Toledo has a constellation of housing issues.
With a waiting list longer than the number of units it has available for public housing, the Lucas Metropolitan Housing Agency has stopped taking applications.
Nearly all of the LMHA’s 2,633 units are full, and the list of about 3,000 applicants waiting to get in face an uncertain future. It’s unclear how long their wait for a public-housing unit will be.
Meanwhile, we’re a region with such famously affordable housing that out-of-town investors snap up former owner-occupied homes in residential neighborhoods and, over the course of a few years, create a plague of neglected absentee-landlord rentals.
And finally, the Lucas County Land Bank, which has succeeded in dealing with thousands of eyesores since it was created in 2016 — demolishing or renovating vacant and abandoned dwellings to improve the region’s housing stock and cleaning up blighted neighborhoods — has to plan for its second act.
The $29 million grant from the Hardest Hit Fund — a component of the Troubled Asset Relief Program — that has been funding the land bank’s demolition/renovation campaign will run out by law this year. What comes next?
None of the stars in this constellation shines as a hopeful beacon. The trick for regional leaders should be to see them together as one big picture, not as isolated issues.
Toledo needs a broad, comprehensive housing strategy that takes into account all these problems. A lack of affordable housing for residents who need it and a glut of empty and/or neglected homes in a shrinking city are problems whose solutions should dovetail.
It isn’t as simple as putting would-be public-housing residents into the city’s available homes, of course. But the same officials who recently chatted up housing issues with U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown ought to be able to put together a plan that takes on the big-picture housing needs of the city.
One promising option is a program Columbus uses to fill private rental units with public-housing residents. Once faced with long waiting lists and a shortage of public housing as Toledo is now, Columbus moved to convert a vast majority of its housing authority’s public units to a voucher program.
Public-housing tenants can take a voucher to a landlord and then pay th difference between the actual rent and public-housing subsidy provided by the housing authority via the voucher. The plan gives low-income families flexibility, does not require the housing authority to build additional units, and fills rental units for the city’s landlords. Such a program deserves a look by Toledo officials
A voucher program could be a first step in a long-term comprehensive affordable housing strategy that the region badly needs. Trying to tackle the Toledo area’s related but distinct housing issues in isolation is not a viable way forward.
Toledo can grow again. Toledo’s homes can once again be full of growing families in liveable neighborhoods. Toledo needs to see its housing challenges as small parts of a larger picture. It needs to adopt a smart and comprehensive solution to put people in homes.
First Published February 28, 2020, 5:00 a.m.
