ASHLAND – In a span of just four years, the average length of time it takes an Ashland County social service agency to secure housing for a homeless person has tripled from about 12 days to about 41.
Krista Kidney, special projects coordinator for OneEighty in Wooster and chairwoman of the Wayne County Housing Coalition, shared that statistic Wednesday at an Ashland County Homeless Coalition meeting, where social service providers, community leaders and others gathered to discuss solutions to Ashland County’s growing problem of homelessness.
The problem came into the public light in February, when the coalition announced the results of its annual point-in-time homelessness count. On a single night in January, 31 homeless people were counted in Ashland County, up from 16 in 2018.
The count included people staying in shelters as well as unsheltered homeless people– those sleeping outside or in cars. It did not include the dozens of county residents who are precariously housed, living doubled or tripled up with friends or extended family members.
Kidney visited the Ashland County Homeless Coalition Wednesday as a guest speaker, along with Stan Popp, executive director of the Wayne County Housing Authority. Both guests were invited by Appleseed Community Mental Health Center housing coordinator Karen Carroll, who hoped the pair could introduce coalition members to solutions that may lie outside Ashland County.
“You’re not alone in this being an issue,” Kidney told the group. “We’re seeing this all across the state right now.”
Wayne County averages about 33 days to house someone, Kidney said.
Meanwhile, the state standard for the average length of time it should take to house someone is 21 days. When a county exceeds that target, Carroll said, it can lose federal funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Asked whether Ashland’s growing need could be a result of transient homeless people moving into the county, Carroll said that is unlikely. Individuals and families must live in Ashland County for a period of time before becoming eligible for housing assistance through Appleseed.
“The population we serve is not necessarily that transient,” she said. “I think what you’re seeing is the result of not having enough housing for anyone in Ashland, so landlords can be a lot choosier.”
Right now, the problem in Ashland is not a lack of dollars but a lack of rental units in which to place people, Carroll said.
When agencies use housing vouchers to place homeless people, they agency must find a unit that meets various government standards while having rental rates at or below fair market rate.
Agencies must also find landlords who are willing to accept the perceived risks associated with renting to tenants who may have bad rental histories, low incomes, mental issues or substance abuse disorders. As the economy improves, more and more landlords are saying “no” to that risk, even when an agency is guaranteeing the rent will be paid through a voucher program.
Compounding the problem, coalition members said, some of the properties recently acquired and demolished the the Ashland County Land Bank previously were rented out to some of the clients of Appleseed and other social service agencies.
Coalition members also expressed concern about what might happen if Almond Tree Inn– the area’s go-to emergency housing apartment complex– closes. That possibility is on the forefront of service providers’ minds following a fatal shooting that took place at Almond Tree this week.
While the group’s discussion kept circling back to descriptions of the problem, Appleseed executive director Jerry Strausbaugh urged the group to focus on coming up with potential solutions, which he said likely would need to be multifold.
Popp agreed with that approach.
“How do you solve the problem today of not having enough units here?” Popp asked rhetorically. “You don’t. You start planning today on how to solve it down the road.”
Despite the challenges, Popp indicated he believes Ashland has one essential ingredient to solving its homelessness problem.
“You’ve got something a lot of communities your size don’t have,” he said. “You have a room full of people who share the concern and who care.”
Assessing the need
Homelessness came to the forefront of community consciousness in Wayne County last year after a revitalization project in downtown Wooster had an unintended consequence.
Homeless people began to spend time, and even sleep, on new benches in public spaces, Kidney said.
“We had a big public uproar because this became a visible issue,” Kidney said.
Because they were seeing homelessness in front of them for the first time, many people assumed the homeless population was coming in from out of town. People were upset, and downtown business owners even threatened to leave town if the homelessness problem wasn’t dealt with.
So the Wayne County Housing Coalition joined with city leaders and the Wooster Police Department to make contact with homeless people on the streets, asking them questions and connecting them with housing when possible.
“We went out and we did street outreach, trying to learn what the issues really were,” Kidney said. “What we did learn was that they weren’t new, most of them, to our area. We knew most of them well. A lot of them were chronically homeless.
“We also learned the community needed to be educated about the issue. Because we didn’t have a visible issue in the past, people didn’t know what was really going on.”
The coalition and community leaders in Wayne County determined they needed to take a serious look at housing needs in the county, asking questions like “How many more low income housing units do we need?” “What types of units do we need?” and “What does ‘affordable’ really mean for the people in the community who need housing?”
It quickly became clear that what social service providers meant by “affordable housing” was different from what city officials meant by the term.
While fair market rent (including utilities) for a two-bedroom apartment in Wooster is $735, what a person making minimum wage can actually afford to pay is $432, Kidney said.
The city of Wooster and local social service agencies contracted with the College of Wooster to study housing needs and create a report with recommendations to help mitigate the issue.
The college’s report will be complete later this month. Kidney said she would be willing to share the study’s findings with Ashland County, which has a similar population and similar challenges.
Encouraging new development
Ashland Mayor Matt Miller attended Wednesday’s meeting. He also attended a regional homelessness meeting in March and has been to similar meetings in the past.
“Over and over again at these meetings we quote the statistics of how many people are being impacted, but I have yet to hear anyone propose a solution for how to fix it,” Miller said. “So much if it is market driven, and the fact of the matter is, it’s not as though there are a bunch of developers sitting there that you can go to and say, ‘Will you build new apartments in our community but charge absolutely the minimum when it comes to rent?'”
Luckily, for both Ashland and Wayne counties, one way to ease that problem may already be in the works in the form of new affordable housing apartment projects.
Ashland County has two apartment complexes– Union Lofts and Montgomery Crossing– coming to the area near Home Depot and Buehler’s, Ashland Mayor Matt Miller said. Meanwhile, Wooster has three similar projects on the way.
Those apartment are referred to by developers as “affordable housing” because they are being built with Low Income Housing Tax Credit dollars.
Though they will be required to have some units available at lower rates for low-income tenants, for the most part, those apartments will not be places where people Appleseed and other agencies can house clients.
Still, Popp and Kidney said they are hopeful the projects will spark a “domino” effect.
As people with incomes around 60 to 80 percent of the area’s median income move into the new “affordable” apartments, Popp said, some older rental units elsewhere in the two cities may open up. Landlords at the older complexes may be more willing to take agency clients and accept vouchers to keep their units full.
The Land Bank’s role
Recognizing that the development of new apartments and the resulting “domino effect” is unlikely to solve the entire homelessness problem in Wayne County, local officials there are considering forming a land bank, Kidney said.
Land banks in Ohio are quasi-governmental entities created by counties to reclaim, rehabilitate and reutilize vacant, abandoned and tax foreclosed property in the county.
Kidney said her county hopes to use the land bank to rehabilitate rental properties in order to create affordable units for low income renters and agency clients.
In response, Miller said he was surprised to hear that Wayne County views a land bank as a solution to the homelessness problem.
In Ashland County, the newly formed land bank has been viewed by some as a factor exacerbating the homelessness crisis rather than neasing it.
Miller, who serves on the Ashland County Land Bank board, said Ashland’s land bank views its role as purchasing vacant, dilapidated and deteriorating properties and cleaning them up. So far, each of the land bank projects have been demolitions rather than rehabilitations.
“Our land bank does not have the idea that we would hold onto property and rent it to individuals,” Miller said. “Our goal is to clean it up and get it in the hands of someone else who might build a home on that property, and perhaps they would rent the home they built.”
Carroll said she understands where land bank leaders are coming from, but she also sees a need for the very type of housing that is being destroyed.
“There are a lot of houses in Ashland that most people would consider worthy of land bank destruction, but the problem we have is a lot of those properties are the only places we have to put our housing program participants,” Carroll said. “Where are the homeless that are in Ashland County going to go?”
Establishing a housing authority
While Ashland County is a step ahead of Wayne County in the formation of a land bank, it’s a few steps behind in creating another tool Popp and Kidney believe could provide another potential solution to housing needs.
For decades, Wayne County has had a housing authority– a political subdivision of the state of Ohio that has statutory authority to buy, sell and rent real estate.
With over 400 rental units, the Wayne County Housing Authority is its county’s largest landlord, Popp said.
The housing authority receives its funding from federal programs and fees. Because the authority’s goal is to meet housing needs rather than to make a profit, it takes on properties and projects that may be less appealing to private developers and landlords.
Ashland County does not have its own housing authority. Though Ashland County agencies go through Wayne County’s housing authority to receive federal housing vouchers, Wayne County Housing Authority cannot buy properties in Ashland County and become a landlord here.
Local leaders and social service providers in Ashland met years ago to consider creating a housing authority, Popp said.
The idea didn’t go anywhere at that time, in part because development dollars and voucher dollars for housing authorities were not available, Popp said. But times may have changed.
Miller agreed to meet with Popp, Kidney, Strausbaugh and David Ross of the Mental Health and Recovery Board to continue a discussion of whether establishment of a housing authority might make sense in Ashland County.
In order for such an authority to be established, Popp said, the county’s board of commissioners and its common pleas and probate court judges, plus the mayor of the county’s largest city, all would have to agree to send a request to the state. If the state approves the new authority, those same officials would be responsible for appointing a board of commissioners to run the housing authority.
