Rural America can’t grow if its workers can’t find a place to live

A hospital in Holmes County, Ohio, recruits a physician. The offer is accepted. Then the doctor spends weeks looking for a house, finds nothing, and takes a job somewhere else.

That story came out of community listening sessions in Wayne and Holmes counties this summer, where employers said housing shortages have made hiring increasingly difficult and that some workers, physicians included, left the area because they could not find a place to live.

The workforce is here. The jobs are here. The homes are missing. What employers are seeing in rural Ohio is a warning for communities across the country: a housing shortage can become an economic development problem.

The numbers confirm what employers already know. A countywide housing study presented to Millersburg Village Council in August identified demand for roughly 858 additional owner-occupied homes and 280 rental units in Holmes County, and found that only 44 percent of the county’s workers actually live there, compared with about 54 percent in surrounding rural counties. Many workers commute from elsewhere, while local employers struggle to recruit and retain people who want to live nearby.

Wayne County has 26 affordable and available rental units for every 100 extremely low-income households. Statewide, Ohio faces a shortage of roughly 266,000 rental homes affordable and available to those households, according to the 2026 Gap Report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio. Ohio is a microcosm of a national shortage: across the country, there are only 35 such homes for every 100 extremely low-income households, a shortfall of 7.2 million homes. The Ohio Housing Finance Agency’s 2026 assessment documents a net loss of more than 62,000 rental units affordable to very low-income Ohioans since 2019. A full-time Ohio worker now needs to earn $23.82 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment. The average renter earns $19.59.

Those figures describe nurses, line workers, teachers, and young families in Medina, Wooster and Millersburg. They also reflect pressures felt in communities well beyond Ohio. These are the people who keep small towns running.

The barriers are familiar to anyone who has tried to build in rural Ohio or in small towns across America: high land prices, infrastructure costs that fall hard on small municipalities, and development rules written for a different era. Every one of those obstacles adds cost, and every added dollar prices out another working family.

Congress needs more people to care about housing. As it becomes a luxury to have a mortgage, we are seeing fewer Americans have families, put down roots, and live the American Dream we all try to achieve. Veterans face housing challenges, too, especially when a new job or assignment requires a move. That’s why I introduced the Homes for Heroes Act, which would increase the maximum VA loan guarantee available to eligible veterans with an outstanding VA-backed mortgage from 25 to 37.5 percent of the conforming loan limit, making it easier for them to purchase another home when they need to relocate.

This summer, Congress delivered the most significant federal housing legislation in a generation. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed the House 358-32 and the Senate 85-5 before becoming law on July 11. The law cuts regulatory delays, modernizes manufactured housing rules, allows pre-approved home designs so builders can get permits faster, and allows rental assistance to continue when USDA mortgages mature. The Agriculture Department’s rural multifamily portfolio includes roughly 400,000 affordable rental units nationwide.

That vote was the easy part. The hard part is implementation, and I intend to make sure rural communities, including those in Ohio, get their share. That means pressing the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Agriculture Department to move grant dollars to communities like ours instead of letting them pool in large metros. It means working with county commissioners and village councils on the zoning and infrastructure decisions that determine whether a project pencils out. And it means supporting the state programs already producing results: Ohio’s housing tax credit, created in the 2023 budget, is helping finance new affordable homes.

I stood at the groundbreaking for The Lafayette in Medina County, a supportive housing development that exists because local leaders, developers, and government worked together. That model works. It needs to happen a hundred more times across this district and in small communities nationwide.

Rural Ohio has always been willing to work. The same is true of rural America. Our job in Washington is to make sure there is somewhere for those workers to live.

Max Miller represents Ohio’s 7th District in Congress.