Rose Sheaves has lived in Toledo for over 60 years.

In 1988, Sheaves purchased her first house with her husband. The North Toledo home located on Walnut St is where some of her fondest memories lie, but none dearer than raising her five children.

But now, 34 years later, the only thing left of Sheaves’ house is the land it sat on.

“Going past an empty lot knowing my home used to be there makes me feel really sad. After my kids grew up, I moved on and rented the home out to my family. I was trusting that they were paying the taxes, but they did not,” Sheaves said. “They eventually moved out, but by then it was already deteriorating. It sat empty, but people would break in and take whatever was salvageable. Homeless would break-in and sleep there, until I finally boarded it up.”

Sheaves didn’t have the resources or time to spend to get the home back in shape. By 2013, Sheaves was behind almost seven years on her property taxes and was forced to give the home to an organization that tore it down.

However, Sheaves is not alone.

Toledoans are living among thousands of vacant homes — a far different kind of housing crisis than the one much of the nation is facing right now.

While rent and mortgage prices have steadily increased around the United States, the city’s real estate is far below the average cost for the rest of Ohio thanks to the vacant homes and businesses in the Glass City, which have also cost the city millions as of 2022.

“When I drive by these run-down houses, I can’t help but feel sad for the owners. I always wonder if lack of money led them to desert their homes. But at the same time, I feel a sadness for the city because these properties cause surrounding places to lose value, and give Toledo a very dreary look,” Sheaves said.

Many Toledo residents said they’re also fed up with vacant homes in the city causing surrounding properties to steadily lose value. Data shows Toledo’s vacant properties have led to a loss of roughly $52 million in property taxes, which are used to fund many of the city’s public services, including public schools, road repairs and emergency services.

That’s something Toledo resident Camille Myers has witnessed herself

“My niece graduated from Toledo Public schools, so I got to witness the problems these children faced compared to other surrounding area schools, said Myers. “Her cousins would go to school with every room filled with laptops or computers since elementary school, and for most of her schooling, they didn’t have that. There was never a surplus of supplies, and a lot of them would go home to houses with no internet, so school was the only place they could work on assignments.”

Since 2005, Toledo has seen its population drop by approximately 30,000 people according to local reports. Of the people that do live in the city, about 25% of the population lives in poverty. That is 12% higher than the Ohio average.

This data helps prove that with more people moving away and vacant properties increasing every year, the city is losing tax money from these houses and the declining population.

Due to the large loss in tax money, public services have become underfunded and a less desirable housing market continues to transpire. People move from the city or avoid living in the city at all, and subsequently, a drop in home values. Zillow estimates the average value of a home in Ohio is $217,000, but in Toledo, that same average drops by nearly half, with the average home valued at $111,000.

“It’s a problem all of us live with every day, even if you don’t live directly in the city. You drive on the poor roads or you hear stories about the school district and all the problems they face because of insufficient funding,” Myers said. “If you do live near it, you experience the problem even deeper. You watch your own home lose value because of what a house down the road looks like. You send your kids to Toledo Public Schools and witness first-hand just how underfunded they are. It is honestly a lose-lose situation for the people in Toledo and the people in its surrounding areas.”

A large part of the problem stems from the number of homes and businesses that are old, out-of-date and run-down. City data shows that 92 percent of occupied homes in Toledo were built before 1980 and 35 percent were built before 1940.

But a number of non-profits around the city are taking action to fix blight in the area.

The Lucas County Land Bank is a non-profit that takes control of vacant properties and renovates them back to livable condition. The Land Bank hopes to preserve property values within the city to help grow and maintain home stability within the city.

“Our purpose is for community revitalization and we do that through a unique mechanism that is written into the Ohio Revised Code. We are able to become the owner of properties that are abandoned or tax delinquent that have gone through a tax foreclosure,” said Stephanie Shackelford, vice president of the Lucas County Land Bank. 

“We then use a tool kit of different programs that we have with the intention of repurposing that property to make it productive for the community but also tax productive again,” she said. 

Last year, the Land Bank had major success due to a housing market that saw the most homes sold in the past 15 years, according to CNN.

“Particularly from mid-2020 on, where you saw quite a demand for housing again with lower interest rates, there was so much competition in the market with traditional homes that often people that didn’t see themselves wanting to work on a fixer-upper type of home suddenly became very interested in the idea,” said Shackelford. “There was a much higher demand to buy than there was product available. During the pandemic, they put a moratorium on foreclosures, and that is the biggest way we acquire property. So we hit a bit of a wall in our inventory. We had such a high demand of people wanting to live in houses that were abandoned and could be repurposed, so we have had to catch up to that volume to reach the demand.”

Unfortunately, the housing market has recently taken a turn. As of October 31, the mortgage rate reached over 7% for the first time in almost two decades, according to Freddie Mac.

The current interest rates have also put a damper on a Toledo housing market that is already struggling to sell with lower prices compared to surrounding areas.

“The way we operate today is in response to the housing crisis of 2008, the mortgage foreclosure crisis that happened and the recession that followed. That really created a vacuum in areas like Michigan and Ohio, and that created such a loss of home ownership during that recession, Shackelford said. “In Toledo, a lot of manufacturing jobs left because of the recession, so the population wasn’t there to inhabit these homes. This became the start of the large boom in the vacant housing crisis within the city.”

“While working on renovations to these vacant houses, we are really trying to affect the people who live around these vacant properties. We are always thinking about the impact it has on these surrounding citizens with property value, but even more with a sense of safety around where they live and work,” Shackleford said.

While these problems all remain at large, the effort to maintain citizen’s safety does too.