The Ohio State University has teamed up with the City of Columbus and Legal Aid Society on “Opportunity Port,” a project to empower those with criminal records to begin the record sealing process. The project is being developed as the university’s finalist in the Alliance for the American Dream competition.

Opportunity Port will be an online and mobile-friendly platform to help those with criminal records easily get help to seal those records. Starting in Franklin County, Opportunity Port plans to increase the number of record-sealing applications submitted from 1,500 in 2019 to 15,000 by 2022.

The Opportunity Port project can help many people access their rights and eliminate barriers, according to Hannah Miller, Opportunity Port team lead and legislative assistant with the City of Columbus and the Legal Aid Society of Columbus.

“Discriminatory enforcement and policies in the criminal justice system account for the disproportionate number of Black and Brown residents with criminal records," said Miller. "The consequences of that record persist – landlords won’t rent to you, the government won’t lend you money for college and most employers won’t hire you. It's a vicious cycle that exacerbates racial inequality.”

Miller says filing a record-sealing application is complicated and requires information and skills that many citizens do not possess. And even though sealing records results in higher wages, housing security and increased economic productivity, fewer than 7 percent of those eligible apply.

Miller works for Columbus City Council member Rob Dorans, who says the Opportunity Port project can help fill a tremendous need in the community.

“In early 2019, I volunteered at a Clean Slate Clinic, and when I showed up there were hundreds of prospective clients, rather than our typical few dozen,” said Dorans. “Apparently, the invite for the clinic went viral on Facebook and folks packed the basement of the Legal Aid office trying to get help. Right there I knew there had be a better way to get people in the pipeline for record sealing.

“That’s when the idea for Opportunity Port was born and when I joined Columbus City Council a few months later I began working with local leaders and policy experts about how we could create something here in Columbus to meet the need of the community and hopefully help folks move beyond their past mistakes.”

Ohio State’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity is also a partner in the project. Kyle Strickland, senior legal adviser at the Kirwan Institute, says initiatives are needed to make it easier and not harder to for people to reenter society.

The Kirwan Institute will conduct research and evaluation on the project.

“When people use the app, they’re going to plug in their information and we’ll track key factors like wages, employment status and other measures of socioeconomic health, before and after they seal their record,” said Strickland. “We’ll see if the intervention of Opportunity Port has made a difference.”

Ohio State is one of four public universities participating in The Alliance for the American Dream, a collaboration created by Schmidt Futures aimed at generating innovative ideas to bolster the middle class. Other partner universities are Arizona State and the universities of Utah and Wisconsin.

Schmidt Futures is a philanthropic initiative, founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, that finds exceptional people and helps them do more for others together. The organization knits talent into networks, bet on the most promising ideas through diverse forms of competition and support, and equip people to scale through partners and modern tools.

Over the next two months, the finalists from each university will continue to refine their proposals. They will present their projects to Schmidt Futures on Sept. 10. 

Teams of community members and Ohio State faculty began working on developing proposals for the competition in late 2019. The ideas were presented during ‘The Evening of Big Ideas,” in January. In addition to Opportunity Port, the other Ohio State semi-finalists selected to move forward after the January presentations included “119 Power to the Patient” and “Readyskill”.

The results of the study, done in Columbus, Ohio, suggest that some of the factors long thought to impact neighborhood values – such as the distance to downtown, nearby highways, or attractions such as city parks – no longer matter much to changing housing prices in an area.

Instead, what drives neighborhood values are the unique, local amenities and characteristics of each area, such as local businesses, schools, crime rates and social networks.

And these features are self-reinforcing over time, said Jinhyung Lee, lead author of the study and graduate student in geography at The Ohio State University.

“Over 15 years, we see the divide between rich and poor neighborhoods getting deeper and wider in Columbus,” Lee said.

The results suggest that government officials need to provide direct investments in low-valued neighborhoods to break the self-reinforcing negative effects, he said.

The study, led by researchers in Ohio State’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (CURA), was published online recently in the journal Geographical Analysis.

Researchers used a high-resolution housing transactions database provided by the firm CoreLogic that allowed them to analyze nearly 480,000 home sales in the Columbus area between 2000 and 2015 to see how housing values have changed in specific neighborhoods.

Traditionally high-valued neighborhoods, which include suburbs (Upper Arlington, Grandview Heights, Bexley), became even more prosperous over the 15 years. Low-valued neighborhoods in the city (Linden, Franklinton) lost value.

The study captured the impact of the Great Recession on the value of houses in the Columbus area.

Housing prices dropped significantly in all parts of the city between 2008 and 2011, as they did throughout the United States. But the recovery did not happen equally throughout the Columbus area.

“Areas that traditionally had high housing prices regained much of the recession-induced loss, while other areas did not,” Lee said.

“This unequal recovery made the polarized neighborhood values in Columbus even worse.”

Overall, high housing prices were clustered near the center of the city and in suburban areas, Lee said.

“In contrast, the areas between the city center and suburban areas had low housing prices, resulting in a donut-shaped housing price landscape,” he said.

The researchers calculated how far each neighborhood was from major Columbus amenities, including downtown, the nearest rivers, Ohio State’s campus, the Columbus Zoo and the closest city-maintained park.

Analysis of the data showed that the distance from these features didn’t shape patterns of neighborhood value over time, as some long-standing theories indicated they might, Lee said.

“This suggests that the reasons why neighborhoods are becoming more polarized has more to do with what is going on each individual neighborhood,” he said.

Results showed that the location of major highways in Columbus, particularly U.S. Interstate 71, shaped polarization. Many of the richer neighborhoods are clustered west of I-71, with the poorer neighborhoods to the east.

“This is consistent with work by public policy and urban history scholars documenting that highways were constructed to purposefully cut through poorer, minority neighborhoods and avoid more affluent ones,” Lee said.

“It has served to further reinforce patterns of economic segregation.”

The findings suggest that low-value neighborhoods are unlikely to improve over time on their own, according to Lee.

“Our research underscores the need for direct investments in neighborhoods to spark a development process,” he said.

For example, governments can invest in job market training programs in low-value neighborhoods to offset the self-reinforcing negative effects that can make these neighborhoods worse off over time, he said.

Lee said he expects similar polarizing trends exist in neighborhood values in cities across the nation. But the exact ways they get there may differ depending on factors like the size of the cities and their levels of decentralization.

Co-authors on the study were Nicholas Irwin, assistant professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Elena Irwin, professor of agricultural, environmental and development economics and the Sustainability Institute at Ohio State; and Harvey Miller, professor of geography and director of CURA at Ohio State.