The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
A bipartisan pair of Ohio Senators are working to rebuild a housing safety net program aimed at lower income seniors and disabled Ohioans.
The Ohio Housing Finance Agency’s Save The Dream program started during the COVID-19 pandemic, and gave eligible homeowners help with mortgage payments, utility bills, and property taxes.
State Sens. Hearcel Craig, D-Columbus, and Michele Reynolds, R-Canal Winchester, want to restart that program by authorizing the agency to spend up to $10 million in homeowner assistance grants.
Save The Dream
In 2022, the Ohio Housing Finance Agency launched Save The Dream with $280 million in federal funds. The idea was to reduce foreclosures and utility shut-offs brought on by financial hardship tied to the pandemic.
Applicants had to fall below an income threshold — about $100,000 for an individual or just shy of $148,000 for a family of four — and the program capped assistance at $25,000.
According to Ohio Housing Finance Agency reporting, that program wound up spending $260 million of its total appropriation and helped almost 35,000 households.
The lion’s share of that funding, more than $213 million of the total, went to mortgage assistance. It handed out another $27 million to help cover property taxes and about $15 million in utility assistance.
Although it set a relatively generous income cut off of 150% of the area median income, the vast majority of recipients made far less than that.
More than 60% of the households who received assistance reported incomes at or below 50% of the area median income.
The housing finance agency Public Affairs Director Penny Martin said they heard from people “regularly” about how helpful the program was.
“It helped them kind of, I’m going to use the term rebound, from the impacts of the pandemic,” she said. “We still do get calls every now and then asking if the program’s going, if the program is still available.”
The state proposal
The program Sens. Craig and Reynolds envision takes the federally funded program as a model, but it’s dramatically smaller.
Instead of the Department of the Treasury authorizing $280 million, the senators are talking about $10 million. And with that smaller nest egg, eligibility is narrower, and the support available is smaller.
Under Craig and Reynolds’ Ohio Senate Bill 255, homeowners would need less than 75,000 in income to qualify. They’d also need to a senior, disabled, or the caretaker of someone who’s disabled.
Like the federal program, S.B. 255 caps the total amount of assistance a homeowner can receive. Instead of the $25,000 ceiling under the original program, the state plan caps assistance at $3,000.
Still, Craig contends the proposal will deliver important assistance even if it does so on a smaller scale. A missed mortgage payment or utility bill, “can quickly spiral into foreclosure or loss of basic needs,” he said.
“The need is there,” he added, “as you look across the landscape in Ohio.”
For many Ohioans, the financial strain from the pandemic never really went away.
Some have had to find multiple gigs to make up the one job they lost. The inflation rate is no longer flirting with double digits, but costs haven’t gone back to pre-pandemic levels.
Meanwhile, Ohioans are seeing higher utility costs and property tax bills.
Craig thinks a new Save the Dream program could help lighten the load.
“We believe that there’s lots of integrity in the process,” he said. “And it certainly is a process that is needed, and even more valuable now, since you know, things have grown exponentially with regard to access to affordable housing (and) keeping seniors in their homes, certainly. And so, we believe that it has great merit and it’s a process that certainly needs to continue.”
It seems some other policymakers are considering the same issue. City leaders in Columbus, for instance, are rolling out a rental assistance program to soften the impact as a federal rent program expires.
