County staff hoping to use affordable housing question to boost community awareness of issue
HOLLAND — Would you support a tax to help build more affordable housing?
Ottawa County’s 2021 Citizen Survey asked residents if they would vote for a hypothetical 0.1 mill millage to fund affordable housing projects in the county.
Although there are no plans for such a millage, officials hope to use the information gathered from the survey to plan for addressing the need for affordable housing in the region.
The survey was administered Aug. 3-8 among 400 registered voters. On the question of a hypothetical affordable housing millage, 57 percent of respondents were either solid or lean “yes,” with 37 percent either solid or lean “no,” with the remaining 7 percent of respondents undecided.
Of the respondents voting “yes,” 47 percent were solid yes and the other 10 percent said yes after they were pressed on the issue. John Cavanagh, co-founder of Lansing-based research agency EPIC-MRA, said the results may not appear similar to actual results if an affordable housing millage question were placed on the ballot.
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“It is general conventional wisdom that if you’re under 50 percent with a solid yes vote going into an election, you’ve got a lot of work to do,” Cavanagh said during a Nov. 9 board of commissioners meeting.
That doesn’t mean the survey is a lost cause. Paul Sachs, Ottawa County’s Director of Strategic Impact, said the county can use the results to drive discussion on increasing access to affordable housing.
“The data that we're collecting at this point, it allows us to think thoughtfully and effectively on how we bridge that financial hurdle, and then how do we strengthen that public sentiment towards the need for affordable housing?” Sachs told The Sentinel.
Local governments and business advocates are hoping to address access to affordable housing as a way to attract diverse and qualified talent to the region. A 2018 report from Ottawa United Way found 35 percent of households in Ottawa County struggled to make ends meet, with housing one of several major costs.
The survey also asked residents if they would be more likely to support such an affordable housing millage “if funding was a partnership of private businesses, nonprofit organizations, and government?” with 62 percent of respondents saying yes.
Sachs said knowing that residents may be more open to a partnership between public and private entities allows for more favorably crafted policy. He pointed to the American Rescue Plan and CARES Acts as possible opportunities to use federal funding to address affordable housing.
“This lays the groundwork for us moving forward,” he said. “With the infusion of (federal relief) dollars, how can we potentially leverage some of those dollars with these types of public-private partnerships? That's where we'll get these case studies and these real-world examples of the success of building this type of important workforce housing stock.”
— Contact Arpan Lobo at alobo@hollandsentinel.com. Follow him on Twitter @arpanlobo.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Ottawa County hopes to take insight from affordable housing survey question
