YOUNGSTOWN — Help is needed to improve not only the city’s housing stock, but to protect those who want to buy or rent from predatory lenders and absentee landlords, Youngstown area housing officials said.

The topics were discussed Monday with U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Cleveland Democrat, who hosted a housing roundtable discussion Monday at the main branch of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County.

“You have a federal government that’s interested more in helping investors and helping Wall Street and taking away consumer protections,” he said. “That’s a serious, serious problem.”

Michael Durkin, the city’s code enforcement and blight remediation superintendent who participated in the discussion, said: “Some landlords are preying on people.”

Because some properties in the city are so cheap, landlords from not only out of the area, but out of the country are buying them up and renting them, Durkin said. He said an Australian company purchased about 10 houses on Ford Avenue for a total cost of about $60,000 in less than a year.

Brown is the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. If Democrats gain control of the Senate, he’ll become chairman.

Brown said he’d “move quickly and aggressively on housing. If you don’t have good housing everything is upside down. When 25 percent of Americans pay more than half of their income in rent” it’s a problem.

Ian Beniston, Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp. executive director and a panelist, said: “We have an old housing stock in the city.”

The number of vacant residential structures in the city has decreased 48 percent from 3,514 to 1,841 last year, according to a YNDC study.

“The problem in Youngstown — as it is in Cleveland, as it is in Appalachia — is old houses that have fallen apart,” Brown said. They “need to be removed so that home values in the neighborhood can stop going down. The feds for a period of time were funding a lot of that. Now too many people in Washington want to give tax cuts to rich people and not for our housing stock.”

Brown is asking state residents to share their stories about struggling to find and afford a home as well as their ideas for making it easier to obtain quality housing. To do so, go online to: www.brown.senate.gov/share-your-housing-story

dskolnick@tribtoday.com