Strategy can stabilize, strengthen Valley housing market
The housing complaints come with increasing frequency.
They come from employers whose workers reside an hour away in places like Cranberry, Pa., and Solon. They come from company executives who live in places like Chagrin Falls and Hudson.
That means the jobs we work so hard to create here — jobs for which we devote community resources such as tax incentives and workforce programs, jobs that require local infrastructure investments — are resulting in growing the tax base, growing school enrollment, growing volunteerism and philanthropy elsewhere.
Recently, we began changing that trend.
We began with the rollout of the Mahoning Valley Regional Housing Strategy. This complex, year-in-the-making game plan funded by Eastgate Regional Council of Governments and The Youngstown Foundation, with coordinating support from the Youngstown / Warren Regional Chamber, is designed to assess the current housing status in Mahoning and Trumbull counties, develop strategy to move forward and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in housing investments throughout our community by 2030.
And we’re off to a good start.
Even before our Thursday rollout, 717 Credit Union launched a $40 million investment in the city of Youngstown and a $7 million investment in the city of Warren to stimulate revitalization of existing homes, revitalization of existing neighborhoods through infill and the creation of new neighborhoods.
To prepare for the type of incentives 717 and others are offering, the Regional Chamber has assembled developers and builders ready to deploy millions of dollars for housing construction. They now have a playbook, written for Eastgate by the Greater Ohio Policy Center out of Columbus in partnership with Reinvestment Fund out of Philadelphia.
While the playbook will take years to fully implement and requires assistance from key agencies such as the Western Reserve Port Authority and Valley Economic Development Partners, there are some common-sense steps we can take almost immediately.
Here’s a snippet:
Revise local building and zoning codes so that infill construction matches the context of existing neighborhoods for such things as lot frontage.
Approve pre-plans so developers who choose can expedite costly, time-consuming permitting processes.
Use heat maps to determine where it’s best to revitalize and where it’s best to use existing infrastructure for new developments.
Work with local agencies to assemble land and / or find solutions to infrastructure needs.
Provide training to new or smaller developers looking to participate in the initiative.
Help employers attract and retain workers through creative benefits such as down payment assistance to live near the job.
Much of our work will be more complicated. For example, our low cost of living, which we are so fond of bragging about, is working against us now. The cost of construction in the Valley is on par with places like Columbus, but the property values here are much less. Developers and builders will gravitate toward higher profits.
Even when we overcome the property value challenge, the workforce shortage will interfere with our ability to rapidly increase the housing stock.
For these more complex issues, Eastgate is forming a Housing Consortium, and the Chamber is forming a Housing Council. These two groups, while tasked with different means of addressing our housing shortage, will work intricately together on finding solutions.
We are not alone. Ohio is 270,000 homes short. The entire nation has a housing shortfall that has been brewing since the 2008 Great Recession when the housing bubble burst. So, we’ll join forces with our counterparts in other communities, such as the Ohio Metro Chambers Coalition, to write public policy that stimulates residential expansion.
We’ll conclude with a pleasant dose of reality. When you reflect on the economic challenges our community faced over the past 40 years or so, and the challenges of job shortages and income shortages, we happily embrace the challenge of a workforce housing shortage.
Guy Coviello is president/CEO of the Youngstown / Warren Regional Chamber and Jim Kinnick is executive director of Eastgate Regional Council of Governments.