Data can help prevent housing crises

Statistics show that it’s more cost efficient to keep people in their residences than to rehouse them after they’re displaced. Evictions also can have other adverse effects on people that can be hard to recover from, said Gary Painter, PhD, the academic director of UC's Carl H. Lindner College of Business real estate program and a professor of real estate.

“We know if someone experiences an adverse event in their life, it’s very costly for them,” Painter said. “Things like if you get evicted, then your credit history gets dinged. It may be increasingly difficult to be stably housed in the future.”

Painter is using data to create algorithms that can assess risks of adverse events, such as evictions and homelessness. By identifying people who are at risk, organizations can intervene before a crisis.

To address housing shortages, other groups are repurposing old buildings, Brick by Brick reported in a podcast. Office buildings, hotels, schools, factories, malls and even a bowling alley have been converted into housing.

“Specifically, Cincinnati is ideal for this because we have a lot of older buildings here. Something else that is conducive to this is that we have a lot of tax credit funds,” said Marianne Taylor, a senior associate of CBRE, a commercial real estate services company, and adjunct instructor at the Lindner College of Business.

There are many more properties such as malls that could be converted for other uses locally and nationally, but it will take time, said Carl Goertemoeller, executive director of the UC Real Estate Center.

“You really haven’t seen wrecking balls starting to swing really at any of these locations just yet and that’s a function of the sheer amount of time it takes to bring a development plan to fruition,” Goertemoeller said.

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Featured image at top: A homeless encampment. Photo/Levi Meir Clancy via Unsplash