Ohio’s Affordable Housing Shortage Deepens

Report Finds Ohio’s Affordable Housing Shortage Deepens: Lower Wage Earners Hit Hardest

A report released Thursday shows nearly half of Ohio’s 1.58 million renters are paying more than they can afford on rent, as the state faces a shortage of 266,000 affordable and available rental units.

The 2026 Gap Report, released jointly each year by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) and the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio (COHHIO), says Ohio’s 422,000 extremely low-income renters are especially precarious. 73% of these households spend over half of their income on rent, up from 66% five years ago.

“The data confirms what we hear all the time – renters across the board are having more trouble paying rent,” COHHIO Executive Director Amy Riegel said. “For people at the bottom of the pay scale, rent is gobbling up most of their paychecks. But this report shows the rent Pac-Man is moving up the income ladder.”

Ohio has only 37 affordable units available for every 100 extremely low income households across the state, but the deficit is more severe in some communities. ELI households earn less than $33,000/year for a family of four.

Ohio’s largest cities all have a similar shortage of affordable housing: Cincinnati has a deficit of nearly 55,000 units, Cleveland lacks 54,000 units, and Columbus 53,000. The ratio of affordable units available to ELI renters was only 27 to 100 units in Columbus, 32 to 100 in Cincinnati, and 36 to 100 in Cleveland.

NLIHC President and CEO Renee M. Willis said the Gap report shows that no state or major metropolitan area in the U.S. has an adequate supply of affordable and available homes.

“It is a sad fact that only one in four households who qualify for housing assistance receive it. When renters are housing cost-burdened, they cannot afford to cover other basic necessities such as food, healthcare, transportation, or childcare,” she said. “Congress has the solutions to increase housing affordability across the country. They must support robust housing assistance programs that can alleviate the housing crisis and ensure the wellbeing of millions of the lowest-income renters.”

Riegel said the upcoming mid-term elections are a good opportunity to highlight the housing affordability issue and called on candidates to lay out plans to make home more affordable for Ohioans.

“Policymakers must focus on the most vulnerable – the hundreds of thousands of hard-working Ohioans who are living on the edge, where a sudden illness or car repair can lead to eviction and potentially homelessness,” she said. “The time for complacency is over. We need action, and we look forward to working with elected officials to find a path out of the housing crisis.”