bringing thousands of jobs to rural Ohio was greeted as an economic boon.“Where are we putting everybody?” asked Melissa Humbert-Washington, vice president of programs and services at Homes for Families, which helps low-wage workers find housing in a region already suffering a major shortage.
“We have underbuilt housing by millions of homes over the past 15 years," said Dennis Shea, executive director of the J. Ronald Terwilliger Center for Housing Policy."So when a big company comes into a community that is supply constrained, the demand that they’re going to inject ... is going to affect home prices and rental prices because there’s more demand than supply.”
“It's economic development. It's going to employ people. But you are probably going to have to bring a lot of people into the area," he said. And"those jobs require housing.” The central Ohio shortage includes the “missing middle” of workforce housing, or homes up to $250,000, said Tre’ Giller, CEO and president of Metro Development, one of Ohio’s largest apartment developers. A recent Zillow search showed only about 570 listings for homes $250,000 or less in the area.
“Housing is definitely an ecosystem,” Riegel said. “If you add housing at one end, and don’t take care of the other end, it has an impact and a ripple effect through the whole system.”