Mike Clark likes to say that he’s on his fourth career. His resume stretches back well into the 1980s, a wealth of experience that is also evident in the regal, gray beard that billows from his chin. Clark is the coordinated entry system coordinator for the Toledo Lucas County Homelessness Board.
He’s only been in his position since 2023, but the decades he spent in corporate offices, the construction industry and property management introduced him to the realities that people struggling with housing insecurity face. When Clark visited homes to conduct routine maintenance and repairs, he realized that he almost became part of the wallpaper.
“I found that as a service person coming into somebody’s house … you became invisible, and so people live their life around you as though you weren’t there,” Clark said. “I was able to understand and develop empathy and really just see that sometimes life isn’t a choice. Sometimes life is handed to you and you live it.”
One of Clark’s primary responsibilities at TLCHB is to plan and execute the annual Point in Time — or PIT — count, a snapshot of the county’s unhoused and unsheltered population. The count takes place annually near the end of January, a time of year in Northwest Ohio when it’s safe to assume that anyone out in the cold is not there by choice, and is therefore the most accurate representation of the size of the city’s homeless community, according to Clark.
This year’s PIT count took place from the evening of January 29th through the 30th. Volunteers navigated the metropolitan area in small groups, identifying and documenting the number of unhoused residents and asking them about their living conditions and needs. Volunteers were also equipped to distribute essential supplies and food to the people they encountered on their shifts.
In total, 72 individuals without adequate shelter were identified throughout Toledo on that frigid night, a six-fold increase from the previous year. And there are many more people struggling with home insecurity that are not represented in the PIT Count — according to a recent TLCHB estimate, 1,258 residents in Toledo lack permanent housing, meaning the population has more than doubled in size from 2024. To Julie Embree, the organization’s executive director, that number is unacceptably high.
“When you live in a community where housing is really quite affordable, but you see the rates of people who are unsheltered on the street, and that our shelters are consistently full, we’re not doing something right,” Embree said.
Toledo has one of the friendliest housing markets in the United States. A recent report by Housingwire found that over half of all properties in the city are affordable on the local median income. The Wall Street Journal ranked Toledo as the third-most desirable destination for prospective homeowners in the entire country, citing the city’s combination of competitive listings, moderate population base and relatively low unemployment. Property owners in the city have reportedly been inundated with inquiries from out-of-town developers interested in carving out a piece of the pie for themselves.
But the factors that created a lucrative housing market in Toledo have placed the city’s unhoused population under further duress. Inflation and speculative investment have caused home prices to surge, and the cost of rent in Lucas County — which has Toledo as its county seat — has also risen dramatically in recent years. Between January of 2015 and January 2023, the average monthly rent in the county increased by 18.7%. That average jumped another 17.9% in the next fourteen months alone. While wages have increased moderately over the last decade, earnings have not kept pace with the cost of living. Over 25% of Toledoans live below the poverty line, and nearly half of all renting households in Lucas County spend more than 30% of their monthly income on rent.
According to Embree, that level of expenditure is not compatible with long-term housing stability.
“It’s not that folks are not employed or not seeking employment and income,” she said. “It’s just they’re employed at levels that are not affordable.”
This predicament is not unique to Lucas County. The cost of housing has consistently outpaced economic development across Ohio and the country as a whole, and more people throughout the state and the country are experiencing homelessness now than at any point in the last ten years.
But homelessness has not always been pervasive in Northwest Ohio. In fact, before 2025, the number of unhoused people in Lucas County was decreasing, bucking statewide and national trends.
On the night of the 2024 PIT count, volunteers found that 563 people were experiencing homelessness in the city. Only 12 of those people, or roughly 2% of the total, were not accommodated by Toledo’s shelter system. That proportion peaked most recently in 2008, when over 250 people were unsheltered, representing more than a quarter of the unhoused population in Toledo.
One of the most pernicious forms of housing insecurity is chronic homelessness, defined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development as a condition that applies to anyone living with an accredited disability who has lacked adequate shelter for at least 12 months or on at least four separate occasions in the last three years.
As was the case with general homelessness, Lucas County’s relief efforts helped keep rates of chronic homelessness in check throughout the last decade.
Clark believes that establishing empathy between the county’s housed and unhoused populations has been key in the effort to combat homelessness.
“If you can look at somebody and understand that they’re doing the best they can with what they got and what life handed them, then you can accept them more. If you can accept them, then you can understand how you can help them,” he said.
But as the data from the 2025 PIT Count made evident, empathy is no longer cutting it. Nearly two decades of diligent work and positive results have come undone, and the local unhoused population has doubled in the space of just one year. In order to prevent more residents from losing their homes, Toledo’s housing advocates knew that the city’s approach to serving its unhoused residents had to change.
Candace Buckley hastily clears off a corner of her cluttered desk and beckons me into her ground-floor office in Cherry Street Mission’s Life Revitalization Center in downtown Toledo. Buckley is immersed in housing justice and advocacy — she’s been Cherry Street’s Vice President for Programs and Services since 2023, and previously served as the Deputy Director for the Toledo Lucas County Homelessness Board. Buckley hasn’t yet found a suitable spot in her office for many of the gifts she’s received from staff, volunteers and appreciative guests (the term Cherry Street uses to refer to the community members it supports).
The organization was founded in 1947 to provide essential care to the city’s unhoused population, serving daily meals and offering shelter and clothing to those in need. While the core of Cherry Street’s mission has remained intact, Buckley shared that the organization strives to be “on the cusp of change,” a commitment that has driven the recent expansion of its footprint and programming throughout greater Toledo.
The Life Revitalization Center still serves free meals and provides emergency shelter — Buckley described these as Cherry Street’s “heartbeat” — but over the last few years, the organization has begun to promote self-sufficiency within Toledo’s unhoused population, Guests are encouraged to make use of resources and staff to build a platform for financial independence and secure stable housing. Those newer offerings include prolonged interaction with caseworkers and certification programs that equip community members with basic skills and vocational training as they search for employment.
“This isn’t just housing stability,” Buckley said. “Let’s just call it life stability, okay? Because we’re looking at healthy relationships, we’re looking at viable income, and we’re looking at safe and affordable housing.”
Cherry Street is also intensifying its efforts to resettle guests in transitional housing. According to Buckley, the organization’s new Ready for Life case management program successfully housed six people in its first three and a half weeks, which created room for six new guests in their shelter system.
Cherry Street’s evolution beyond direct aid and relief efforts was as much a matter of necessity as it was evidence of ideological growth. Year after year, Cherry Street is serving more Toledoans than it did before. 2024 brought 1,945 guests to the organization, a 4.2% increase from the previous year. The men’s shelter has been near or at capacity for the last 19 months, and the women’s shelter was fully occupied for three months last winter, the first time that has happened in over ten years. Cherry Street operates three facilities across the city with a fourth set to open in June of 2025, but as demand for their services continues to increase, the organization won’t be able to feed and house everyone indefinitely.
In the evolution from homelessness relief to community-wide rehabilitation, the final, crucial step is to secure housing for the unhoused. But in Toledo, that hurdle is exceptionally difficult to overcome.
Julie Embree and Candace Buckley both stressed that public housing will be fundamental to eradicating homelessness in Lucas County, particularly at a time when the private housing market is becoming increasingly inaccessible to the people who are most vulnerable to home insecurity. Monthly rent for public housing units is tied to the tenant’s income, rather than the private market, offering greater stability and affordability to cost-burdened individuals and families.
In Lucas County, as is the case across the country, these public housing units are owned and operated by the local Public Housing Authority, which is an extension of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, and are available to individuals and families whose household income is less than 80% of the local median income. If they are eligible, prospective tenants can submit an application to their PHA, and if their application is approved, they will either be offered a lease or placed on a waitlist.
In Toledo, this is where the trouble begins.
The demand for affordable housing in the area is immense, far surpassing the amount of subsidized units available. The Lucas Metropolitan Housing Authority, the PHA for the county Toledo is located in, serves roughly 17,500 residents across 2,521 units. But thousands of people remain on a 5-year-long waitlist, according to the city’s recent audit of the system.
The city commissioned a report in 2022 which determined that Toledo needed to add 12,705 units in order to eliminate the housing deficit for its low-income tenants, but federal funding for public housing development is evaporating. In 2025, HUD slashed its yearly contributions to the LMHA by more than 20%, and the city is also at risk of losing 22% of its affordable housing by 2031 due to expiring federal subsidies.
With public housing difficult to come by in Toledo, many low-income tenants are forced to contend with the private market. HUD does offer support to cost-burdened individuals and families searching for housing outside their local PHA through Section 8, also known as the Housing Choice Voucher Program. The HCVP was formed in 1998, and currently assists 2.3 million tenants throughout the United States.
In theory, the HCVP seems to be the perfect fit for a city with extremely limited public housing stock and a hyperactive private market because the program pairs low-income residents with local landlords and subsidizes the cost of rent. Essentially, Section 8 establishes public housing by proxy, creating PHA-worthy leases in privately-owned buildings. Vouchers are also only accessible to residents with the highest demonstrated need for affordable accommodation — those who earn no more than half of the local median — but the HCVP does set aside allocations for specific vulnerable populations, including those who are pregnant or living with infants, the elderly, veterans and people experiencing chronic homelessness.
But the HCVP has suffered in Lucas County. The number of vouchers HUD allocates to the LMHA is fixed at 4,494, and yet the number of active vouchers within the LMHA’s jurisdiction has not been maximized at any point in the last ten years. In fact, the number of vouchers in circulation has been in decline, dwindling from 4,219 in March of 2019 to just 3,828 in March of 2025, which represents the most recent data available.
What accounts for this gap in usage? Section 8 vouchers remain very much in demand throughout the county, but the HCVP waitlist has been closed since 2019 because of budgetary constraints. HUD requires a PHA of the LMHA’s size to hold 4% of their annual budget in reserve, and since every active voucher adds more expenses to the ledger sheet, housing authorities aren’t always able to use their full HCVP allocation. Each of the five of the largest PHAs in Ohio have regularly overspent their budgets in the last two years, and, as a result, their Section 8 leasing potentials have crumbled. The LMHA hasn’t been able to issue a single new voucher since February of 2024.
In Lucas County, these internal financial guardrails are only part of the problem. When eligible tenants do make it off the HCVP waitlist with their voucher in hand, securing adequate housing remains tremendously difficult. The number of Section-8 eligible housing units in use throughout the county shrank from 94% in September of 2015 to 82% in January of 2023, and after a brief rebound in 2024, that percentage has begun to decline once more.
This downward trend is partially due to tenant discrimination, as landlords throughout the city have reportedly been rejecting applicants who intend to use Section 8 vouchers in order to afford rent. Another issue is the quality of the local housing stock. 92% of Toledo’s homes were built before 1980, and nearly 35% were built before 1940. Over 20,000 properties in Toledo sit vacant, representing 15% of the city’s total inventory, and that percentage is on the rise.
As Toledo continues to show up on Wall Street Journal top-ten lists and attract more speculative interest from out-of-town investors, the gap between what low-income tenants can afford and what the private housing market can demand may continue to widen, requiring the cash-strapped LMHA to pay larger and larger subsidies to help renters make ends meet. Under these unforgiving conditions, Section 8 would scarcely be able to contribute to a more affordable Toledo.
The Trump administration’s budget proposal for the 2026 fiscal year includes $33 billion in cuts to a variety of HUD programs, including Section 8. HUD Secretary Scott Turner described the austerity measures as “bold” changes to a system that had become “too bloated and bureaucratic to effectively function.”
Julie Embree and Candace Buckley believe that a combination of short-term relief and long-term financial support is the best method of eliminating homelessness, but as federal funding cuts become commonplace, Lucas County’s housing advocates will have to adapt.
“The first thing that will go is the staffing. The second thing that will go is the subsidies,” Embree said. “So we know we have a model that works … How do we scalably do that within the money we have that also meets the needs of the people that are in front of us? The problem is it’s a need that continues to grow.”
