FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 13, 2025

Report Finds Shortage of 264,000 Affordable Rental Homes in Ohio

Advocates released a report Thursday showing that Ohio made modest progress toward reducing the state’s shortage of affordable housing over the past year, despite continuing headwinds.

The 2025 Gap Report, released jointly by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) and the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio (COHHIO), reveals a deficit of 264,083 rental units that are affordable and available to the 438,108 extremely low-income (ELI) households in Ohio. Last year’s report found had a shortage of 267,382 affordable units available to the lowest-income Ohioans.

The overall ratio of only 40 affordable units available to every 100 ELI households in Ohio remains unchanged from 2024 to 2025.

COHHIO Executive Director Amy Riegel said the findings are a sign that state policymakers’ efforts to increase the supply of affordable housing are working.

“The new housing programs that Ohio created in the last budget bill are having a positive impact, even as pandemic-era housing assistance expired and rents continued rising,” she said. “Fortunately, the General Assembly has another opportunity this spring to maintain forward momentum by including the Home Matters to Ohio platform in the next state budget bill.”

COHHIO is a member of the Home Matters to Ohio coalition, which is urging the state legislature to improve the new Ohio Low Income Housing Tax Credit, safeguard the Ohio Housing Trust Fund, strengthen legal protections for tenants, promote local zoning reforms, and implement other policies designed to promote housing stability for all Ohioans.

The Gap Report also found the portion of Ohio’s ELI tenants who spend over half their income on housing costs increased to 71%. Meanwhile, only 2% of middle-income renters are considered “severely housing cost-burdened.”

The affordable housing gap in many Ohio communities is even worse than some of the most expensive cities in the nation. For example, Columbus has only 25 affordable units available for every 100 ELI households, while San Francisco has 31 units per 100 households and New York City has 34 units per 100 ELI households.

Some rural and suburban counties in Ohio also have acute shortages of affordable and available rental units, including Allen (33:100), Darke (28:100), Delaware (26:100), Fairfield (31:100), Van Wert (18:100), Wayne (26:100), Williams (28:100), and Wood (24:100) counties. Gov. Mike DeWine’s budget plan to invest $100 million in rural housing opportunities would help increase supply in some of these areas.

NLIHC Interim President and CEO Renee Willis said Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) pending cuts to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s programs and staffing would exacerbate the affordable housing crisis.

“Attempts to cut deeply insufficient resources for housing assistance in the face of so much unmet need are senseless. We also need to support, not undermine, agencies like HUD to ensure that housing assistance programs are administered as efficiently as possible,” she said. “There is no path to addressing the housing crisis for the lowest-income renters that doesn’t involve increasing resources for assistance and supporting the agencies that administer our housing programs.”

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