Mayor Ginther lays out Columbus plan for $200 million affordable housing bond package
If Columbus voters approve the city's proposed $1.5 billion bond package in November, Mayor Andrew J. Ginther laid out how $200 million of that would go toward creating affordable housing.
The breakdown:
⋅ $80 million to build affordable rental units.
⋅ $50 million for affordable homeownership through the Central Ohio Community Land Trust.
⋅ $40 million to preserve housing affordability in targeted neighborhoods that have seen home prices skyrocket, such as the Near East Side, Linden and Franklinton.
⋅ $30 million for programs and housing for people dealing with homelessness.
"For anyone making less than $60,000, it's getting harder just to get by," Ginther said during the Monday media event across from an affordable housing project for seniors on Cleveland Avenue in North Linden.
"Central Ohio's housing crisis is not just a Columbus problem. It's a regional problem," he said.
Part of the city's $50 million affordable housing bond package that voters approved in 2019 helped pay for the $25 million,100-unit Mulby Place development for seniors that nonprofit builder Homeport is constructing. The three-story building is aimed at anchoring a new "Downtown" for the Linden neighborhoods at Cleveland and Myrtle avenues.
Boyce Safford, executive director of the nonprofit Columbus Next Generation Corporation, which assembled land for Mulby Place and nearby properties, said his group should be entering into a pre-development contract with Woodborn Partners of Detroit for a mixed-use development, including housing and retail, across from Mulby Place.
"We must build housing at all pricing levels," Ginther said. "We must preserve existing affordability.
That's been difficult in most neighborhoods, even South Linden, where home prices leapt 43% from February 2020 to February 2021, although the housing market has cooled somewhat this year.
Ginther mentioned the $20 billion Intel project coming to Licking County, and the pressure that will place on Greater Columbus' housing market.
"We must invest in affordable housing," Ginther said. "A couple earning $50,000 with two children should be able to choose where to live."
Elizabeth Brown, Columbus City Council's president pro tem, said access to housing is the city's most-pressing problem, with better housing improving the public's safety and other quality-of-life issues.
Columbus City Council member Shayla Favor, who chairs the council's housing committee, said housing and homelessness are two of the city's most-pressing issues.
Favor said the equity families have in their homes are their main source of wealth, one that creates more stability and financial security. She said she wants to build more of those opportunities for Black and brown families.
Erin Prosser, the city's assistant director of housing strategies, said the $50 million that would be targeted from the $200 million toward affordable ownership through the land trust would do so through a subsidy that would stay with the home that would help keep the property affordable as it is sold.
Prosser said that city officials are looking at models across the country to see how the $40 million aimed at keeping housing affordable in certain neighborhoods would be spent.
mferench@dispatch.com
@MarkFerenchik
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Mayor Andrew J. Ginther lists ways housing bond money would be spent
