(Photo by Michelle Dillon) Coalition on Housing and Homelessness in Ohio Executive Director Amy Riegel speaks about factors creating an increase in homelessness in Ohio during a COHHIO in Your Community meeting Monday afternoon at the Washington County Public Library Marietta branch.

The Coalition on Housing and Homelessness in Ohio, also known as COHHIO, held a meeting Monday afternoon in Marietta to discuss homelessness in Ohio and challenges facing homeless individuals and the organizations that help them.

COHHIO held a COHHIO in Your Community meeting at the Washington County Public Library where a small crowd gathered to listen as COHHIO Executive Director Amy Riegel and Managing Director Douglas Argue spoke about homelessness and housing insecurity in the state of Ohio.

Riegel said 444,768 renter households – or 28% – in Ohio have extremely low income. Extremely low income is based on the Area Median Income and is defined as people who make 0%-30% of the Area Median Income, according to information COHHIO provided at the meeting.

In Ohio extremely low income for a family of four would be $27,485 or less for a family of four, according to the information provided.

There is a shortage of 267,000 rental homes that are affordable and available for extremely low income renters, according to Riegel.

“This is in every community, far and wide,” she said.

“For every 100 extremely low income individuals looking for housing, there’s 40 units available,” Riegel said.

She used a musical chairs analogy. She said if 10 people are playing musical chairs it means there are nine chairs, but with the housing shortage “there’s 10 people playing and only four chairs.”

She said this creates “a lot of tension and strain in the lives of extremely low income individuals.”

“Any roof is better than no roof” so people are living in units that are unsafe or low quality but most common is they just can’t afford the unit they’re living in, Riegel said.

She said 70% of extremely low income individuals spend more than 50% of what they earn, not what they bring home in a paycheck, on housing.

“In the state of Ohio you’d have to earn $20.81 an hour to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment,” Reigel said.

She said this amount is higher in metropolitan areas, in Columbus it is $25 an hour and in Cincinnati it is $22, while in rural areas it is lower, about $17 an hour.

When looking at the top ten jobs people occupy in Ohio according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2023, only two of them pay enough an hour to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment, according to Riegel.

People are also dealing with rising rents, according to Reigel. She said rent went up 24% from 2021 to 2023 in Ohio, and it continues to go up. She said the rent in some states went down or stayed the same during the pandemic but in Ohio it has kept rising.

Evictions are also on the rise in Ohio, according to Riegel. She said Ohio had some of the highest eviction levels in the country before the pandemic and Ohio evictions are rising to pre-pandemic levels.

Evictions make people harder to house and later down the line this can lead to homelessness, according to Riegel.

She said homelessness is on the rise in Ohio too, with it increasing a little under 7% in 2023, while nationally it rose around 12%.

Attendees shared information about the homelessness rate in Washington County.

According to Washington-Morgan Community Action Director of Planning and Community Development Dawn Rauch, a Point-in-Time (PIT) count of homeless individuals done on Jan. 23 showed about 39 homeless people in Marietta. She said they did not conduct a count out in the county.

Washington County Homeless Project Chair Robin Bozian said the homeless drop-in center the project runs serves about 120 people in six months and about 60% of them meet the federal definition of homelessness.

“They’re in cars, sleeping outside,” Bozian said. “I mean we got people who are sleeping in doorways and in-between buildings and all around.”

Argue shared information about what COHHIO is doing to help homelessness and the challenges that service providers in Ohio face. He said they provide training and technical assistance; they started youth housing initiatives; they work for racial equity and much more. To learn more about what COHHIO does visit

Riegel shared some good things happening to help homelessness too, such as politicians talking about the housing problem more, the state low income housing tax credit and its Welcome Home Program, the expansion of the Ohio Housing Trust Fund and more.

Then she asked attendees what challenges they are facing.

Rauch said Community Action manages the HUD voucher program in Washington County and they have “seeing a lack of rental units in general … we’re having people on the streets with vouchers looking for units.”

Community Action Fiscal Officer Jessica Gum said that it typically takes more than 60 days for people with a voucher to find a unit.

She said she thinks there will be a decrease in landlords accepting vouchers once Community Action starts doing National Standards for the Physical Inspection of Real Estate inspections next year.

These inspections are conducted mainly by contract inspectors and public housing agencies and they focus on deficiencies deemed to be the most important indicators of housing quality and they are intended to provide HUD with a high level of confidence in the inspection results, according to the HUD website.

Gum also said Community Action is at its peak for HUD vouchers and they cannot issue any more vouchers. There are about 299 people on the voucher waiting list, although this is better than when it used to be 2,000, according to Gum.

Bozian said she has helped a couple of people where they rent a room and that puts them in a spot where they are easy to take advantage of.

Landlords are charging $450 a room and they still want them to shower at the drop-in center and they want to charge them $150 a month in utilities, according to Bozian.

“People are taking advantage,” she said.

She also brought up the effect that other issues a homeless person has on being able to rent. She said criminal backgrounds, substance use issues and mental health issues exacerbate any other barriers to renting a person has.

“There’s only a handful of landlords that you can work with who are willing to take a chance,” Bozian said.

Other issues attendees mentioned were people being able to afford application fees when applying to for a rental unit, pets preventing people from being accepted into a unit, the difficulty some developers have applying for and using low income housing tax credits, the criminalization of homelessness through camping bans and other legislation, people getting a job causing them to lose Medicaid and therefore having to spend money on medications instead of saving to rent, not having an overnight homeless shelter in Washington County and more.