Combat rising rents with more affordable housing, advocates say

Many often tout rents in Greater Cleveland as being affordable when compared to housing on the East Coast and West Coast and even in some Midwest cities.

Rents here are still much cheaper than such places, but they are rising faster than in most U.S. metro areas. Creating more affordable housing is the best way to prevent rents from escalating, according to government and nonprofit officials Signal Cleveland interviewed. The combination of steep rent hikes and evaporating pandemic rental assistance is motivating government and nonprofit officials to work on ways to produce more. A family of four making up to just above $72,000 can tap pandemic rental assistance. Some of the officials said that increasingly families making above this federal cap have needed help because of skyrocketing rents.

The officials say demand has generated an urgency to create more affordable housing for low-income, working-class and middle-class residents. What follows are some of the ways they say that this can be done.

What we really need in this community is more access to affordable housing: Units for low- and middle-income folks to access. The need is enormous. It always has been. What is happening in the [post-pandemic] economy is just making it worse.
Laura Boustani, vice president of external affairs at CHN Housing Partners

Cleveland has plans to tap pandemic American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding in an effort to generate more rental assistance, likely into 2026, according to Mayor Justin Bibb’s spokeswoman Marie Zickefoose.

The city is also launching an initiative to create more affordable housing and help the unsheltered obtain housing, she said.

“We’re working to increase the number of affordable units in the city through a variety of programs, including newly built units, redevelopment of historic buildings, parent leasing opportunities, and incentivizing landlord participation in providing affordable units for rent,” Zickefoose wrote in an email to Signal Cleveland.

Laura Boustani, the vice president of external affairs at CHN Housing Partners (CHN), a nonprofit that develops and manages affordable housing, said having more affordable housing is the best way to fight escalating rents in the post-pandemic economy.

“What we really need in this community is more access to affordable housing: Units for low- and middle-income folks to access,” she said. “The need is enormous. It always has been. What is happening in the [post-pandemic] economy is just making it worse.”

Signal Cleveland is digging into affordable housing with: The Housing Squeeze.

Stories in the series examine Cleveland’s affordable housing landscape through the experiences of renters and homeowners and with an eye toward solutions.

Boustani said there should be a public policy push to create more of it. She said this could be done in many ways, including what CHN “preaches.” This is centered on rehabbing older single-family homes, which are then sold to local homeowners.

“We don’t want more out-of-town investors who are going to neglect the housing stock even more and charge enormous rents,” she said.

Sara Parks Jackson, the director of the Cuyahoga County’s Department of Housing and Community Development, also said creating more affordable housing is key. She said the federal government allows for some of the pandemic rental assistance dollars to be used for this purpose. The country is using $7.5 million to provide gap financing, which often represents a small percentage of a project’s cost, to developers of affordable housing.

“Our view is that the need for rental assistance will go away if there are affordable rental units,” she said. “People have said that $7.5 million is a drop in the bucket. But we know from ceiling leaks, if water keeps dropping in the bucket, the bucket becomes full.”

You can read more about the issues in “‘Still struggling’: How Clevelanders are getting squeezed by higher rents as assistance dries up,” The story looks at how most of this federal pandemic rental assistance has already been given out and examines what not having this funding could potentially mean in the Cleveland metro area, which has ranked high nationally for its high rent increases since the pandemic. The story is part of our ongoing series called “The Housing Squeeze.”