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Rural communities face multiple challenges when it comes to providing affordable quality housing, including barriers to home ownership, dilapidated and abandoned housing stock, lack of housing variety and infrastructure financing, and competing demand for short-term rentals and workforce housing.

To assist local municipalities, the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Service has partnered with the nonpartisan, not-for-profit, to compile a housing “toolkit” to help rural communities to more effectively and efficiently address these challenges. The toolkit will be released this spring.

“When they're having a conversation about housing, we want them to talk apples to apples with the right person,” says Misty Crosby, the senior executive in residence for local government services at the Voinovich School. “The goal is to personalize it for their community and determine where their community is on a scale of readiness to secure more housing.”

The Voinovich School and the MPP recently secured funding in the state of Ohio’s operating budget to directly support the mayors with future planning needs. These funds can be used to deploy planners and grant writers, vet architects to design future buildings, and hire engineers to ensure that new structures meet zoning requirements.

The MPP membership includes over 200 mayors and city managers across 25 of Appalachian Ohio’s 32 counties.

“The MPP is becoming very attractive to folks because there are now resources there that the members can access,” says Crosby. “Those are funds that they just don't have to do those kinds of projects on their own.”

Housing is one of the areas of focus, in part because Southeastern Ohio has the lowest number of multi-family units in the state, measuring only 6.3% of all housing unit types. Multi-family units are generally more affordable and the most common workforce housing option, particularly for younger workers.

A sign of the tightness of the housing market in the southeastern Ohio region is the steady drop in active home listings. Home listings have declined by +50% over the last five years in the four regional counties where data is available. Affordable housing is defined as costing no more than 30% of gross income for low to moderate-income households.

One of the main drivers for additional housing is that an ample supply is attractive to companies looking to add workers and build or relocate their businesses in Appalachia.

“Site selectors are coming and looking at different areas, and available housing is one of the things they check now,” says Crosby. “In years prior, it wasn't really on the radar because the assumption was that if you brought 500 workers to an area, they'd be able to find housing. And that’s not the case right now.”