housing – Whoopsie Piggle

The current housing shortage in the United States has been most devastating for those who need affordable rental housing. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, no state currently has an adequate supply of affordable housing for the lowest-income renters. In Ohio, only 37 affordable rental units exist for every 100 extremely low-income households.

In an attempt to address the lack of affordable housing in Akron, Freedom BLOC, a local community organization, led a successful petition drive to place two issues on the Nov. 3 ballot. If passed, they would amend Akron’s city charter — but the unintended consequences of the measures would create new problems and erase most benefits.

Issue 11 would “require property owners or operators to permit security deposits for residential rentals to be paid over three or six month periods,” and also criminalize “the collection of an application fee for residential rentals.” These provisions would apply to all landlords, from large rental companies to individual landlords who own few properties.

I own two side-by-side homes in Akron’s West Hill neighborhood. I live in one and rent out the other, which is my primary income source. Like many of my tenants, I live below the federal poverty level and understand how difficult it can be to come up with the first month’s rent and security deposit at lease signing. I support Issue 11’s first provision.

But I will vote no for Issue 11 because of its second provision.

When my rental turns over, I list it on zillow.com. Interested parties apply on the website, which runs secure credit and background checks and sends them to me. Zillow’s $35 application fee is only a few dollars more than the cost of running the checks. It is a seamless and ideal service for a landlord with limited means.

If Issue 11 passes, however, I will have to pay for every prospective tenant’s background and credit checks. My house is leased to four unrelated roommates; their applications would have cost me $140. Furthermore, not everyone who applies ends up renting, which means each rental turn-over could cost me hundreds of dollars.

As forgoing background and credit checks would be reckless, landlords like me will need to increase rent to offset this expense.

Issue 11’s goal is to lower renters’ costs, but it will have the opposite effect.

Issue 12 would add a protected class to whom landlords cannot refuse to rent: people with a criminal history, except for sexual or arson offenders. It also would prohibit refusing to rent to someone based on “income as it relates to real estate transactions,” which is vague, but significant.

I am not opposed to renting to someone with a criminal history, but excluding only arsonists and sex offenders is too narrow. Forcing landlords to rent to those with a criminal history of domestic violence and drug trafficking, for example, will put families and neighborhoods at risk, and potentially lead landlords to sell their rental properties. It will not solve the re-entry problem Issue 12 seeks to remedy.

As for the vague language forbidding source-of-income discrimination, Freedom BLOC’s ballot literature asserts this to mean a “landlord could not turn away a tenant solely for paying rent with a housing voucher.” But the amendment language does not say that. And Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority, not the landlord, sets the rental price for properties leased to someone with a voucher.

When asked by the Beacon Journal for clarification, a community organizer who helped craft the ballot initiative said Akron already has a requirement that a person cannot be denied housing based on where they receive their rent income.

However, the ambiguity of the ballot language and campaign literature raises serious concerns.

In 2025, AMHA determined I could charge $1,152 a month if I accepted a voucher. That’s less than I charged 15 years ago. My monthly mortgage payment was $952, which would have left me $200 each month, or $2,400 a year. Subtract from that the cost for repairs and maintenance, and I would have lost money renting to someone with a voucher had I not paid off my mortgage the year before. Even without a mortgage, I pay over $5,000 a year in taxes and insurance (both of which have skyrocketed since 2020), plus the cost of maintenance and repairs. Accepting vouchers is not feasible in my case.

Laws forcing private-sector landlords to provide public housing are not sustainable. For public housing to be sustainable, it must be fully funded by governments with buy-in strictly from landlords who choose to participate.

Issues 11 and 12 call attention to the very real affordable housing crisis, but the devil is in the details. As written, these well-intended but flawed amendments will exacerbate existing problems, and create new ones.

The issues should not pass. But immediately after Election Day, the mayor’s office, Freedom BLOC and other interested organizations, such as Unify Akron must begin the work on comprehensive housing reform in Akron. Good legislation requires engaging with other stakeholder organizations and should include hearings from interested parties, in this case both tenants and landlords. This takes time, but will lead to better legislation.

This column was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, October 11, 2026.

A 2023 Harvest for Hunger ad featuring a photo of a young girl revealed more about those who created the ad than it did about people who are food insecure. In a column, I imagined how the advertising company decided to portray her and wrote: “The result is a hackneyed stereotype of the poor — a child whose hair is messy, a stand-in for dirty, which is just a short walk to laziness. Not far behind laziness is dishonesty. Charles Dickens couldn’t have done better.”

The pervasiveness of bias, if not outright bigotry, against poor people surfaced in a letter to the editor responding to my most recent column, in which I explained that I am factually and legally a member of America’s working poor. I described how our nation’s policies currently favor the richest 1% over everyone else, causing income inequality to explode in recent decades. Unlike much of the second half of the 20th century, today jobs that pay a living wage and offer comprehensive benefits packages, including health care and retirement, are hard to come by.

And I described the benefits cliff – when people who receive government assistance, in my family’s case Medicaid, can lose all benefits when they earn only a little more than 138% of the federal poverty level. My column concluded: “The problem isn’t the poor, working or not. The problem is our systems.”

The overwhelming response to that column was positive. Yet the point was lost on some who, rather than recognize America’s intentional and systemic imbalance in wages, health care, housing costs and more, would blame the poor – in this case me – for our status.

Marcia Schray’s letter to the editor dismissed my factual and legal status as a working poor American and called me disingenuous. Her letter repeated a number of widely held, but false, biases and stereotypes about the poor. Chief among them is the belief that if poor people have lives that are anything but coarse and miserable, they must be grifting. Or, as another reader pointed out, apparently I am “not poor enough” for Schray.

Schray claims to have long read my columns and gives my “travels, foreign and domestic, [and] summer long vacations” as examples of my not being factually and legally poor. Yet every time I’ve written about trips I’ve taken, I’ve pointed out that anyone can travel cheaply if willing to forgo things in order to save for travel and rough it when they go. I mostly travel by car to the homes of family and friends. I do not take summer-long vacations, but for years enrolled my children in municipal summer camps in Michigan where we stayed in a small camper in their grandparents’ driveway. I cannot teach in the summer as there are no teaching jobs then, but work all year long as a freelance proofreader and writer, which I can do remotely.

Schray then mentions my children’s father, whom I left years ago, is an attorney. Why? My best guess is Schray believes all attorneys live like those on the TV show “The White Lotus” with fabulous incomes and no concerns for mundane expenses like health care.

That’s simply fantasy.

Solo practitioners lack access to corporate benefits packages and pay a premium for health insurance with high deductibles and measly coverage.

Most poor Americans, Schray states, don’t own a home, let alone two or three. That’s likely true. I bought a house in Akron in 2003 for $112,500. In 2014, I was able to acquire on a lease-to-own contract the neighboring home that had a mortgage balance of $52,000. I’ve shared this information before because there are few places besides Akron where someone could purchase two homes for a total of $164,500.

I live in an inner-city neighborhood that is economically and ethnically diverse. My homes are over 100 years old and designed very differently than new homes. All of which is to say, many people aren’t willing to live in houses like mine in neighborhoods like mine, a choice I happily made for many reasons, including the fact that it allows me to live within my means.

As for my means, my adjusted gross income in 2024 was $19,414. I earned just over $25k in wages last year, but my AGI was $4,072 due to the expenses of my one rental home. Rather than making me rich, as Schray seems to believe, my one rental home allows me to invest in a safe asset, the income and expenses of which, over the course of several years, roughly break even.

Meanwhile, as a self-reported regular reader, Schray forgets the many times I’ve written about being a “Second-hand Rose” to quote a Streisand song. From my base-model car to most of my shoes and everything in between, including what I buy for my children, I purchase used, and at bargain prices.

Bias is generally based upon assumptions that fall apart when met with facts. The poor are no more lazy, slovenly or mendacious than the rich. Nor are the poor Dickensian caricatures. As I wrote before, most people are doing all that they can to take care of their families as best they know how, but federal policy changes beginning in the 1980s have left the majority of Americans behind, even as the rich prosper. No wonder we have to find creative ways to live that are not coarse and miserable, something those who would shame us might consider.

This was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, March 1, 2026.