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Tierney Olosunde, a single mother of four, is hunting for a more spacious and affordable place to live.
She's already paying too much for a cramped two-bedroom apartment in West Toledo. It was a reasonable price when she signed the lease at the start of the pandemic, back when she had a steady nursing job. But a lot has changed since then, including expensive car problems, a career change to accommodate her kids’ busy school schedules — and a $300 rent increase after the lease expired.
The pandemic rental assistance funds she received for several months last year helped get her through, Ms. Olosunde said, but now she wants to find a cheaper place with three bedrooms, and has had no luck.
"They're starting at $925 and going up," the 31-year-old said. "And it's just like, a single parent can't afford that much unless I only have one child. But I have four."
Toledo does not have the skyrocketing rents of Denver, Miami, or Austin, but it nevertheless has an affordable housing crisis. A third of the city's households — nearly 40,000 — are cost-burdened, meaning they pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs, with half of those residents shelling out more than 50 percent on their rent or mortgage.
The problem is most severe for Toledoans earning the least. A recent city-commissioned 10-year housing plan found there is a shortage of 12,705 units for people with extremely low incomes — a number that has only increased slightly in recent years.
"If I'm spending 80 percent, or 60 percent, or 50 percent of my income on housing, I don't have any money to go and shop and buy anything, I can't buy a new car," said Rosalyn Clemens, director of the city's Department of Neighborhoods. "But if I'm only spending 25 percent of my income, I can save, I can go to the theater — I can take my kids to the ballet, because I have more discretionary money."
Toledo's rising rents and home prices remain far cheaper than most other major U.S. and Ohio cities. But the problem is that the average Toledo household earns just $39,000 — about 30 percent less than the state average, and about 40 percent less than the national average. About 25 percent of Toledoans live in poverty, roughly twice as high as both the state and national averages.
“I think oftentimes when people hear how much rent is in the city or county, folks say ‘Gosh, that’s low, that’s very affordable,’” said Kim Cutcher, executive director of LISC Toledo, which helps fund affordable housing. “But that’s based on our income levels. If you start to look at what individuals in the community make, and you drill that down by neighborhood, and you look at rentals, you start to then see maybe that isn’t so affordable.”
The city's affordability woes are exacerbated by an issue faced by many Rust Belt cities: a housing stock made up primarily of single-family detached homes that are more than a half-century old. Many have high utility costs. They are often in disrepair and have health and safety hazards, such as lead, that are costly to fix, the city's 10-year plan noted. Fifteen percent of Toledo's homes sit vacant.
But city government is also partly to blame and could have done far more to fix Toledo's housing problems over the years, according to research conducted by the Maryland company, Enterprise Community Partners, that developed the 10-year plan.
No ‘cohesive’ housing policy
The city "lacks a cohesive housing policy," said a 2021 memo from the company to Ms. Clemens, and its existing collection of housing codes and ordinances have created uncertainty and barriers around new housing development.
Toledo never established a consistent local funding source for housing-related work, the plan's authors wrote, instead relying almost entirely on U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grant funds.
Other federally funded programs specifically designed to accelerate affordable housing development, including the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, have gone "largely untapped."
Ms. Clemens, hired in 2019, acknowledged "a lack of engagement on the part of our Housing and Community Development department" over the years that led to problems attracting tax-credit projects.
Officials are working to remedy these issues, she said, including through the development of the 10-year plan. They will use at least $10 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to help spur development of potentially more than 600 new affordable units.
More affordable units disappearing soon
Yet city officials face an uphill battle, as 1,500 of Toledo's existing affordable housing units will see their subsidies expire in the next decade — with more than 500 of those gone by 2026. This means those units' rent prices will likely increase substantially.
Pandemic-related effects on the housing market have also worsened the affordability crisis in the city, said Sarah Jenkins, director of public policy and community engagement at the Fair Housing Center in Toledo. Because of surging demand and low supply of housing, she said, landlords have frequently raised both rents and fees, and made eligibility requirements stricter.
Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz said improving Toledo's affordable housing situation is a "core pillar" of his administration, and that it is key to turning around the city's population decline in coming years. And the 10-year plan, a first of its kind for Toledo, offers numerous recommendations to chip away at the problem.
But big questions remain — including how to pay for many of its proposed strategies, and whether city officials will actually follow through with its recommendations.
Strategies outlined in the plan include:
- Create a local, dedicated funding source for housing activities in the city. In other cities, such revenue sources include a property tax levy, real estate transfer tax or document recording fee revenues, developer fees, or general fund revenue, the report said.
- Create a redevelopment authority that would act as the city's "development arm" and help bring to fruition larger housing projects. The entity, separate from city government, would have its own governing board and could tap into a few funding sources not typically available to local governments, the report noted.
- Make wide-scale zoning changes that would encourage higher-density, mixed-use development in certain parts of Toledo. Also, the city should develop incentives that make larger housing developments cheaper and easier to build, like fee reductions, waiving parking lot requirements, and streamlined permitting, the report said.
- Create a "rental registry" that ensures Toledo's rental homes meet "basic health and safety standards." This would require hiring more staff or contract labor, the report noted.
- Create a "community land trust" to help spur additional affordable home construction or rehabilitation, including rebuilding some of the city's vacant homes. Funds from the city and the Lucas County Landbank could be used to get this model off the ground, the report said.
How to fund it
These types of comprehensive plans are “only as good as the political will” to carry them out, said Michael Sachs, deputy director at NeighborWorks Toledo Region, a nonprofit that develops and rehabilitates affordable housing. A former planning consultant, Mr. Sachs said he has seen many similar city plans elsewhere "check the box for public input," and then sit on a shelf.
Mr. Sachs and other NeighborWorks officials said the report, prepared by an out-of-state consultant at a cost of $160,000, did not seem to take into consideration historical affordable housing efforts in Toledo. For example, they said, it suggested the city should rebuild its network of community development corporations, or something similar to them, at the neighborhood level.
But numerous CDCs shuttered in the past two decades — some of them absorbed by NeighborWorks — because of financial problems and scandal.
“To see a recommendation saying, ‘Let’s recreate the mess we had 20 to 25 years ago,’ was disheartening,” said Bill Farnsel, the organization’s executive director. Ms. Clemens said the city is not interested in "recreating multiple CDCs,” but wants to strengthen neighborhood organizations in general.
“Some of the recommendations were so vague as to be irrelevant,” added Mr. Sachs. One example, he said, was the strategy to create a local funding source for affordable housing: “Oh, I’d like that too,” he said. “Should we just plant a money tree?”
Indeed, no one is sure how the city should pay for its affordable housing push.
For now, both Ms. Clemens and Mr. Kapszukiewicz said the influx of federal ARPA funds will kick-start the effort. But the neighborhoods director said the city does need to generate new funding sources; some 96 percent of her department's budget comes from federal dollars, which often have restrictions placed on them.
Councilman Nick Komives said the city should consider raising additional funds by upping permitting fees in the city's building inspection department. Some of those revenues could be shifted over the affordable housing initiatives, he said.
Though other cities have created a housing tax levy, Mr. Kapszukiewicz and others said that shouldn't be the approach, at least not yet.
"People are taxed out," said Councilman Tiffany Preston Whitman, who leads the Neighborhoods and Community Development Committee. She added Ms. Clemens has done a good job exhausting Community Development Block Grant program funding and other federal sources in a way the department had not in the past.
The redevelopment authority model
The city is starting to focus on solving its affordable housing crisis before gentrification starts, Ms. Clemens said, which is typically the moment many other cities begin addressing the issue.
But a lack of gentrification also has a downside: There is not yet much natural demand from developers to build new market-rate housing projects in Toledo. If there were more demand, she said, officials could add requirements to the apartment projects in the planning phase, such as mandating a certain percentage of affordable units for each new building. Housing officials can tell developers: “You give me more restricted units, maybe I give you more density. Maybe I waive some of your fees,” Ms. Clemens said.
For now, though, the city needs to figure out how to incentivize new affordable housing development in the first place. That's something a redevelopment authority would help with, said Ms. Clemens, who worked for an RDA in Maryland before coming to Toledo.
The first step toward a full-fledged agency, she said, will be to hire a “redevelopment manager” position in her department later this year that will work on identifying ideal city properties for housing and attracting developers. This person will look to find opportunities similar to the old Driggs Dairy site in Central Toledo, which the city recently bought, cleaned up, and sold to a developer who plans to build an affordable apartment complex on the property.
"It's a model where you're not just sitting down waiting for a developer to bring you a deal," Ms. Clemens said. "You're looking at the property that the city owns, you're looking at, strategically, we own this site here, we own this old building there — how can we proactively facilitate a commercial structure or housing?"
Looking for less stress, more space
Ms. Olosunde, the single mother, for now will continue sleeping on the couch and allowing her children to take the bedrooms as she hunts for a cheaper and more spacious rental home.
The current apartment — buzzing on a recent evening with her four kids, ages 6, 11, and 14 — was only supposed to be a short-term "stepping stone" to something bigger and better, she said. Two years later, Ms. Olosunde said she feels stuck as she continues to struggle to keep up with the higher rent and avoid eviction.
Since leaving nursing she has pieced together jobs, including at Amazon, and is attending school to obtain her cosmetology license. But she said it hasn't been enough to keep pace with her expenses — including those resulting from a car crash last year, and a series of other car-related issues since then.
Still, Ms. Olosunde said she stays motivated by visualizing the future. That involves obtaining her cosmetology license, so she can eventually do something she loves with a more flexible schedule. And it involves finding an affordable house, where her growing children have enough space to spread out.
"I don't want [the rent] to be so extremely high to where I'm still working my butt off just to be comfortable," Ms. Olosunde said. "I would like to be able to work and still have money, so I can put money away for them."
This is the first in a series of stories on housing affordability in Toledo. Read the second story here.
Do you have a Toledo affordable housing story to tell? Reach Blade reporter Luke Ramseth at lramseth@theblade.com.
First Published March 27, 2022, 11:45 a.m.
