Wednesday, September 06, 2000

Scarce commodity: Affordable housing in Warren

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Zoning rules, fees are factors

By Cindi Andrews
The Cincinnati Enquirer

        Eileen Furnish, newly divorced and wary of fixer-upper homes, searched for a year before she found a house she could afford.

        She's not alone. Nowhere in Greater Cincinnati is it harder to find affordable housing than in Warren County, home of suburbs that are among the fastest growing in the state.

Many new Warren County homes like this one on Ascot Street near Maineville are in the $300,000 range, far more expensive than many people who work in the county can afford. (Dick Swaim photo) | ZOOM |

        “As a person who was married for 35 years and then had to find housing, the options are not wonderful,” Ms. Furnish, 58, says. Not wanting the maintenance chores of an older home, she finally found a neighborhood in Franklin where new houses sold for $100,000.

        Affordable housing — homes selling for less than $125,000, as defined by county planners — accounts for just 15.7 percent of single-family homes for sale in Warren, well below Tristate averages, according to a recent check of the Realtors' Multiple Listing Service.

        At the same time, the average house in Warren sold for $171,000 last year, highest in the Tristate and out of reach for many Warren Countians who earn a median $57,000 a year.

        “The housing stock in a community should mirror the people who live there, or who want to live there, and that's not happening today,” says Larry Sargeant, executive director of the county's Community Services agency.

        Local governments and new residents share the blame. Pressured by newcomers in high-end homes who don't want low-end housing nearby, officials have adopted zoning and fees that have pushed home prices to record highs.

        Warren County officials say a booming economy and low interest rates have resulted in a high demand for upscale housing.

        “We, as a local government, do not control the marketplace,” says Dan

        Theno, Deerfield Township's economic development director.

        But officials do control building fees and zoning:

        • The smallest lot sizes allowed in Mason and Deerfield are three times as large as some other Tristate communities. That increases the cost of land that developers must use for each house.

        The smallest lot sizes permitted on undeveloped land are 12,500 square feet in Mason and 14,000 in Deerfield, officials in those communities say.

        Deerfield and several other areas of the county also are virtually out of land on which they'll allow apartments or condos to be built.

        • Communities have added 5 percent or more to the cost of a low-end house with high fees for tapping into their water and sewer systems. Mason and Warren County charge among the highest fees in Greater Cincinnati — $6,240 and $4,800, respectively.

        The closest community with steeper charges is Centerville, a Dayton suburb, says Chet Calkins, president of the Home Builders Association of Greater Cincinnati. “I think some of our fee structures are becoming unreasonable at this point.”

        It's partly snobbery, he theorizes.

        “My personal belief is that there's in some cases exclusionism, that: "I don't want the affordable product in my neighborhood,'” says Mr. Calkins, who also is president of Homes by Calkins. “By raising fees I keep out certain products. I do the same thing by lowering densities.”
       

Conflicting interests

        Local government is caught between conflicting interests in Warren, home to 153,000 people.

        On one side, a lack of affordable housing threatens the work force in the county's already-stretched labor market.

        “I do have a concern that we do not have enough lower- to moderate-income housing available,” Mr. Theno says. “We are expanding job opportunities at a rate that is probably one of the highest in the whole state of Ohio, but yet we don't have moderate housing for people who take those jobs.”

        Laid-off workers in an eastern Ohio community were willing to move to Warren County, Mr. Sargeant says, but they couldn't afford housing.

        The fear is that businesses will stop coming, or even start leaving. In 1998, Cinmar, a catalog company, decided to expand in West Chester in Butler County instead of Lebanon, partly because of the Warren labor shortage.

        On the other side, well-heeled residents — often newcomers to Warren County who may work in Cincinnati or elsewhere in the Tristate — have opposed higher density and smaller houses.

        “Our community, the people in Mason, want to see that growth slowed,” Mayor John McCurley says.

        Mr. Sargeant says schools, too, have encouraged upscale housing because their funding comes from property taxes.

        Franklin is of the few Warren County cities that has seen a lot of affordable development; its average sale price for homes in 1999 was $93,840. But it recently heard — and heeded — the cries of angry homeowners.

        Residents in the first phase of 57-acre Rolling Meadows moved in last year thinking the houses that came later would get bigger and more valuable than their $140,000 to $180,000 homes.

        “We all started out with smaller homes, and this was our idea of moving up,” says Sue Hutson, 39, owner of a four-bedroom, three-story house.

        Homeowners were floored when Crossman Communities bought land that hadn't been developed yet and started building 1,200-square-foot homes that start around $115,000.

        Shortly thereafter, Franklin City Council prohibited homes smaller than 1,500 square feet from being built in Rolling Meadows and other similarly zoned areas.

        Mayor Paul Hillard describes the change as part of an overhaul of outdated zoning rules: “It brings us more in line with the rest of the county.”

        The developers of Rolling Meadows and another subdivision asked the courts to intervene and they did, at least temporarily allowing small homes to continue multiplying in Franklin.

        And buyers continue to snap them up. Crossman's entry into Rolling Meadows enabled Ronda Lykins, her husband and four children to buy their first home, a 1,200-square-foot ranch for $126,000.

        “I lived in an apartment for 10 years, and I was real tired of it,” Ms. Lykins, 41, says.

Solutions
        The good news for the Lykins family and would-be homeowners is that Warren County officials are becoming more aware of the lack of affordable homes, says Yana Keck, director of the county's Housing Advisory Committee.

        In three United Way studies, the issue has risen from the eighth-highest county concern in 1987 to No. 2 this year, behind “family issues.”

        The bad news is that the gap between people's incomes and the cost of housing is still increasing, Ms. Keck says. She cites home prices that jumped 9.7 percent in 1999.

        Efforts are under way to provide more balanced housing options:

        • Developers and communities are increasingly turning to a special zoning category — planned-unit development — that allows smaller lot sizes as part of an overall plan that also includes larger lots and community “green space.”

        “Right now that's the compromise,” says Brian Murphy, a sales manager for Crossman Communities in Warren County. “It still makes it a little more expensive” than allowing all small lots.

        He'd rather see communities zoned for residents' chief concern — appearance — instead of lot size.

        “Affordable housing doesn't have to be substandard housing, or unattractive housing,” Mr. Murphy says. “It just has to be affordable.”

        • At least two nonprofit groups are using public and private grants to create affordable housing.

        Community Services has 10 multiunit developments in Warren County, mostly for the elderly. The agency's five-year plan includes building 24 single-family homes on a site not yet picked and an apartment complex in Loveland.

        Warren County Balanced Housing, a year-old spinoff of a county planning committee, is rehabilitating old houses and selling them cheaper than private industry can. The group also aims to start building housing.

        • Some other communities are permitting smaller lots and more apartments. Boone County and its cities, including Florence, allow lots as small as 4,000 square feet in subdivisions, says Kevin Costello, executive planning director.

        “We're getting a lot of different groups, a lot of young people,” he says.

        Boone also doesn't mind the multifamily housing that's eschewed in some Warren County communities because apartments tend to bring in fewer kids, Mr. Costello says. That helps control school overcrowding.

        For now, prospective home buyers who want to live in Warren County have to make some hard decisions.

        Older homes — even historic ones — tend to cost less, although they require more maintenance. They're primarily found in older communities such as Lebanon, Morrow and South Lebanon, where even new housing tends to cost less than in Mason and Deerfield.

        “If it isn't found in Mason,” says Mason Mayor McCurley, “I think there are places that aren't too far from here that might be affordable.”

       

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