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Housing crisis spurs Columbus town hall meeting

By Clayton Baumgarth

Posted September 27, 2022

Columbus, Indiana town hall. (Greg Hume - Wikimedia Commons)

Spurred by skyrocketing national rents and investors buying up properties, families and tenants in Columbus are struggling to find safe, quality and affordable housing. About 60 community members, including three council members, gathered last week for a town hall meeting to share stories and find solutions.

Jennifer Wells, a leader of Hoosier Action, said, “I just think it was a great opportunity that after talking to literally hundreds of people over the last two summers that we came together as a voice, showing power that we are people that are concerned and worried for our future.”

Read more: New development has citizens concerned Indiana housing inventory has increased over last year

A full-time minimum wage worker would have to work 101 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom unit at $950 a month in Columbus, according to a Hoosier Action press release. That puts the town above Washington, DC, Portland, and L.A. county in terms of work hours needed to afford the same unit.

Stephanie Zhang, event organizer for Hoosier Action, says that part of the problem is that tenants don’t know their rights. In addition, out-of-state investors are buying many area properties.

“Over the past few years, there's been a handful of big private equity corporations and foreign investors that are buying up affordable, single-family homes in our county and turning them into expensive rentals,” she said. “And it's like jacking up prices of rent. It's pushing out first time homebuyers and fueling the rent crisis.”

The town hall meeting ended with two requests of local government.

One is to form a website and/or yearly flyers that lay out tenant’s rights and responsibilities. The other is for a database of landlords so that tenants can learn more about them. For example, how many code violations does this landlord have?

“It’s one step of many, many things that we want to see happen,” Zhang said.

Wells said the next step is to get the requests to the mayor so that they can get on city council’s agenda. “We need him to be a champion and get it on the agenda so that we can go somewhere with it,” Wells said.

Columbus residents interested in helping Hoosier Action can sign their Columbus Housing Petition here.

Read Next

Want to contact your legislators about an issue that matters to you? Find out how to contact your senators and member of Congress here.

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