Across the region, there's a big disparity in how long people live. Nearly 90 years, on average, in Indian Hill and Mason, but barely over 60 in Arlington Heights and Adams County. That's nearly 30 years of life, love, children, grandchildren, and memories that are lost. Why? Community health experts are looking at the larger forces that shape health and wellness. The places where we grow up, live, work, and age shape our lives and our opportunities to thrive. This is the third story in a year-long deep dive into the factors that people and neighborhoods need for long, healthful lives, spotlighting individuals and organizations working toward building healthier, resilient communities. You can read other stories in the series here.
Affording a home, a place of security, stability, and comfort, is becoming more stressful than ever.
Rising home prices, steep hikes in rent, high mortgage rates, a lack of affordable housing, and huge increases in property taxes have conspired to make buying or renting a home difficult, and more costly for those who already own one.
Local, in-depth reports paint a portrait of a system in crisis. Released in 2020 as the nation was struggling to respond to the pandemic, the
Housing Our Future study found “unprecedented housing affordability challenges,” including a massive need for housing that people of modest means can afford: a gap of 40,000 units of affordable housing needed in Hamilton County, and an even larger gap of 60,000 homes in need of repair.
In Northern Kentucky, 6,650 additional housing units will be needed to keep pace with growth in eight counties in that region,
a 2023 study found. Half of that will be needed for workers making less than $25 an hour. “Our region lacks sufficient housing stock for young adults forming their first household, for essential workers like nurses, teachers, and first responders, and for seniors,” it says.
As the dream of a home of one’s own becomes a stretch for many, the health of families and communities is at risk. Spending too much on housing, constant stress over paying the rent or the mortgage, and frequent moves,
can all chip away at physical and mental health and make it harder to afford or find health care.
Housing that is free of hazards such as lead water pipes, water leaks, bugs and mold is obviously essential to good health. And when families must spend too much of their income on housing, they’re unable to pay for other essential expenses such as medical care. Foreclosures and evictions can lead to moving in to already crowded conditions, or even homelessness.
Children are especially vulnerable.
'I just couldn't afford it'
Tenicia Adams has been searching for stable housing for years. She’s a 28-year-old who makes $21 an hour working as an aide at a nursing home in Fort Thomas. She’d like to buy a home for her and her two children, but she’s spending so much on rent now that it’s hard to make ends meet, let alone save for a down payment.
Her apartment in Newport costs $1,900 a month, meaning she spends more than 40% of her income on rent alone, with utilities and other housing costs on top of that.
Even at $1,900 a month, the apartment, she says, isn’t the healthiest place to raise two kids. The oven hasn’t worked since she moved in, the basement floods, making doing laundry a problem, and it’s moldy, which she blames for her kids getting sick too often.
She lived in public housing in Covington for four years, but even there, the rent ballooned to the market rate of $1,430 a month when she got her job. “I just couldn’t afford it,” she says. “And I couldn’t afford anything else either.”
With an eviction on her record, a credit score that’s not quite good enough, and unable to save for a security deposit, she’s had to settle for what she can get. She’s even had to stay in a hotel for a few months at $500 a week. She's currently working through training at the Brighton Center in hopes of advancing her career and earning more.
“I want to buy a house, but my goal right now is to find a rental that I can afford,” she says.
The Black home ownership gap
The dream of home ownership is becoming especially elusive for prospective Black homebuyers. They’re not only burdened with the ongoing impact of decades of discriminatory housing practices, but have been hit hard by today’s rising cost of home ownership.
There’s a huge gap in home ownership rates among Blacks in Hamilton County, found a
study by Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME) that was updated in 2023. Black homeownership in Greater Cincinnati is around 34%, while white homeownership is approximately 74% -- a nearly 40% gap. This disparity is worse than many other cities across the country, and has worsened over time, HOME says.
“As we've seen the last few years, interest rates have really increased, and the housing supply has really tightened up,” says Elisabeth Risch, executive director of HOME. “Things look a lot different in terms of who can access mortgage loans, and that’s continuing to put up barriers for Black home ownership.”
Fixing the affordability crisis will take a coordinated, long-term strategy that involves the many players in the often-complex housing network. But there’s agreement that it’s critical to the long-term health of the region and its people. “In solving our housing problem, we will strengthen our local economy and help our entire community,” the Housing Our Future report says.
The importance of stable, healthy, affordable housing to the overall health of cities and neighborhoods has prompted in-depth analyses that is beginning to result in action.
Strategies and solutions
In Northern Kentucky, 90 community leaders convened to draft
Home for All: Northern Kentucky Housing Strategies. Released in January, the study presents 50 strategies for communities to consider that would make housing more available and affordable (see right sidebar). The project viewed housing through the lens of the region’s economy, seeing housing as crucial to attracting and keeping workforce talent in the region.
“We need a place for essential workers, the nurses, the teachers, the first responders,” says Tara Johnson-Noem, executive director of the Northern Kentucky Area Development district, which coordinated the study.
The study focuses on the most common jobs in Northern Kentucky – nurses, teachers, warehouse workers, restaurant employees and elderly care. About 60% of the workers in the region earn less than $60,000 and many of them make much less. For example, with a teacher’s median wage of just under $44,000, only 16% of the for-sale housing is affordable, and only 26% of the rentals.
“As a region, we're in a global competition for talent,” Johnson-Noem says. “When we think about our economic vibrancy and our future, we need to have adequate places for those people to go to bed at night. That's just as critical to being competitive as having the right road infrastructure and the right broadband infrastructure.”
The strategies range from proactive code enforcement to keep homes from falling into disrepair and becoming unhealthy and unsafe to expanding funding for first-time homebuyers to amending zoning rules to increase housing supply.
One of the recommendations is to step up enforcement of building codes to keep housing safe. Housing affordability is not just about cost but also about quality and safety.
“There's a lot of different situations where the lack of upkeep for a piece of property eventually leads to that property not really being a place that someone could live any longer,” Johnson-Noem says.
Many small Northern Kentucky communities are in the process of updating their long-term comprehensive plans and could adopt some of the strategies in them, she said. “This is a prime opportunity for our communities to take the data and the strategies that have been identified and figure out which of those works best for them,” she says.
In Cincinnati and Hamilton County, some steps have been taken to increase the supply of affordable housing. Following the Housing Our Future report, a new emphasis on policies and funding to support affordable housing was seen and an affordable housing trust fund was established. Laws were passed that aim to make affordable housing more available and to protect renters.
Property tax abatement laws were adjusted in Cincinnati to make them more targeted to low-income communities, and the Connected Communities zoning reform was passed by Cincinnati City Council, which potentially allows for development of more multi-family housing. Cincinnati City Council in 2021 approved a program to offer legal assistance to tenants facing eviction, as well as new regulations on maintaining housing in a livable condition.
But the changes have been relatively modest and more needs to be done, especially to encourage Black home ownership, says Elisabeth Risch, executive director of HOME. “Current programs and policies are not enough to stop the decline in Black homeownership given the market conditions we see today,” she says.
Property tax shocks
Among those conditions are big increases in property tax bills that homeowners saw in 2024, which hit Black and low-income neighborhoods particularly hard.
New research sponsored by HOME finds that tax increases were disproportionately concentrated in communities of color and lower-income neighborhoods. On average, property tax bills increased by $990 (83 percent) in communities of color, compared to $430 (8 percent) in White neighborhoods.
That’s the case for Dinah Yisrael, who has lived in her home in Bond Hill for 54 years, and homeschooled her two now-grown children there. She’s now and retired on her Social Security benefits and spends her days gardening and volunteering. After Hamilton County’s reassessment in 2023, her property taxes nearly tripled to just under $2,000 a year. She appealed to the county auditor’s office without success.
She loves the neighborhood she’s lived in most of her life, although it is gentrifying, and at age 78 doesn’t want to start over. “I don't intend to go nowhere,” she says. “However, they're making it really challenging.”
The HOME study blames the property tax changes on the approach used to estimate property values. Hamilton County’s auditor, it says, contracts a private company to derive an equation that determines each property’s value. This equation increased values in communities of color more than in white neighborhoods.
“This is a huge risk to home ownership, and a huge risk to Black homeownership,” Risch says.
HOME makes a half dozen recommendations to address the disparity, including increasing enrollment in the homestead exemption and owner occupancy programs through targeted outreach, expanding which properties are protected from tax lien sales, replacing property tax levies with more equitable revenue sources, and working with state representatives to allow the county to use new assessment approaches (see sidebar).
Cutbacks at HUD
Complicating these efforts is President Trump’s
moves to drastically cut the budget at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Cincinnati’s HOME is one of dozens of private, nonprofit agencies around the country that work to enforce fair housing laws by investigating complaints of discrimination, educating communities on their rights, resolving disputes and helping with legal counsel. The office’s work is partly funded by a three-year grant from HUD, but that grant was abruptly terminated at the end of February, Risch says.
“We've had to pause and reduce fair housing counseling, working one-on-one with individuals who feel they've been discriminated against,” she says.
The Trump Administration is also planning to cut more than half of HUD’s staff, some 4,000 positions, including more than 75% of the employees in its Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which, in concert with local agencies like HOME, enforces fair housing laws. Major cuts are also in the offing for the federal office that supports public housing and one that provides counseling for first-time homebuyers and mortgage insurance, which makes it easier for middle- and lower-income Americans to qualify for home loans
“It’s going to have a huge impact on housing instability in the region,” Risch says.
And that, in turn, will likely have a huge impact on the health of the region.
This series, Health Justice in Action, is made possible with support from Interact for Health. To learn more about Interact for Health's commitment to working with communities to advance health justice, please visit here.