COLUMBUS, Ohio — From homeless to homeowner, Jasmine Wooten understands the struggle to afford a safe place to live in Columbus.
“This year closing on my home, it was a culmination of six years of really hard work and kind of scratching myself out of circumstances,” Wooten said.
The single mom of two struck gold this summer when she bought an affordable home through the Central Ohio Community Land Trust.
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“My mortgage ends up being around $1,280 including my homeownership insurance,” Wooten said.
It’s a similar story for Carla Rangel – a renter in Austin, Texas. She spent more than a year homeless before she won the housing lottery there. She was placed in an affordable apartment through the Austin nonprofit Foundation Communities.
“They called me up and they said, ‘We’d like to give you an opportunity to tour and then sign your lease, and you can pick whatever apartment you want,’” Rangel said.
Experts say Columbus and Austin are both booming cities with the same problem: Affordable housing is scarce, and the demand is growing.
“We have more people than we can serve that want to be part of this program, so we have a lot to do ahead of us,” Hope Paxson said. She is the vice president of programs and housing for the Central Ohio Community Improvement Corporation.
“There’s a waitlist in our communities for affordable housing because our rents are so affordable,” Foundation Communities Executive Director Walter Moreau said.
The Gap Report shows Columbus is short 52,000 affordable housing units. Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin says it’s a serious issue the metro needs to address as it prepares for 1 million new people to move into Central Ohio in the next 20 years.
“We’re talking about teachers and firefighters and police officers and certainly folks who are working at restaurants and hotels,” Hardin said. “[They] can’t afford to live in the city that they’re serving.”
Hardin hopes that changes to the Columbus zoning code will put a dent in the affordable housing crisis. The changes allow denser development in key areas of Columbus – and could provide up to 88,000 new housing units within the city limits.
Still, Hardin says those changes won’t fix the problem completely.
“ZoneIn will take us a long way down that road, but that’s just one tool in the toolbox,” he said.
As Austin leaders grapple with the affordable housing crisis, they say part of the solution came from voters who renewed a bond that will keep moving toward the issue.
“If we’re going to achieve rents that are within reach of folks living on social security or on disability income, we can’t just borrow money and build the housing,” Moreau said.
There’s no perfect solution for Silicon Hills or Silicon Heartland, but there is a common goal: To keep the dream of a safe home alive for people like Wooten and Rangel.
“It’s nothing short of a profound experience,” Wooten said of homeownership.
“Just to have a home, a place that’s safe, a place where there’s a lot of help if you need it. It really makes a difference,” Rangel said.