With thousands on waitlist, Columbia’s Housing Authority has 100+ empty homes

While families wait years for affordable homes in Richland County, an agency charged with providing that housing owns more than 100 houses that sit empty — many deteriorated to the point that they require extensive repairs before anyone can live in them. Why the homes have been allowed to fall into such a state of disrepair during a countywide affordable housing crisis is unknown. The Columbia Housing Authority’s new CEO Jessica Anderson-Preston could not answer a series of questions posed by The State newspaper during a recent interview, citing her short tenure with the authority that began in January. The 109 homes represent nearly 40% of the single-family houses owned by the Columbia Housing Authority, the agency that operates public housing and rental assistance programs for low- and moderate-income families in Richland County and Cayce, according to CHA data.

Meanwhile, nearly 3,000 applicants are on the waitlist for public housing, according to the agency’s data, some waiting years before securing a spot. The large number of empty houses — and a lack of explanation as to when and how they became vacant — is raising worries among housing advocates. “For those families that are in such desperate need and have been waiting for so long, that could’ve been a huge game-changer for them. And that nobody seems to know how it happened is concerning,” said Sue Berkowitz, the founder of SC Appleseed Legal Justice Center, a Columbia-based nonprofit that provides legal assistance to, and advocates for, low-income South Carolinians. Oliver Gospel Mission Director Kyle Harding said that while he isn’t sure what factors led to the homes being unoccupied, “to have that many empty units and have the shelters full every night [is] sad.”

Columbia Housing leaders couldn’t immediately provide details about the empty homes, including their locations in unincorporated Richland County, as well as the dates they were purchased and the length of time they have been vacant. The State has filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act with the Columbia Housing Authority for that information. Anderson-Preston and agency spokesperson Cynthia Hardy said answering questions about the properties would require “a lot of research,” with Anderson-Preston suggesting that detailed documentation for each home may not exist. The chairman of the housing authority’s board, James Chatfield, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Difficult to maintain

Earlier this month, Richland County Council approved spending $400,000 of general fund dollars to rehabilitate four of the CHA-owned homes and sell them at a discounted rate to lower-income buyers. That breaks down to $100,000 per house. Longer term, CHA hopes the county will pay, or help find outside funding, to repair an additional 39 vacant homes, Anderson-Preston said. Just where the money will come from remains to be seen. “Those are details we are working out, so I don’t have a definitive answer to that,” she said.

Sixty-six remaining houses are slated for “disposition,” which means the housing authority plans to offload them, ideally by selling them, Anderson-Preston said. At least some “have reached (or are nearing) the end of their useful life,” according to a statement from the agency.

Single family homes are the most difficult for the housing authority to maintain, a big reason the agency is looking to offload them, Anderson-Preston said. “While we would love to have everything occupied, we can’t have people living in units that are not suitable, and you can put the money in and just keep patching and patching and patching. But again, that goes to, is that the highest and best use of those funds,” Anderson-Preston said. She agreed that the number of homes “seems a large number,” but argued that because the empty houses represent less than 2% of the agency’s entire housing stock, “in the greater context of our entire subsidy portfolio, it’s not that big.” It’s not only single-family homes that need repairs. Columbia Housing in 2021 conducted an audit of the conditions of all the agency’s properties and found $250 million in deferred maintenance costs alone. The agency has been gradually repairing or rebuilding units for the last several years. Richland County officials said they were surprised to learn how many homes were sitting unoccupied, but many were hopeful about the planned partnership between the county and the housing authority. “Properties do not do well sitting vacant. You get rodents in there, roof leakers, squatters,” said Don Weaver, a Richland County councilman who chairs the county’s affordable housing committee. “The sooner that [Columbia Housing Authority] can get these numbers down and get them renovated and get them on the market, the better.” Councilwoman Allison Terracio, who also sits on the county’s affordable housing committee, said she appreciated that county staff worked with the housing authority to identify the properties and come up with a plan for them.

County faces growing affordability problem

Richland County is in the midst of a housing affordability crisis. Aside from the nearly 3,000 people on the housing authority’s public housing waitlist, nearly 18,000 renter households in Richland County were classified as severely cost-burdened in a 2021 state housing report. To make a living wage in the Columbia area, a single person without children must earn over $21 an hour. For a family of four, that rises to almost $39 an hour, according to a living wage calculator created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Statewide, a person making minimum wage — $7.25 an hour — must work 125 hours a week to afford “a modest” one-bedroom rental at fair market rent, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Linda McDonald, an organizer with the faith-based community advocacy group MORE Justice, said she’s increasingly seen religious leaders and their congregations dip into discretionary funds to provide assistance for families facing eviction and homelessness. “It’s pretty clear when 30% of your income, or more than 30% of your income, is gone before you even start to feed your family, clothe your family, pay for school issues, pay for healthcare, you just never can get ahead,” McDonald said. “We’re doing such a disservice to those children and those families if we don’t react to this crisis.”

At least 837 people are considered homeless in Richland County by federal definitions, according to a 2025 count of those individuals. Just over 200 of those people are considered chronically homeless, meaning the person has been homeless for at least a year. The annual count of an area’s homeless, called the point in time count, is also almost always considered an undercount by experts because it’s just a snapshot taken one day each year. “It is the housing authority’s problem, but I think it’s all of our problem,” Berkowitz, with SC Appleseed, said. “While 109 is a drop in the bucket, what kind of planning are we doing and how do we all come together [to address this]?”