2,000 more homes needed in Worthington to meet demand, study finds

WORTHINGTON, Ohio (WCMH) — Worthington needs more than 2,000 new residences as the city’s households are increasingly overcrowded and a third of renters face high costs, according to a new study.

About 68% of those 2,000 homes are to be for-sale homes, while rentals are to make up 32%, according to the report from Camoin Associates, a New York-based consulting firm. The Worthington City Council commissioned this assessment to better evaluate the housing options currently available in the community and identify possible strategies to meet those needs.

Camoin determined demand by combining the estimated number of high-cost residents — those who spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent — with the number of overcrowded households and displaced commuters, those who work in Worthington but have declared not having the means to live. there. Only 6 percent of residents work in Worthington, while a third of the city’s renters face high costs, and half of them are seniors.

Council member Rebecca Hermann said at a May 20 meeting that she was a displaced commuter in the 1980s when she worked in the AT&T building in Worthington, but couldn’t afford to live in the suburbs. Hermann said “it was a displacement” and noted that she met “a number of tenants who had not been able to live here in Worthington.”

In detail, 567 homes are needed above a price of $250,000, with 783 homes below, and 165 rentals are needed above a monthly rent of $1,200 and 462 rentals below. However, under current zoning, Worthington does not have available land to build these new units, and building new homes for less than $200,000 is not financially feasible, according to the study.

The consultancy said to view these numbers as “the scale of demand” and use the data to prioritize the city’s housing goals and policies in the future. The company also recommended that the council seek to make progress in providing these needed units rather than reaching a target number, and to support projects that move closer to affordability rather than setting levels exact prices.

“That’s how you start to solve this problem, by providing more supply that can change the market to make it more affordable and more affordable for people who want to live or stay in Worthington,” Robert O’Brien said , senior housing specialist at Camoin, who presented the student at the May 20 meeting.

Camoin also noted that while Franklin County saw a 10% increase in new housing between 2010 and 2020, Worthington’s housing increased by only 3%. Additionally, even though rents in the surrounding area have increased faster than in Worthington over the past decade, rents in the city are still 17% higher than in the surrounding area.

City Council member Beth Kowalczyk said those estimates were part of a study conducted with other city reports, and said employees who spoke at a recent Chamber of Commerce event city ​​business said they wanted to live closer to their workplace.

“It also spurs economic development, employers want to be able to locate where their employees live,” Kowalczyk said. “And as we fail to solve this problem, fewer and fewer employees can live in this community and work where they live. »