“Carried to its logical conclusion, [the private control of land] means that some have the right to prevent others from living.” -Ambrose Bierce
In the May 6 Columbus City Council meeting, Council President Shannon Hardin and Councilmember Shayla Favor called out “the greedy investors, property managers and landlords who are exploiting our vulnerable residents.”
Favor pointed to a number of recent mass evictions carried out by investment firms and property groups at complexes such as Sandridge Apartments, Sawyer Towers, Colonial Village and properties on Riverview Drive, which she said totaled more than 1,000 displaced residents.
“What they’re doing might be legal, but it’s still morally reprehensible,” Hardin said.
These mass evictions are exacerbating a crisis with roots in everything from year-long waits for Section 8 housing and rising rents to a growing lack of affordable housing. The current housing crisis can’t be blamed on any one source, but instead a mixture of many. Each of the aforementioned parties – investors, property managers, developers and landlords – contribute to it. But so do the politicians trying to solve the problem. Solving the housing crisis will take a far more ambitious plan than any of the ones to this point laid out by local officials.
Landlords and Property Management
As a part of the Columbus Dispatch’s 2013 series, “Legacy of Neglect,” the publication tracked 100 landlords who had at least three court cases filed against them for housing code violations. Among the offenders was Joseph Alaura, a landlord who owned at least 26 properties, some of which lacked running water.
In 2013, Alaura was sentenced to 60 days in jail for refusing to fix code violations. In 2019, he was sentenced to 5 days for not making repairs at a Hilltop duplex. This year, he was sentenced to 175 days in jail after code enforcement found properties with rodent infestations, broken windows, plumbing issues and no running water. Alaura lives on a 30-acre property an hour outside the city.
Alaura and the other landlords tracked by the Dispatch aren’t the only ones leaving their tenants in sometimes unlivable conditions. The Lantern found that housing violations in the University District have skyrocketed since 2020. “The 373 violations covering the first nine months of 2023 are roughly equal to a total of 379 violations reported over nine years, stretching from 2013 to 2021,” the Ohio State student newspaper reported.
Many of these apartments and homes are managed by property management groups on campus such as Northsteppe Realty and University Village Apartments. In 2021, Northsteppe Realty was sued for shorting their tenants on security deposits for years. In The Lantern’s investigation, students complained of a cockroach infestation in their University Village Apartment.
Finance Capital
According to Kevin Cox, author of Boomtown Columbus and professor of geography at OSU, one of the drivers for investment in housing has been low-interest rates that the government would’ve preferred been committed to industry.
“Money to finance housing, including the purchase of existing units, has exploded, which then helps to explain the extraordinary run-up in the price of homes: Between 2000 and 2020, the mean home price in Franklin County increased by more than 130 percent. The fact that median household incomes only increased by scarcely 40 percent has then created a crisis of affordability,” he wrote in a Dispatch op-ed.
As Cox notes, private equity firms are behind the recent mass eviction cases. A New Jersey company called Carlton Equities evicted residents at Sandridge Apartments; Peak Property Group purchased buildings on Riverview Drive, jacking up the rents on immigrant tenants; and, according to city officials, the out-of-state Apex Equity LLC is believed to be the owner of Sawyer Towers (Latitude Five25), which flooded on Christmas Day in 2022, and Colonial Village, the site of a human trafficking scandal.
As the early 20th century Ohio humorist Ambrose Bierce wrote, capital is “the seat of misgovernment.”
Politics
In Capital City, author Samuel Stein outlines what he calls the “real estate state,” or the marriage between government and private real estate capital. “Landowners have been determining the shape of cities for centuries, and the idea of housing as a commodity – even as a financial asset – is not exactly state of the art,” he writes. “What is relatively new, however, is the outsized power of real estate interests within the capitalist state.”
In 2020, Matter News analyzed campaign contribution data and found developers gave more than $440,000 to city officials within four years. This money went to city council members and Mayor Andrew Ginther, who received almost $100,000 in 2019. In 2023, he received almost $500,000.
After observing that more than 1,000 local residents were displaced due to the recent mass evictions, Favor said that “because of our incredibly tight housing market, we don’t have 1,000 affordable housing units to move these folks into.”
Columbus has taken a number of steps to address the housing crisis. This includes passing $250 million for affordable housing bonds, zoning reform to make building homes easier, and a tax abatement program called the Community Reinvestment Area (CRA) Residential Abatement.
These steps have paved the way for an influx of housing being built. But despite the deceiving vocabulary, virtually none of the units being built are technically affordable – even by the city’s own standards.
At the May 6 city council meeting, Favor sponsored an ordinance that would help build a new “affordable” apartment building downtown called Elevate 340. Of the 74 proposed units, 51 will cost roughly $1,200 for a one-bedroom apartment, and only four will be less than $1,000. Those numbers are being replicated in poorer neighborhoods such as Linden, where the median income is half of what it is in Columbus overall – the metric used by the city to label housing affordable.
The investment firms executing mass evictions are looking for ways to hike their rents to match the revenues of the very projects City Council is championing. Both are trying to buy in on the profitability of housing as an investment. But the local government and city planners are tasked with “the contradictory goals of inflating real estate values while safeguarding residents’ best interests,” as Stein wrote.
The solution, according to Cox and Stein, is to challenge the very premise of a privately-run housing market. Cox highlights Britain’s relatively large public housing stock while Stein points to places such as Singapore where 80 percent of the population lives in public housing. Putting the housing stock in the hands of public entities removes the barrier of subsidizing profits for developers and abruptly lowers the cost of living, which is a prerequisite to guaranteeing housing as a human right – a goal city council members claim to be striving toward.
More generally, Stein believes that “the city must belong to those who build it, not those who buy it.” Developers and landlords shouldn’t have any more control over housing than the millions of toiling renters who, through their monthly rents, fund their landlords’ lush 30-acre properties and lavish retirements.
