Ohio Housing Finance Agency 2020 Fall Newsletter

OHFA UPDATE - PAGE 5 - FALL Office of Research and Analytics UPDATE The Office of Research and Analytics started the fall with some great surprises. In September, we won the 2020 GIS Best Practices Award from OGRIP for the online and interactive Qualified Allocation Plan maps that we developed with the Office of Multifamily Housing. Then in October, the same maps won in the Management Innovation: Internal Operations category at the National Council of State Housing Agencies annual conference, which recognizes outstanding innovation in internal operations management to strengthen agency operations and achieve strategic objectives. We have been working closely with program staff to develop interactive Tableau Dashboards for different offices. For example, the multifamily outreach Devco Help Desk dashboard (top figure) tracks Help Desk requests and inquiries, when they are submitted and who the requests are assigned to. This allows us to more easily track what types of requests are coming in, what topics they focus on, and how efficiently OHFA is responding. Likewise, the Environmental Review dashboard (bottom figure) helps the multifamily team track the environmental review process. Tableau has been a great resource to help us make your data more easily viewed, managed, and tracked. We celebrated the fall and winter with some fun visualizations and data infographics. Inspired by Halloween, we analyzed how many ‘houses’ were needed for living Ohioans in relation to all the Ohioans who have shared this state with us over approximately 15,000 years, finding that the dead outnumber us about 4 to 1. In November, we mapped the location of Ohio’s turkeys, apple and pumpkin farms, and food banks to help celebrate the season. We also recorded a podcast with United Way of Central Ohio focused on development in Weinland Park , and how growth in this neighborhood may signal opportunities and challenges in other Ohio neighborhoods. The COVID-19 crisis pushed some of our strategic planning slightly later than in years past. In September we released OHFA’s FY 2021 Annual Plan and the Housing Needs Assessment . The Annual Plan highlights OHFA’s strategic goals over the coming year, and how we plan to respond to emerging needs at the state level. The Housing Needs Assessment included some new visualizations this year, as well as some new sections, including How Ohio Compares , which looks at how Ohio’s housing indicators compare to nearby states, and COVID-19 , which is a more frequently updated dashboard that looks at how COVID-19 is affecting the state’s housing and economic indicators. HP team members Cody Price and Devin Keithley discussed the Housing Needs Assessment and Ohio’s most pressing needs in a podcast released in October . We also updated our analysis on the Ohio Housing Trust Fund again this year, finding that spending from the Trust Fund was able to leverage more than $144 million in funds for the state. This means that for every dollar that the state of Ohio allocates to the Trust Fund, we are able to leverage 3.2 times that amount for housing-related interventions. In our most recent analysis, we found that FY19-FY20 Trust Fund spending helped create and support 2,700 full time jobs (about 41.1% of which were in Education and Health Services), generated $375 million in economic output, and contributed $14 million in state and local tax revenue. The Trust Fund is even more effective at leveraging additional funds than it was in years past. Finally, we released an update to the Ohio Human Services Data Warehouse report, which covers the period from 2012-2018. Ohio is one of the only states with the ability to aggregate data from Continuum of Care organizations, which provide homelessness services. In 2018, more than 76,000 people accessed homelessness services, an increase of 30.8% from 2012. Some of the largest increases were among older adults aged 55 and older, and children aged 5 to 14. The rise in homelessness is highly linked to the lack of affordable housing in Ohio. The Housing Needs Assessment shows that Ohio has a large gap in affordable and accessible units, given our low-income population. KATIE FALLON DIRECTOR OF HOUSING POLICY