A Season of Solutions
As many of our neighbors in southwestern Ohio already know, challenges around housing and community development are persistent. But as we’ve seen over this inaugural year of reporting on Brick by Brick, there are a plethora of solutions either underway already in our region, or possibly worth bringing here.
Spoiler alert: none of these solutions are ‘silver bullets’ to the problems of housing stability, or the shortage of broadly affordable housing and income-restricted housing (for our most vulnerable neighbors). In most cases, solutions will likely have to be combined to have the largest impact.
But hope is not lost. In fact, the investigations that we’ve done on various solutions provide hope that while there’s no “one” solution, a combination of credible responses can make an impact. So, let’s look back and update some of the key solutions we’ve reported upon in year one of this initiative.
Cincinnati Housing Stability Collaborative Program
As you may recall from our TV or podcast episode (#5) on this program, the group Strategies to End Homelessness is working with a consortium of human services provider partners to use household data in order predict, and hopefully prevent, area folks from being evicted.
In the world of solutions, we call this one an “upstream” response because it’s not just waiting on residents to reach out after they’re already facing a hardship but uses data (from local utilities and other key indicators) to flag when a household is at risk.
Looking back on the initiative’s first year, CEO of Strategies to End Homelessness, Kevin Finn, shared this analogy:
“The day the very first car rolled off the assembly line, it probably was not the most reliable mode of transportation. A horse and buggy was probably still a more reliable mode of transportation than the car was, but thank God Henry Ford continued working on cars and improving them because obviously now a car or an automobile is a much more reliable form of transportation. I think we’re still at the point where we’re still making the concept work of using predictive data analytics and these proactive services.”
One of the challenges is when you use a predictive data approach to preventing evictions, the resident in need may not expect your call, and so rather than scaring the very people they are trying to help, Kevin and team have had to adjust their approach to outreach in order to not scare people.
Since July 2024, Finn shares that they’ve helped about a hundred families using data and preventive outreach, and the group has the capacity to help 60 families at a time.
Lavonya Leonard, the shelter housing director for one of the program’s partners, Bethany House, says using data in this way is a game changer.
“The accuracy with which the data analytics predicts those coming upon an eviction is almost terrifying,” Leonard shared. “We have connected with landlords who will say, ironically enough, we were getting ready to potentially serve an eviction, so just having a system navigator reach out to the landlord to say, ‘Hey, I’m so-and-so. I’m working with this family. Trying to service them and connect them to some identified needs,’ has been helpful, and having the landlord not move forward with an eviction.”
Finn believes they are proving the worth of the concept to the community of Cincinnati, and tells Brick by Brick that over time, they hope to refine things and even expand this model to serve the broader Hamilton County region in the future. For now, partners in this initiative are working to evaluate and document the impact of the first year as they seek continued funding from a multitude of sources.
What do you think of this solution? Share your feedback here: Brick by Brick Feedback Form
Access to Counsel
From a pre-eviction response, we shift to a post-eviction solution: access to counsel.
If you’re facing eviction and you’ve received notice of an eviction and you have an attorney, you are more than 90% likely to have a favorable outcome. That may not mean you can stay in your home, but you can likely avoid having an eviction on your record, which can impact you for years to come. The problem is most people in this situation don’t have an attorney.
That’s where an effort in Northwest Dayton is proving effective. We initially covered this access to council pilot program, being managed by Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE), in Spring 2024. While the pilot is restricted to certain zip codes and income levels, it has helped 167 people so far, representing 61 adults and 106 children in 38 cases.
At the time, Hernz Laguerre Jr. also shared the story of a mother who wished the program was in place when she had dealt with housing troubles, because representation changed the outcome for her family.
As ABLE’s team proves out the concept further, the next hope is to scale it up, expanding it to provide access to counsel to tenants throughout all of Montgomery County. It is partnering with community groups, foundations, and local governments to make this happen. Brick by Brick will continue to follow the efforts of this pilot program and update the story as new developments occur.
In the Cincinnati area, neighbors facing eviction are having the same or similar hardships faced by those served by ABLE’s program in Dayton. To help tenants facing eviction, last year, the City of Cincinnati funded an attorney part-time to provide limited representation to people in eviction court. In this case, the same-day access to counsel comes in the form of attorney Shannon Price, who shows up two days a week at the court. Since September, the Help Center reports to Brick by Brick that since September 2024, Price has represented more than 250 city households. In 91% of the cases there was a positive outcome, meaning dismissals or continuances.
Nick Zingarelli, a UC law professor who leads the Help Center at the court, says the outcomes have been positive. “The data definitely shows that it works, is changing the outcome there in Courtroom B, and we are incredibly optimistic about the potential for expansion in the near future.”
Zingarelli and others are advocating for continued and possibly expanded funding by the City of Cincinnati, with a goal to have representation available five days a week for both city and county residents. Helping with that is a volunteer effort by attorney and Cincinnati City Councilmember Evan Nolan. He comes one day a week to represent people and UC Law students also plan to assist, showing others that in Zingarelli’s words, “this isn’t a big lift.”
Brick by Brick will be keeping tabs on this program and updating things as they develop.
What do you think of this solution, access to counsel? Share your feedback here: Brick by Brick Feedback Form
Housing Choice Vouchers
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development controls the purse-strings for this solution, which is the oldest and largest federal response to housing instability in our nation’s history. When vouchers are available, the housing subsidy is tagged to a qualifying resident, and then it pays up to 70% of the rent directly to a landlord, based on eligibility.
Although the financing, it seems, can waver depending on the administration in power, the implementation of this response is always at the local level. In southwestern Ohio, the two largest housing authorities shepherding rental assistance are Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) for Cincinnati and Hamilton County, and Greater Dayton Premiere Management (GDPM) for the city of Dayton and Montgomery County. Both entities say housing choice vouchers are on pause due to funding limitations.
However, that doesn’t mean this solution, which makes safe and secure shelter more accessible for extremely low-income neighbors, should not be on the community’s radar.
Our Brick by Brick investigation in the fall of 2024 showed that overall, the effort struggles at placing voucher holders into rentals for a number of reasons. First and foremost, a mismatch between voucher value and market-rate rents; if a property owner can make more on the open market, the more dependable but lower value voucher may not appeal enough. GDPM and CMHA are both working on adjusting the values of the vouchers they have, as well as actively recruiting property owners willing to rent to their clients. As the value of vouchers comes in line with asking rents, and those recruitments strategies grow, this response may still further blossom in its impact, some 50 plus years after its initiation.
Additionally, there is still stigma associated with housing choice vouchers, which were once known (and sometimes still referenced) as “Section 8” and those tenants seen as possibly detrimental to a neighborhood. You can read more about how these aspects are limiting this solution, and other changes that could improve it, here.
Brick by Brick’s Emiko Moore filed this story at the time, sharing about a Dayton woman who utilized housing choice vouchers not just to get a safe and secure rental, but additionally used a voucher program to bridge into home ownership, becoming a first-time homebuyer. It’s just another way HUD, and local housing authorities, are proving their impact. By the way, that woman also started working for GDPM, helping to assist others as she had been.
We’re keeping watch on HUD, and the efforts of our local housing authorities to support tenants and improve the housing they can offer. CMHA and GDPM regularly invest in renovations of managed housing, as well as co-develop new housing with private and public partners). We’ll update our coverage of these responses as we go forward.
What do you think of housing choice vouchers? Share your feedback here: Brick by Brick Feedback Form
Adaptive Re-Use/Conversions
Over the past year, our team has focused a lot of time and energy on speedier solutions to add more housing to our communities, which we call supply-side solutions. One such response that shows efficacy is adaptive re-use, or converting buildings into a use different from the original intent.
Our region is one of the leading areas in the country for this response, which has a lot to do with the age of our buildings. Some older buildings are simply easier to convert from offices to apartments (condos or rentals), or from warehouses to apartments. How about an old bowling alley turned into affordable housing? We’ve looked at that scenario as well, amongst others.
While each has its own challenges, the benefits of additional housing – whether the units are market rate, income restricted, or luxury – shine through. Research around the addition of apartments to neighborhoods by experts like Evan Mast at the University of Notre Dame shows that any additional units will create migration by prospective tenants that then open up other units down the income ladder. Known as “filtering,” the research shows that with the addition of 100 luxury units, up to 50 other units, including affordable or market rate, will be opened up for the next tier of local renter. In other words, most newly available housing is helpful across the spectrum to create more optionality and affordability in the long run. Which is good, because as you talk to experts in our region and beyond, we need all types of housing, as soon as possible. We see some of this potential in newly built large scale apartment construction as well.
As we continue to look at the trends around adaptive re-use and conversion of commercial buildings into residential, look for more of these developments to occur outside of city centers, reaching into suburban neighborhoods. Finding new uses for older buildings is a practice as old as civil societies; it’s interesting to see how our cities will evolve to serve resident needs as we move forward.
What buildings do you think should be converted for more housing locally? Share your feedback here: Brick by Brick Feedback Form
Cincinnati’s Connected Communities, or zoning reform
Cincinnati’s big push at reforming its zoning to support more transit-oriented development, and middle housing, is now a year old. Passed in 2024, it reduces or eliminates parking mandates for developments, allows for height and density variances, especially near neighborhood business districts or transit corridors. The intent is to incrementally level up the city’s development, thickening up neighborhoods while improving the infrastructure to make it more walkable (or at least viable to live without a car).
In this regard, there has been progress, but some council members who originally opposed the zoning reform package, have been working with residents to refine it. Among other suggestions, one example of a recommended change is: only allowing increased density if the developer makes at least 20% of the units affordable to households making 50% of the AMI or less.
How these reforms continue to benefit the community may come down to who gets elected to council in the fall of 2025. Their overall impact will be felt in the next 2-5 years still, as that’s the typical life cycle for developments. The city is also managing a dashboard for real-time impacts. You can check that out along with us, here.
If any changes move forward, we’ll bring them up on the podcast, broadcast, and right here online.
While the team shares more updates on solutions in this lookback podcast episode, the last one we’ll shine a light on here is:
Buying Up Hedge-Fund Housing Portfolios (Cincinnati’s The Port strategy)
In our very first podcast episode, we explored an effort by The Port in Cincinnati, which had bought 194 homes from a defunct out-of-state owner, Raineth. In that story, we highlighted one young family that was able to buy their first home thanks to this effort to preserve naturally affordable housing for resale. We also introduced you to Ella Carre, a local retired nursing aid and Army veteran, who was eagerly waiting at the time for the renovations to be done on another home in that same portfolio.
In an update, Carre shared, “I’m finally moving to my place and I’m enjoying every minute of it.”
Carre was able to move in November 2024, and is now enjoying tending to her many plants, as well as providing more space for her grandson to play. “I get so much joy watching him just running around. He actually thinks he live here. I’m so happy that I get a lot of joy just watching him. He be outside riding his bike, and I also got enough room for my plants. Too much room for my plants, so I’m happy about that.”
The Port’s strategy of reclaiming local ownership of homes that have been rundown and exploited by out-of-town corporate landlords continues to make progress as well. Philip Denning, executive vice president for The Port, shared that they have now sold 48 of the 194 properties, or about a quarter of the portfolio. He adds, “We’re working towards a little bit more than that, and it has been a real challenge. But it’s also been really fulfilling to really make an impact on the ability of average working families in Hamilton County to get access to a house. We have another 30 that are under construction right now. We bid those out. We’re going through the construction process right now, and for your podcast listeners, we have six that are listed. We would love to sell them to whomever is willing, qualified and interested.”
The Port originally purchased all of these parcels, most of them sight unseen, back in December 2020. Since then, the condition of the properties has been one of the main challenges, and they continue to work through renovations. In order to fully renovate these affordable homes, it may take longer than the five-year estimate they initially projected. Brick by Brick will be checking in with them as we get closer to that milestone later this year.
As housing and community solutions go, the above is simply scratching the surface. From Tiny Homes, to 3D printing, to housing for the formerly incarcerated, and more, we have been BUSY here at Brick by Brick this past year. We hope that you are getting something from our solutions reporting too. If so, leave us some comments and help keep our effort accountable.
This season, we’ve been able to shine a light on credible and viable responses to housing and community development and also shared their inherent limitations. With more knowledge around what is working, or what might work here, we believe that you, our neighbors, will be better able to get behind solutions you believe in, too.
However, this is just the start. As we look ahead at season two of this multiplatform effort (coming in September), we aim to add the layers of health and the environment to our solutions search, especially where those topics interconnect with housing and development in our cities. We hope you’ll continue to follow along, and reach out to connect; we’re all neighbors, after all.
What do you think about this inaugural season of solutions? Are there solutions you didn’t hear about that you want investigated? Your feedback is very important to the effort, as we continue to dig deeper into the responses to some of our most pressing social issues, including the housing crisis. Click on the green button below to take a short survey to help reinforce and refine our work. Thank you.
