 22. A lot of those cities we have not seen them go back to their voters. Um, we have an incredible development community here that was ready and able to sort of start getting those units on board. When you look at those 6,000 units, right now, about 65% of them are already open and being lived in. Wow. That's pretty remarkable. That's a lot of families that are suddenly secure in their housing and protected over time. They can start to think about other things, they can start to, you know, get advanced degrees, they can start to support their kids. That there's just a lot of opportunity that comes with that. There's a bevy of different ways that other cities use it. I think we're looking at some of those different, now that we have the $500 million and we can keep doing what we were doing. We can keep our foot on the gas to deliver those really important affordable units. What are the other things we could be doing? And the mayor announced in February, we're going to keep investing in affordability. That's really important. We're also going to be investing in housing stability, right? We know in the city of Columbus, we have to do two things at the same time. We have to invest in the long-term infrastructure and acknowledge that their families in crisis right now. And that they they have we have to walk and chew gum, right? We have to do both at the same time. Last year, the mayor stood up the a new division in our department called the Division of Housing Stability. And we have a whole team now that will wake up every day to make sure that people stay housed, that that that if we can keep them in their rental unit or their homeownership, that we can uh that they can stay housed. And if they lose their housing and they find themselves in a circumstance, how do we get them back into housing quickly? How do we make sure that it's a long-term stabilized condition? So there's a whole team at the city now doing that work. How do we do that at the capital side? What does it look like to invest in our shelter system? Not necessarily adding more beds, but adding a better condition to support families and other folks that are experiencing homelessness in a time when shelters may not have served that that wide range of humans. And so, how do we invest in that housing stability? Again, we'll continue to do the investment on our low-income homeowners as well. Keeping people housed is really important. The other, the next bucket that the mayor announced is access to opportunity. And the access to opportunity space is we've we've added a lot of affordable units because we knew we needed them. We responded to a lot of the state and federal criteria. How do we decide then where do we need affordability and how do we make that happen? So that affordable housing is not just in the city in general, but specifically approximate to jobs and education, places that are high demand. How do we enter that space? That may include things like acquisition of land and being able to set it aside so that those affordable housing partners have access to places that right now is really difficult for them. And then the final bucket is investing in innovation. There's a lot of both financial tools and construction practices that need some uh ability to move forward and be see if we can make something that it makes it less expensive to build, make it faster to build, whatever that criteria is, how do we invest in the innovation so that we can stretch our dollars farther? So hopefully, as the voters of the City of Columbus continue to invest in affordable housing, we get better at investing.

SPEAKER_01 21:59

And do you Anticipate that there will be another voter opportunity in 2028. It seems as if we've been having these housing bonds every three years. Is that a cadence that we expect to continue to see in the future?

SPEAKER_02 22:12

I would expect at this point. The bonds that we've typically issued for those other parts of infrastructure I mentioned have been on a three-year cycle. Got it. As with anything, we've the voters gave us the authority to bond these dollars to sell these bonds. Each year we work with partners in the city auditor's office and finance to make sure that we have the capacity that there's enough room to put this on our credit card and be able to understand where our income levels are to pay that. So that's we hope that we can keep going at the pace we're going. As we can, you know, we have really smart people that continue to watch the economic outlooks and conditions. But barring any big changes to that, then I think, yeah, we want to keep that same pace.

SPEAKER_01 22:55

As you know, United Way is solely focused on success by third grade. And we believe that all children need to be on the pathway to both economic and academic success by third grade. So let's talk a little bit about housing for families with children. In recent census data that I've been able to access, there is growth all across the urban core, from Franklin to the Short North, Winland Park, Near East Side, near South Side. The population in those urban neighborhoods is on the rise, but they are losing school-age children. So there's a lot of mobility where families can no longer afford some of these urban communities that are really seeing their prices rise. Is there a specific strategy the city is using when it looks at affordability with families with children? And how does that look differently than maybe other programs that you have?

SPEAKER_02 23:45

And I think that's really where you're where you'll see that impact of the $500 million bond. Again, when we couple it with state and federal funding, we have been pretty light in adding additional criteria because we didn't want to create projects that just wouldn't come out of the ground ultimately. As we look at investing without those programs associated, we can make some decisions around investing in family-sized units. It's very difficult to deliver housing that has above three bedrooms. And that's largely due to financing, right? And if if if I have a one-bedroom unit or a two-bedroom unit, I can't simply, I don't get double the rent on the two-bedroom, right? We all know that. It's a premium, but does not full double. So when a bank looks at that project, they're going to see per square foot, if you do three or four bedroom units, you're just going to have a much lower revenue per square foot. So even if a developer is interested in doing that, it's not likely they would get financed because the bank's going to ask them to say, you have to maximize that per square foot. And that's you can do that with studios and one bedrooms. And how do we invest then to change that math? How do we make it so that it's financially feasible to do larger bedrooms and deliver that in those high opportunity locations? And that's really where those bond dollars can help subsidize and figure out how do we fill that gap. So whatever the gap is that the bank's saying is between those two square footage revenue sources, how do we fill that so that we can get those bigger bedroom counts? Those will be things we do, certainly working with the land trust and with Habitat for Humanity, both of those entities are looking at essentially multifamily home ownership. And how do we make it so that you can enter home ownership and it doesn't necessarily constitute a single family home? How do you, and that those are natural price points that are with that subsidy, we can have that accessibility. And with the land trust, it can be permanent over time. On our street, I always point to this on our street, which has changed a lot. We've seen a lot of increase in value in this. This is a street where you live on the near east side. Uh at the end of our street, there's a series of row houses. They're probably been there since the 20s. They are individual home ownership, they are two-bedroom, one bath. So maybe not something you want to live in long term. I think we all like to have a second bathroom. But as a starter home, as a place to enter the property ladder, I will tell you, I watched those prices. They change hands relatively quickly. It's mostly young people that are buying those. They stay around the same price point. They've not seen that escalation. And it becomes that entry point for homeownership, which we've kind of broken. And right now, if you want to, I mean, I think we're around 323,000 for the average home price. If that's where you're entering the market, it's prohibitive to a lot of families. We've lost that ability to build the equity over time. A lot of us ended up in our forever homes accidentally, right? We didn't mean to buy the house that we were just going to get locked into. But you start to look around, you're like, I can't afford anything else. Even with the equity here, I can't get out.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

And I've heard you tell the story about your own mom and how much housing she's consuming, even though she doesn't want to. So give us a little bit insight into your own family journey.

SPEAKER_02 26:51

Yes. And I think that's where we think about the diversity of housing types, right? Without even necessarily looking at a big A affordability subsidy. She has a house in a 1960 subdivision that we grew up in. When we left the house, she she could have made a decision at that time to downsize, right? That would have been a reasonable decision. But when she looked around her neighborhood, every house looks like hers. So for her to downsize, she would have had to leave her friends, family, civic association, community. When her kids just left the house, that's kind of an insane decision, right? So she stayed. And now she's in a house that doesn't function really great for her. It's fine. And the house should have a family in it. There should have been a place in her neighborhood for her to downsize, stay connected to her community, but also open that house up to a family, put her in the right spot where she can have what she needs without dealing with this giant house. Those are things that should have functioned in the market. But because of the typology of housing that she lived in, she didn't have those options. And now we're just, she's she's in the house and will probably be there as long as she can.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:01

Um, we kind of lost that opportunity to really figure out what was the best option for her.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

So you mentioned zoning earlier, and so we talk about neighborhoods that don't have housing diversity and typology. Um, the city is now heading into phase two of zone in. If I've got my numbers correct, in phase one, the city upzone the commercial corridors from 6,000 units of housing to 88,000 units of housing. Uh, what can we look forward to in phase two of zone in?

SPEAKER_02 28:29

Yes, so phase two is going to be looking at what we would generally refer to as our underutilized sites. We know that around the city there's places where we have aging strip center retail, we have aging office parks that may have functioned given the office culture in say the 80s or 90s, they're not particularly well used today. How do we convert those things back? How do we make them for a mixed income purpose? How do you flip them back over to housing? What are the what can we do on those sites to encourage that investment? It allows us to invest on our existing infrastructure, those roads and pipes that are already there. So you're not continuing to sprawl out. And then also just repurposing that land so that you have someplace, new residents that are, and and we talk a lot about housing in kind of the ways that it negatively impacts your community. People talk with me a lot about traffic or parking or kind of what are those other issues that are challenging. The beauty of housing is they also bring neighbors with wallets and who want to go shopping and buy coffee at the coffee shop. There's actually advantages that can come for these neighborhoods and some of the things we really want. If we can turn over those underutilized sites, bring him, bring people back to living on those sites, then you have some of that broader impact on a neighborhood. And I think that will be the really critical part of phase two is just figuring out how do you rezone that. So zoning is not the impediment to those redevelops, those abilities, the ability to redevelop those sites.

SPEAKER_01 29:57

How much of the city will be uh looked at in phase two of zoning?

SPEAKER_02 30:01

The zoning team will probably be furious of me. I believe it's another 45%. So we're gonna get up over half the city for rezoning. The first phase was quite small geographically, huge impact on housing supply. The middle section will be a smaller geography, middle, medium geography, and it had a decent impact on housing supply. As we think about the third phase, it'll be the largest geographically, but it will be probably it's a lot of it will be built out and it will be much more about adding housing diversity to our community and allowing, again, those neighborhoods to start to add in some of those other types of housing. And so when you look across that, that will be the full modernization of the zoning code. Everything to previously, everything in the zoning code was in Title 33 of our code. Everything will be migrated over to a new Title 34 with the idea that this is how we show up as a city of Columbus, this is how we want to grow. We're gonna allow for that growth to happen in the best places to continue to have those thriving neighborhoods, as opposed to the kind of individual sites waiting to see what a developer brings us. This is our opportunity to say as a community, this is what we want to see and where we want to see it.

SPEAKER_01 31:13

So three times the voters have said yes to housing bonds. Were those close elections or were they uh a resounding choice?

SPEAKER_02 31:22

I would say they were a resounding choice. I think that that's the incredible thing, again, that gives me optimism about the city and us having a different outcome than our pure cities. I think at times there is this underlying belief that a bigger a city gets, the more expensive it gets. And that's just sort of like the a true thing that happens. And it's absolutely not. We can have growth as long as we manage it properly and maintain our natural affordability over time as long as we do it well. And those policy decisions are things that we're making, and then to have the community also support that work, that's the secret sauce.

SPEAKER_01 32:00

So the voters have turned over $750 million over six years. Uh the Link Us Levy Passed, which was a uh historic investment in public transit. The city is looking at upzoning. As you look at the pure cities across the country, what's some innovation that you see in other cities that you'd like to ultimately bring to Columbus?

SPEAKER_02 32:23

I think those are there's a lot of work going on, and cities are starting to get the kind of what we would call the bread and butter, making sure the supply is up, all of those pieces. And now we're all starting to think how do you make it easier to build where we want you to put housing? And so I think you see some of these opportunities around working with partners in nonprofit or faith-based communities, what are the land our partners in other parts of this of the public sector, like our libraries or our schools? How can we all get together to figure out how do we get that housing into those communities? How do we, how do we partner with those kind of non-traditional entities? I think that's a big part of it. Um, we're seeing a little bit around kind of understanding how to do more creative financing. How do you make it less expensive to borrow the money to build the housing? That's as important as how does it how do we make it less expensive to physically build it? We have a very um, it's a cumbersome financing process to get to a place. How do you, how does the city show up with um resources to be able to say these make it easier to finance that housing? Um what do we need to talk about in terms of just getting less expensive capital out the door? I mean, we have partners here as well, like Affordable Housing Trust and others, Finance Fund, the Finance Authority, other folks that can bring that lower cost capital. Those are things that we'll explore over the next couple years to figure out how do we make it less expensive and faster to build the type of high-quality housing we're looking for. And I think that's always the balance. There's cities around the country that have sort of really turned us supply on really hard. And I think we would look at some of those cities as not being, I think I'll use, I'll I will quote Michael Wilkos back to himself. These are not cities that are worthy of human affection, right? And we want to balance that slow trajectory of building the supply we need by doing it really well.

SPEAKER_01 34:16

I've heard it described that uh capital is not the challenge right now in our city, but the operational dollars for a lot of these housing. Uh, explain to our listeners the difference between capital and operational and where the log jam is occurring.

SPEAKER_02 34:32

So we have again the ability with the voter-approved bonds to invest on the capital side. But I think what we all have to reckon with right now is that operations are getting more and more expensive. And the primary way to solve for that is to increase rent, right? If you have more operating expenses and they're legitimate expenses, right? These buildings are expensive to own and operate. We've seen a 25% increase in insurance, largely because of some of the climate impacts on the coasts. That's also impact they're spreading that burden across the country. And so the folks, housing providers in our community are feeling that pinch. Um, we can see continued and increased cost around property management because we quite honestly don't have enough property management companies. There's not enough of that inventory of that staffing. And so we see a lot of these companies that are stretched too thin or um not able to deliver the services we need. All of that, how do we look at making really efficiently operating buildings so that we can continue to have uh things that are nice in our community operated and maintained well, the tenants are having good units, those are all things there are some folks who, and we've seen this over the last couple of years with places like Colonial Village or Latitude, where you have exploitation of tenants and there's very much a decision not to continue to invest and maintain the buildings. That's some that's certainly something that happens. But alternatively, there's just also the ability for some of these areas where or buildings that are older and the rents aren't just aren't as high. We're starting to see those operations outpace that rent. And that's where we get into the problem of maintenance of the building, keeping it up, making sure that the tenants have what they need. How do we solve for that becomes very challenging because it is not something we can use bond dollars for. It's something that we have resources that are scarce otherwise to support something that's an ongoing operation.

SPEAKER_01 36:25

So clearly, housing is not just a Columbus issue, it's a regional issue. Uh last year, the City of Columbus, as you said, had building permits that jumped by 50%, but only up 17% for the region. Uh said another way, the City of Columbus is 42% of the metropolitan population, but accounted for 58% of all of the residential construction that happened across the region. What's the effort to look at housing through a regional lens and get cooperation among communities and counties across the region?

SPEAKER_02 36:59

And that is where we focus this conversation around what, for lack of a better uh name for it, is the Regional Housing Coalition. And starting to say not only should the jurisdictions and the cities in the region get together, but it's also going to need the private and nonprofit sectors as well. And that we all have to be talking together about what does it mean for us to bring jobs to a community if we're not building the housing. How do we reconcile these companies that are coming and asking, where's my workforce? And how do we make sure that we have that workforce available and making sure that as we talk in the region, there's an understanding that the two are connected and that there's as a really critical need to make sure that we have a stable and available workforce for these companies, or the companies won't choose to stay. We sometimes refer to them as the mobile middle. These are folks with the ability to choose where they want to go. And if they can't find housing and a good life here in Columbus, they'll go move to Raleigh or to Charlotte or somewhere else that may be delivering what they're looking for. All of a sudden, that workforce is not available, and those companies start to raise their hand and say, How are we supposed to staff this? We have to make that link between housing and economic development.

SPEAKER_00 38:13

Well, a job is uh or a home is where a job goes at night.

SPEAKER_02 38:16

It has to go somewhere, right? There's a moment where driving 90 minutes or 60 minutes or even 45 minutes isn't going to be the quality of life you were looking for. And if that's where you're stuck living and figuring out how to solve for, you may choose a different city. There was an article a few years ago, a reporter at Axios talked about the fact that he and his wife, both professionals, had good jobs, were looking for to buy a house. They looked in Clintonville. That was their first choice. They ended up in Newark. Wow. And so they they're they had made a series of compromises to get to a place that they could afford. I don't know what how that ends up being a long-term choice for you as to whether or not you stay in the region. If it's not affording you the lifestyle you were looking for, there are lots of folks that might choose Newark. They were wanted to choose something different, they didn't have that choice. And going back to our original conversation about Wineland Park, that's really what we want for families, is you want to be able to make the choices you want to make. It goes back to my mom should have been able to make the choice to downsize, but it wasn't available. If any of us are sitting in our homes and meant to buy a starter home and suddenly find ourselves in our forever home, we lack that choice of making that next step up the property ladder. That's the the lack of choice is affecting every income level in different ways, but that's the really the impact we're seeing for folks. And where people talk about affordability, I think what they're saying is, I'm not able to make the choices for my family, either by not having two separate jobs to pay for my rent or by living quite a far away from where I would have preferred to live. All of those things start to limit how you feel about this region. And if you don't choose Columbus and you have the ability to choose somewhere else, we will lose that workforce. And I think it's about having that conversation with our suburban communities, with our with our employers to make that connection. This is not just about what I think historically housing has felt more like a social service and something that that's the lens that it was viewed under, but it is 20% of our GDP in this country. It is a major part of the economy, and we have to start looking at it that way and treating it as such. And continuing to block housing starts means eventually that is going to come to that is going to come to a head where it is going to limit the amount of workforce we have to support the jobs and employment.

SPEAKER_01 40:36

So it's a complex issue, it's a layered issue, it's a regional issue, but finally, as we close out the conversation, what gives you hope and optimism for the future of Central Ohio?

SPEAKER_02 40:47

I think just the people we have in the city, in the region, leaders like yourself, leaders on our elected official side. I talk to my counterparts in other cities, and they are having far more arguments than I am. People are deeply curious about this work. They want to understand housing. I have a lot of great conversations. There's a lot to unpack and understand, and we're not always going to agree, but I don't see the kind of fights my counterparts in other cities have about just understanding that supply matters, understanding that affordability is important. Those aren't things that we're, we we all sort of agree on that. And now we have to figure out how then to move forward on the solution side, but we don't have to fight about the basics of how we show up. That feels incredible to me compared to where other cities are having fundamental disagreements about the cause of why they're seeing these challenges. We've all accepted this is kind of where we are. I don't really have those conversations anymore. And now we just get to move into solutions.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

That's nice. So someone's coming to Columbus for the first time and you want to show them the city. What are two or three places or neighborhoods that you would want to show that visitor?

SPEAKER_02 41:59

Oh, I mean, everything I again mostly live downtown. Um think Columbus has the most incredible neighborhoods. Uh, I spend as much time as I possibly can at the bookloft in German Village. That would definitely be one. I know it's kind of um a common one, but I think it's I love going to Bookloft and seeing people from out of town like experiencing um that place for the first time is very fun. Uh, I think that's certainly part of it. Um, and then I think as we think about just anything in the summertime, I would make them come then because I don't think there's a better city in the summer. Nice. If you're bored in this city in the summer, that's your own choice. Like there is something every weekend, there's something going on. It it feels so vibrant and fun. And I don't think any city does summer as well as we do.

SPEAKER_01 42:48

Nice. Aaron, I really appreciate your perspective. I think what comes through clearly is that this is a complex challenge, but it's also one where real strategies are taking shape and real progress is being made. And so I thank you for your participation in all of that. And it's a reminder that housing isn't just about supply and demand, it's about people and whether a growing city like Columbus continues to be a place where opportunity is within reach. So thanks for joining us today. And if you take one thing away from today's conversation, let it be this. All of the opportunities we're creating in Columbus don't matter if people don't have a place to call home. So thanks for listening to So Let's Talk Columbus. If this conversation made you think, share it. If it challenged you, good. If it made you proud, even better. And until next time, remember there's not a problem Columbus can't fix.