The Columbus Dispatch
More than five months after two East Side apartment towers were evacuated due to unsafe conditions, more than a dozen people remain in motels.
The motels, paid for by Franklin County, were intended to be a temporary stopping place for the people occupying 154 units of the Latitude Five25 apartment towers.
After the emergency evacuation on Christmas Day due to a lack of heat, burst pipes and non-working elevators, tenants were sent to a temporary shelter and then settled in the Columbus-area motels.
Many began to find more permanent homes within a few weeks of living in motels, with the help of a city-hired relocation specialist, R.H. Brown and Company.
But others have struggled.
Why can’t the remaining people find permanent homes?
There are still people living in 16 rooms in a motel, as of June 1, said Hannah Jones, deputy director of Community Development with the city of Columbus.
Of those, eight have not identified permanent housing, and the other eight have found apartments and are working to finalize leases and move, she said.
“Each circumstance is unique to the individual,” Jones said of the people without a permanent home. “In some instances, individuals have turned down units that have been offered; in others, there are issues in their background that have caused their applications to be denied; with others, it has been difficult to maintain consistent communications; it really just depends on each unique individual.”
Still, the city is working with the remaining eight households who have been unable to successfully relocate to date, she said.
What about the March relocation deadline for Latitude residents?
There was an initial deadline for former Latitude tenants to be out of the motels and into permanent housing by the end of March. At that point, 58 motel units were still occupied. So, an extension until April 3 was granted. By that date, people were to move out, pay on their own or contact R.H. Brown and Company.
There is no current deadline for people to leave the motels, Jones said.
The Community Shelter Board, county, city and others are meeting regularly to discuss each case and determine the next steps, Jones said.
The Community Shelter Board was contracted by Franklin County shortly after the evacuation to use $750,000 in funding to find motels for former Latitude Five25 residents and provide food, security and transportation for them, said Sara Loken, community relations director.
That money is still being used to pay for the motels, as well as gift cards for food, daily rides to grocery stores and laundry facilities, and bus passes, Loken said. The board has not used any to cover administrative costs and have staff at the motels four hours a day during the week, and two hours per day on the weekend, she said.
In April, a Dispatch story detailed how the effort to find homes for 154 households at a time when affordable housing is hard to find locally is unprecedented in Columbus. The effort highlighted the need for a future strategy for similar crises, showed holes in communication and exposed deeper issues regarding the lack of affordable housing in the city.
“There was no playbook for this,” Graham Bowman told The Dispatch in April. Bowman is a Legal Aid Society of Columbus lawyer representing over 105 former Latitude Five25 tenants in ongoing litigation against the owners.
“There was no established process for how to handle, essentially, a humanitarian crisis, at this scale,” he said.
At the time, Jones acknowledged the difficulty of the situation.
“As we encounter barriers, we are working to address them in order to ensure that they are able to move successfully,” Jones said this month.
