'We have to be more ready than ever before': Shelter board CEO addresses housing crises
Since becoming CEO of the Community Shelter Board in December 2022, Shannon Isom has already dealt with several major housing crises.
First, there was the displacement of more than 150 residents from the Latitude Five25 apartments on Columbus’ Near East Side in late 2022. Late last year, over 1,300 people — many of them Haitians asylum-seekers — were kicked out of the Colonial Village apartments on Columbus’ East Side by the property’s receivership estate. And in recent weeks, Prairie Township officials announced they want to demolish the Galloway Village complex after a long string of housing code violations.
The Community Shelter Board in Columbus coordinates city- and countywide efforts around homelessness. It also conducts annual “point in time” surveys of the homeless population — which recorded 2,337 unhoused people in 2023, an all-time high.
In an interview, edited for length and clarity, Isom spoke about the ongoing challenge of ensuring safe and secure housing in Franklin County.
Q: What is the Community Shelter Board doing to support people displaced from Colonial Village?
A: The Community Shelter Board has been working in alignment with the city and some of the other contractors that are helping us organize resources as well as operations of what is now nine hotels … with well over 1,300 people — a little over 500 families. We've been doing this for a couple of months now.
Q: The city is providing temporary housing for Colonial Village families through March 31, but not many of them have been able to find permanent housing yet. What will happen when the funding for their temporary housing ends?
A: It is an alarming … date that is coming up. And yet there are multiple barriers (to finding new housing) … from immigration status to the vulnerability of believing that you are under a contractual law … to not having any level of paperwork or credit history, to — even if you do have a job — to be able to rent on your own…
I don't know if I have yet the right answer for what is going to happen to 1,300 people. What I do know is our shelter system is already fragile. … On top of the nine hotels that we have for Colonial Village … we also have warning centers across our county footprint, and for those that are unsheltered, we're running an additional four-and-a-half hotels.
(All together) we have 14 1/2 hotels with close to 1700 people, who are spread across a very heavily overburdened system.
Q: What sort of public policy solutions could help prevent or address future crises like Colonial Village, Latitude and the like?
A: That's a question that I have been thinking about often but let me just first acknowledge that I don't know if I have the right answer. What I do know is there are a myriad of answers that must be threaded together to have impact.
We have to be more ready than ever before for environmental and climate changes that are literally devastating our infrastructures. …
We are also meeting with the city's legal team to see what tenant rights we can review, so we can ready tenants for how to keep their own spaces safe.
We're also really (looking at) what are (the city’s) rights … to pressure landlords, and what can Community Shelter Board do … to modify landlord behavior? … What are some policies or legal ramifications that we can (use to) intercede?
We're also looking at (how to rapidly access) emergency housing (using resources from) partners like CMHA (or) ERA dollars…
Finally, how do we take underutilized spaces or empty hotels or motels and buy them? How can CSB not rent all of these hotels but (rather) buy three or four of them and have them ready for what we know is now a common thing, when … uncared-for, large, dense apartments (are shut down)?
Peter Gill covers immigration, New American communities and religion for the Dispatch in partnership with Report for America. You can support work like his with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America at:bit.ly/3fNsGaZ.
pgill@dispatch.com
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Shelter Board CEO addresses Latitude, Colonial Village housing crises
