Many issues confront the state at this pivotal moment: rising gas prices, rising food prices, public education, healthcare, and more. But one of the single most important issues that people face on a day-to-day basis is housing, made more challenging with rising housing prices, coupled with fluctuations in the policy and regulatory environment.
Ohio’s housing and homelessness system is being asked to do more. Across Cuyahoga County, our organizations are seeing greater housing instability, longer shelter stays, increasingly complex barriers among people experiencing homelessness, and growing difficulty moving households quickly into permanent housing.
The need for affordable housing and homelessness assistance continues to outpace available resources.
Families and individuals are struggling
People remaining homeless longer, households needing assistance to avoid losing housing, and face greater difficulty locating units that voucher holders can afford and landlords will accept.
In 2025, LMM served 3,824 people experiencing homelessness, including more than 2,800 residents at Ohio's largest men's shelter. Our experience highlights how rising housing costs, behavioral health needs, and disability-related challenges are making it increasingly difficult for vulnerable residents to secure stable housing. With an average investment of just $949 per household to prevent or resolve a housing crisis, 93 percent of households remained housed after receiving Flex Fund assistance.
West Side Catholic Center served 8,860 people in 2025 through food assistance, emergency shelter, housing support, employment services, and family programs. Investment in a new food distribution model with walk-in refrigeration and a storefront setting improves both capacity and dignity. Integrated supports like food, housing, benefits assistance, and healthcare are all in one place, including a relationship with MetroHealth.
EDEN helped 10,910 people through supportive housing, rental assistance, homelessness prevention, and emergency shelter services in 2025. Working at the intersection of housing and homelessness, a focus is on prevention rather than waiting until homelessness occurs. A 62-unit senior development reserves 25 units for veterans, as well as managing 14 permanent supportive housing buildings.
The populations needing assistance are also increasingly complex, with many needing ongoing services and housing stability supports.
A shortage of affordable units, rising rents and operating costs, and reluctance among some property owners to accept rental assistance can turn even a relatively small financial or administrative barrier into prolonged homelessness.
Public investment has not kept pace with the actual cost of operating emergency shelters, preventing homelessness, and helping households secure and sustain housing. At the same time, complex administrative demands consume scarce organizational capacity without necessarily producing better outcomes. Even proven interventions like Rapid Re-Housing and Permanent Supportive Housing cannot function at scale or speed.
Lean organizational operations make it difficult to recruit LSW, LISW, LPC, and LPCC-licensed professionals into the workforce, and they instead join clinical environments that can offer more. Governmental funding challenges leave organizations relying on unrestricted
contributions to cover most salary and benefit costs for non-program staff, which are essential to the regulatory and reporting requirements needed to operate. Every dollar and staff hour devoted to duplicative administration misses an opportunity to house Ohioans.
Housing innovation with limited resources is still possible.
LMM is piloting new housing models including shared housing, modular solar homes, and the exploration of 3D-printed affordable housing in Cleveland; West Side Catholic Center is integrating services and partnerships in a coordinated response to poverty, focused on housing, food security, and healthcare; and EDEN is modernizing systems while developing and preserving housing stock, for long-term housing development to address evolving community needs.
Recommendations
- Preserve and expand existing homelessness and housing-stabilization resources.
- Create an accountable cross-agency housing strategy aligning Medicaid, behavioral health, corrections, child welfare, aging, etc.
- Reduce administrative fragmentation and standardize eligibility, reporting, monitoring, reimbursement, and compliance requirements across state-supported housing programs, while simplifying unnecessarily complex development and financing processes like LIHTC.
- Create pathways to test and scale housing innovation, supporting locally developed approaches that can produce deeply affordable housing more rapidly and efficiently.
Ohio has the chance to move more people from crisis to permanent housing and prevent homelessness before it begins. We’re ready to help.
Sincerely,
Maria Foschia, President & CEO, Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry
Michael V. Bernot, Executive Director, West Side Catholic Center
Elaine Gimmel, Executive Director, Emerald Development and Economic Network, Inc. (EDEN)
