Affordable housing is something that’s on everyone’s mind. In recent years, many of the conversations about affordable housing have centered around people’s living conditions in medium-to-large metropolitan areas. In 2024, Pew Research Center reported that nearly 70 percent of Americans see affordable housing as a major issue — that data, however, is based on U.S. Census Bureau data that primarily relies on major metropolitan areas. Metropolitan cities in California, Utah, New York, and Massachusetts have dominated the stories platformed by major news outlets.

Since urban areas hold such extreme concentrations of people sustaining massive rates of growth, it makes sense for these areas to make up the majority of the dialogue about the affordable housing crisis. That crisis, however, is not by any means quarantined to metropolitan areas. Our small town of Oberlin is also suffering from the ravages of this generation-defining issue.

In 2024, the City of Oberlin released the first Comprehensive Plan of Action since 2005. At the top of its priority list between now and 2050 is to “provide a full range of housing types and price points across the City that allows for diverse lifestyles and provides quality, affordable homes for all Oberlin residents.” 

That goal wasn’t created just to fit in with the national vogue. I spoke with Carrie Porter, director of the City’s Planning and Development Department. According to her, there hasn’t been a new multi-family subdivision of land created since two decades ago, when the East College Street Sustainable Community broke ground in 2009 (now the complex where Slow Train Café sits). 

Beyond prices, diversity in housing choice is fundamental to the health of a community.  After the Comprehensive Plan Committee interviewed nearly 800 residents about their most desired improvements to the City of Oberlin, nearly 90 percent of respondents agreed on the necessity to expand housing choices. According to the data provided by the Comprehensive Plan, demand far outpaces the supply of rental units that cost up to $500 and units available for up to $100,000. On top of this, the City’s current housing zones lack diversity — with land plots dedicated to single-family housing nearly entirely encompassing Oberlin’s map with some individual plots dedicated to multi-family housing scattered across.

The lack of new housing has the potential to worsen Oberlin’s overall quality of life for families young and old. It also could possibly affect the population rates for the town’s school system.

“We found that there were a lot of seniors who were staying in their single-family homes way longer than they really wanted to because there was no alternative,” Porter said. “That [isn’t] helping the housing market either because then those houses [aren’t] turning over so that families with kids can move in. We also found out that the enrollment for the schools was going down.”

The health of a community’s housing landscape has pervasive consequences. If housing’s dynamism and affordability isn’t maintained, it can eventually have detrimental consequences for a limitless range of ostensibly unrelated aspects of Oberlin’s community. The revision of Oberlin’s zoning code and map represents a crucial first step to prevent the degrading impacts of unaffordable and unilateral housing options from further metastasizing around the city.

Lydia Young, Human Relations Committee chair, agreed.

“I think it’s an extremely positive step forward,” she said.

Working with Oberlin’s community liaison, Young organized an event dedicated to sharing information on fair housing, financial literacy, and down payment assistance. This event exemplified the work that community officials are dedicating to empower our community.

“These people aren’t getting paid, they’re not getting kickbacks,” Young said. 

People are not taking on this work because it is lucrative or glamorous. They are doing this because vitalizing the state of housing is essential work and has generational consequences. 

College students have a direct obligation to address this. Oberlin College does not pay property taxes as a nonprofit. This is supposed to be because its mission is dedicated to developing leaders who will return that value to their communities. That work starts here.

“Be a part of the conversation, share your opinion,” Young suggested. “Ask questions, get the answers, go to meetings if you can. If you can’t, go online. Read the minutes. Watch the video. It’s important to stay active and involved.”

At any given point in time, I’m facing a mountain of work that I can’t see the end of, and I know this isn’t unique to me. When we are so immersed in the work in our immediate vicinity, engaging with local politics might seem like a noble yet entirely unrealistic prospect. Still, it fits squarely within the tradition of Oberlin’s legacy and mission to try — in spite of what seems rational. At a time when our administration is making a series of decisions seemingly antithetical to that mission, where else can we start intervene if not in our daily action?