What We Do
Greater Ohio Policy Center (GOPC) develops policy recommendations and disseminates strategies that reduce barriers to equitable real estate development and homeownership. We work to help Ohio’s residential and mixed-use neighborhoods provide stable housing for all residents, attract new neighbors, and thrive economically. GOPC partners with local leaders to:
Monitor emerging challenges to equitable real estate development in strong-markets and weak-markets
Understand local market and demographic conditions through quantitative and qualitative analysis
Develop effective plans for revitalizing neighborhoods, lowering development barriers, and improving opportunities for homeownership
Advocate for state policies that will lower risk for real estate development, while ensuring growth is equitable and provides access to homeownership and vibrant neighborhoods
GOPC also serves as a third-party evaluator on major philanthropic grants that are creating more housing, businesses, and services in distressed neighborhoods.
Assessing Housing Options & Affordability
Creating attractive, competitive, and sustainable communities means rebuilding markets and ensuring Ohioans of all income levels can access a range of safe and appealing housing options. GOPC has analyzed housing markets and neighborhood conditions throughout the state and provided actionable recommendations to community leaders. GOPC’s work focuses on stabilizing and rebuilding market-rate housing markets, preserving and expanding affordable housing, and bridging the appraisal gap that holds back rehab and new development opportunities across the cost spectrum. Among other activities, GOPC staffs and stewards the Affordable Housing Learning Exchange, a community of practice for local leaders who are working to preserve and expand affordable, stable, housing options in Ohio’s major metros.
Lowering Barriers to Real Estate Development + Redevelopment
State policies and local ordinances, including zoning codes, can increase costs and produce unwanted uncertainty for real estate developers, rehabbers, and individual residents. GOPC works with partners around the state to spot emerging issues that impact Ohio’s residential neighborhoods. With partners, GOPC develops policy responses recommendations that will keep costs low and bridge the “appraisal gap” between what it costs to build or rehab and what the current real estate market values such work. GOPC is always mindful that new development or redevelopment should produce equitable outcomes, particularly in neighborhoods experiencing rapid market change.
Mitigating and Eradicating Blight
GOPC is an expert on tools and best practices that contain and eradicate blight in Ohio’s neighborhoods, which are major barriers to redevelopment of existing real estate. GOPC works with the Revitalization Steering Committee (the RSC), a community of practice for local governments, nonprofits, bankers, realtors, and others who are working to prevent and mitigate blight. GOPC and the RSC advise policymakers and advance state policies that target intervention points in the foreclosure and property abandonment process to return properties to productive use with less expense and prevent future blight that will weaken the real estate market.
Tracking & Evaluating Community Investment
Foundations and nonprofits trust GOPC’s ability to assess the progress and impact of investments in Ohio’s neighborhoods. For more information about GOPC’s evaluation work, visit our Services page.
Related Publications
The 614 for Linden
This Annual Report provides the community development field and the broader public with a greater understanding of The 614 for Linden, a collaborative of 4 community development financial institutions and 6 nonprofits seeking to help implement the City of Columbus’ One Linden Plan (2018). As the official evaluator of The 614 for Linden, GOPC discusses the Collaborative’s progress, lessons learned related to community engagement and collaboration, and quick pivots made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the neighborhood’s immediate needs.
Opportunity CLE Neighborhoods
As the official evaluator of the Opportunity CLE Neighborhoods initiative, GOPC produced this Annual Report, which shares the first-year impacts of a partnership between Cleveland Development Advisors and Finance Fund Capital Corporation. Opportunity CLE Neighborhoods is supporting development efforts in three Cleveland, Ohio neighborhoods. The Annual Report discusses the Collaborative’s progress and lessons learned related to fostering equitable development, building trust, ensuring alignment with existing neighborhood plans, responding to COVID-19, and more.
Open for Business
April 2020
This Comprehensive Housing Market Analysis studied the existing conditions in Champaign County and its four largest communities and identified thoughtful policies for preserving housing and encouraging new market-rate development. It shared strategies for prioritizing downtowns and Main streets, ensuring local governments are strong partners to development, and maintaining affordability, among three other focus areas.
Redeveloping In The Comeback City: A Comprehensive Housing Market Analysis For Portsmouth, OH
October 2021
Leaders in the City of Portsmouth identified housing as an important component of city’s revitalization journey, launching a comprehensive housing analysis as a first step to understand housing conditions across the city. Various community partners engaged the Greater Ohio Policy Center (GOPC) to analyze market rate and affordable housing conditions within the municipality.
The Ohio 3C Community Impact Report
May 2022
Learn what happened when the OH3C brought together four of Ohio’s most active community development financial institutions (CDFIs), ECDI, Cincinnati Development Fund, Ohio Capital Finance Corporation, and Village Capital Corporation, to combat the effects of gentrification through targeted capital investments in nine neighborhoods within the state’s 3Cs (Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland). GOPC served as the program evaluator of this program.
Recent Testimony
Additional Resources
Local Interventions for Eviction Prevention
November 2020
This working paper profiles initiatives from around Ohio to provide ideas and templates for communities that need housing stabilization programming
Cleveland Tax Abatement Study
July 2020
GOPC was part of the consultant team hired by the City of Cleveland to study its tax abatement program that has encouraged developers, builders, and homeowners to build and substantially rehabilitate housing in Cleveland since 2004. The study helped the City better understand the tax abatement program’s historical usage, value, and opportunities for improvement.
Public comments submitted regarding the proposed rules for the Single-Family Housing Tax Credit presented to the Ohio Housing Finance Agency (OHFA) on Thursday, December 7, 2023.