YOUNGSTOWN - Senator Sherrod Brown was in Youngstown Monday, talking to people who have struggled to find affordable housing and housing experts.

 

One of the big obstacles discussed—the way people are renting or getting into land contracts for houses that are substandard.

 

"Houses that need a lot of work. Houses that people want to have a sense of security, but that security gets taken away from them because of the conditions of the agreements by which they're there. They're predatory contracts, and a number of people are trying to do something about that. But it will just lead to another large cycle of demolition here in Youngstown unless we change the system," said Debora Flora, executive director of the Mahoning County Land Bank.

 

Flora said that there needs to be legislation and local boots on the ground to make some movement here.

 

"People hear what a great economy that we have here, cost of living when it comes to housing is extremely low but on the unfortunate side it attracts people who only want to extract money out of the community and they don't care about who they hurt and they don't care about making a true investment in a neighborhood and those are the weeds that we need to get through and move out of the way in order to be in a place of real progress," she explained.

 

Brown says wages have not kept pace with housing costs and too often, lenders try to take advantage of borrowers looking for an affordable home by offering land contracts that saddle homeowners with unsafe homes and frequent threats of eviction.  

 

"The problem in Youngstown as it is in Cleveland, as it is in Appalachia, is old homes that have fallen apart need to be removed so that home values in the neighborhood can stop going down, we can turn that around. The feds, for a period of time, were funding a lot of that. Now, too many people in Washington want to give tax cuts to rich people and not fix our housing stock. At the same time, we've got to have incentives for builders to come in and build homes on vacant properties," said Brown.

 

He is also still collecting people's stories and policy ideas online here.