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eventy-four-year-old Pearlie Young says she likes her apartment on Chapel Street in Walnut Hills, where she has lived for four years. She and 19 others enjoy living in the building because it’s affordable and because they’ve come to know each other. Sometime in the next year, though, she and her neighbors may have to move.
The building itself isn’t going anywhere. And the tenants aren’t being gentrified out for luxury condos or a new mixed-use development. The new owner, Talbert House, will be renovating the building so it can eventually provide permanent supportive housing — a desperately needed form of low-income housing in Cincinnati that helps those who have struggled with homelessness, addiction and disability. The current residents qualify for some forms of housing aid, but most do not qualify for permanent supportive housing.
That makes the Chapel Street project a double-edged sword, bringing up hard questions about priorities as Cincinnati’s affordable housing stock is stretched thin. It also reveals the vulnerability of low-income renters, who can be moved based on development deals beyond their control, splitting up communities.
“No one in the building wants to move,” says resident Wayne Green. “We all know each other. We’re all family in the building. If they relocate us, we’ll all be spread out.”
Talbert House is asking for $5 million in Ohio Low Income Housing Tax Credits from the Ohio Housing Finance Agency. If it receives the tax credits, the organization will renovate the Chapel Street apartment building to create 24 units of permanent supportive housing. That’s four more units than are currently occupied in the building.
Detractors of Talbert House’s plan, including residents and some affordable housing advocates, say it should be focused on creating more new units of affordable housing instead of displacing residents while exchanging one type of low-income housing for another. They point out that tenants at Chapel Street will have to move on to units that could have been available to others seeking affordable housing.
Talbert House and its partner on the project, Model Group, say they will assist residents at Chapel Street in finding new housing, perhaps at some of the other 74 units of low-income housing the nonprofit runs in the neighborhood.
“No one will be kicked out on the street and made homeless,” said Jimmy Wilson of Talbert House. “It’s not our desire to create homelessness. In fact, we solve homelessness in our agency.”
Talbert House CEO Neil Tilow defended the project at a recent City Council committee meeting, pointing out that the building will still be for sale by its current owners, Oake Properties, whether Talbert House buys it or not.
“If it weren’t permanent supportive housing and some other landlord buys it, no relocation plan would be required,” Tilow said. “If we just bought it and didn’t do a [low-income tax credit] project, we could empty the building with 30 days notice, if that’s when their leases ended, and that would be the end of that. But we don’t intend to do that.”
The plight of the tenants at Chapel Street Apartments comes as affordable housing is stretched thin in Greater Cincinnati. More than 11,000 people in Hamilton County have Section 8 vouchers, and there are more than 5,000 on the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority’s Section 8 waitlist.
As the waitlist for Section 8 swells, the number of landlords accepting vouchers has decreased 5 percent in the past two years. CMHA itself has continued to reduce the number of units it offers as part of a move away from large, project-based housing by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. That move comes as political pressure has mounted to cut HUD’s budget. Last year, U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot, a Republican who represents much of Cincinnati, called for a 10 percent reduction in funding for housing vouchers across the country.
Meanwhile, market-rate rents continue to go up in the Greater Cincinnati area. The median rent for a market-rate apartment in Cincinnati topped $800 last year, marking the sixth consecutive year in which rents rose.
These forces have combined create higher demand for affordable housing than the supply currently available. On the most severe end, that imbalance is contributing to homelessness in Cincinnati, even as social service agencies like the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless and Strategies to End Homelessness enact initiatives to end homelessness in the city. A preliminary point-in-time count by Strategies to End Homelessness in January found well more than 1,000 people homeless in the Greater Cincinnati area, a number roughly the same as the past few years.
Affordable housing is a big part of bringing the number down, advocates say.
Cincinnati’s Homelessness to Homes plan, an initiative overseen by Strategies to End Homelessness and drawn up in 2009 as a region-wide plan to address homelessness, calls for 1,000 more units of permanent supportive housing in the coming years. But other types of affordable housing are just as vital, advocates say.
“In order to end homelessness, we have to increase our affordable housing stock,” says Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless Executive Director Josh Spring. “When we say that, it means increasing all varieties of affordable housing. That big number, all that combined, really matters.”
Spring believes the $5 million in tax credits Talbert House seeks from the state could be better spent on creating new housing in currently vacant buildings that won’t displace established residents.
Earlier this month, Cincinnati City Council decided to recommend the Talbert House project, along with 11 others, for the state tax credits. Council’s approval of the projects gives each an extra 10 points in the state’s competitive ranking system. Talbert House’s project and another by Lighthouse in Walnut Hills will get another extra five points because they are permanent supportive housing.
Councilman Wendell Young was sympathetic to the building’s current residents but ultimately voted to give council approval to the project.
“If you don’t get it, someone else will,” Young said of Talbert House’s pending purchase of the building, which is set to close next month. The building has been for sale for two years. “The sad part about being a renter in anybody’s building is that you get very little to no say in what happens to the property. If this has to happen, this is the best way.”
A nod from Cincinnati and Hamilton County’s Homeless Clearinghouse, a board made up of social service providers such as the Coalition for the Homeless and Strategies to End Homelessness, can also recommend a project, giving it another 15 points on the state’s rubric. The Clearinghouse recommended the Lighthouse proposal but did not do so for the Talbert House project.
Talbert House must apply for the tax credits by Feb. 20 and will know in the spring whether they’ve been awarded. In the meantime, the nonprofit intends to spend more than $30,000 doing immediate renovations on the building once the sale is final. ©
This article appears in Feb 18-24, 2015.