Rehab, Cincy, Rehab

This article is part of The Rooftop, a blog and multimedia series from New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Featuring insights from experts across diverse fields, the series is a home for bold ideas to improve housing in the United States and globally. ______________________________________________________________________________________________

“How many people will show up? And when?”

It’s a common question in Midwest cities grappling with a potential influx of U.S. climate migrants from the Sun Belt and other vulnerable regions. Last year, researchers in Cincinnati tried to come up with an answer.

In a first-of-its-kind report, the Cincinnati Regional Chamber estimates that between 200,000 and 500,000 new residents could show up in the 2.3 million resident, 15-county metro area by 2050 due to the impacts of climate change elsewhere in the United States.

Many public officials in Cincinnati, including Mayor Aftab Pureval, along with local business leaders, believe that future climate migration is a key pillar for revitalization and economic growth after decades of deindustrialization and population decline. At the same time, local housing advocates voice concerns that a demographic boom could negatively affect home costs amid an ongoing affordability crunch. During a trip to Cincinnati in December 2025, multiple stakeholders told members of the FLH team that “we can’t house the people we have now,” let alone new arrivals.

Both viewpoints have merit. Indeed, the Regional Chamber advocates for a response to climate migration that includes zoning reforms and the streamlining of construction processes in order to keep housing affordable, encourages transit-oriented development, and advances equity across communities. Still, the fact remains that regional housing production isn’t keeping pace with current demand, to say nothing of future population growth.

But Cincinnati doesn’t have to rely solely on new builds to house newcomers. Tens of thousands of affordable homes already exist around the city. It’s just that many of these houses sit functionally off-limits to working families, due to financing failures that are largely hidden from sight.

Unlocking these homes by boosting access to mortgage and repair financing is actually a cheaper, quicker, and greener strategy to boost supply ahead of an anticipated jump in population.

Cincinnati was one of America’s first boomtowns, an important inland port on the Ohio River as the U.S. expanded westward, and later a significant manufacturing hub. The city’s population peaked around half a million during the 1950s, compared to roughly 300,000 residents today. Much of the housing and public infrastructure to accommodate that many people remains, at least in theory.

The city is growing again, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and many decision-makers are eager to sustain and capitalize on these gains. Staff at the Hamilton County Planning and Development Department, which covers Cincinnati, told FLH that almost all jurisdictions in the metro area would “take the population [growth].” The Regional Chamber report explicitly calls out climate migration as a possible engine for revitalization around Cincinnati, while some in local government believe that demographic growth is critical to ensure an ample tax base for public service provision long term.

There might be growing pains, however. A widely-cited report from Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) found that Cincinnati and surrounding Hamilton County maintained a deficit of approximately 40,000 affordable housing units back in 2017. Not much has changed over the years. According to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, the tri-state Cincinnati Metro Area lacked roughly 35,000 units for lower-income renters in 2023. FLH heard that demand for higher-density and more affordable housing is stifled by the hilly topography in the city, community pushback (in another word, NIMBYism) in suburban communities, and high construction costs everywhere.

Housing instability is already a significant issue throughout the region. According to LISC, 29 percent of households in Hamilton County—both renters and homeowners—were housing cost-burdened in 2023, meaning they spent over 30 percent of their monthly income on the rent or mortgage. Data from Eviction Lab shows that the county experienced an eviction filing rate over 8 percent in 2025. Many older homes were built in the nineteenth century, and now suffer from inefficient and expensive energy systems, and are in need of major repairs and rehabilitation. Ownership by absentee, often out-of-state, landlords who refuse to fix up these homes only adds to the challenges.

The rapid and unplanned arrival of climate migrants could add to housing insecurity. Recent examples show that climate-related growth can exacerbate unaffordability, displacement, and homelessness in a community, especially for lower-income and historically-marginalized populations. Housing assistance programs, legal clinics, and related services often experience additional stress.

In fact, many places around the country are increasingly concerned about climate gentrification, a new expression of the old phenomenon in which poorer residents are priced out of increasingly desirable neighborhoods. It’s something that Cincinnati knows well, given the massive amount of reinvestment in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, and the resulting displacement of long-time Black residents, over the past few decades.

Current estimates for U.S. climate migration are complex and imprecise. Beyond anecdotes and a few academic articles, the future scale, pace, and direction of movement is really anyone’s guess. The 2025 Climate Migration Outlook report from the Cincinnati Regional Chamber is likely one of the first attempts to estimate climate-related population growth at the metro level.

To help prepare, researchers produced a few possible scenarios for climate migration to the Cincinnati region, incorporating varying assumptions about local pull factors, infrastructure readiness, and national climate trends. Within each scenario, population growth is predicated in part on Cincinnati’s desire to attract newcomers. That means proactively investing in the necessary housing, transportation, and amenities to effectively and equitably welcome a certain amount of climate migrants. Within the “modest growth” scenario, for example, the city could accommodate over 200,000 migrants by 2050 if it comes up with roughly 75,000 new housing units.

That’s admittedly a lot of new homes, especially when local developers only built an estimated 2,900 units in 2025. And it’s increasingly expensive, time-consuming, and carbon-intensive to build. But there’s thousands of cheap houses already standing, with a 2023 LISC report identifying nearly 33,000 empty housing units in Hamilton County. And according to our own analysis, 35 percent of all homes in Hamilton County cost less than $200,000.

Many of these homes are older and in need of repairs, and research shows that both mortgage and repair loans for modestly-priced homes have dwindled following the Great Recession. Yet fixing financing gaps to unlock this funding could lead to rehabs that are faster, cheaper, and greener than building new units. Unlocking this existing housing ahead of U.S. climate migration should therefore be a key supply strategy for Cincinnati.

Decision-makers around Cincinnati know that the city already needs additional housing, and will require even more ahead of anticipated climate migration. County planners are working with communities to implement a model zoning code that streamlines development and encourages more density, and the Cincinnati Development Fund continues to lend millions for affordable housing projects across the region. Roughly a dozen public and nonprofit programs help local homeowners rehab their homes.

There’s myriad policy and programming proposals floating around the city, too. These include an increased tax on earnings to fund preservation work and affordable housing development, rent control measures, and greater prioritization for transit-oriented development as suburban communities expand. Each of these proposals can help chip away at Cincinnati’s housing supply shortage, and prepare the region for prospective population inflows. In addition, we think that Cincinnati can get a significant bang for its buck by focusing on boosting access to the many older and affordable homes that already exist in and around the metro area.

That starts by increasing access to capital for lower-income buyers, for example, through a regional loan loss reserve fund by which banks, credit unions, and other lenders can take on small-dollar mortgages and home repair loans with reduced risk. These reserves ease the flow of money and it easier for non-traditional lenders to serve as borrowers. Flexibility during the underwriting process, through use of alternative credit histories and higher allowable loan-to-value rations, can further expand access to credit.

At the same time, policymakers can work with lenders to expand the types of purchase and rehabilitation financing products, in order to supplement the federal FHA 203(k) loan program. The Detroit Home Mortgage Program is a possible model to look at, and lenders might even consider bundling these new financing tools with existing property inventories, such as the Hamilton County Landbank or with the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority. Additional partnerships with affordable housing developers and lenders to expand access to and awareness of second mortgage loan programs can also help to increase home repairs. Stakeholders told us that programs like the Revive + Thrive Home Repair Loan Program, managed by LISC Greater Cincinnati, is popular within city limits but has experienced much less uptake in suburban communities.

Ultimately, any boost to current efforts around housing preservation and rehabilitation will help Cincinnati prepare for future climate migration. Receiving communities don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The tools to accommodate climate inflows look a lot like the approaches that most cities already utilize to accommodate any sort of population growth or housing crunch. Important tweaks to lending habits and capital flows can help the Queen City and other potential receiving communities unlock and upgrade their existing housing stock today and better ensure that both long-time residents and coming climate migrants can access affordable homes tomorrow.

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Editor’s note: The views expressed in the articles on The Rooftop are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policy positions of New America.