Immigration Helped Revive Springfield—Now Its Recovery Is at Risk

“The word I hear most often about the Haitian community right now is 'panicked,'” Michael E. McClelland, a longtime Springfield resident, tells Realtor.com®.

In recent years, the Ohio city had begun gaining what it had lacked for decades: people. Thousands of Haitian immigrants made homes there, took jobs, opened businesses, and became part of a community that had spent much of the previous half-century shrinking.

Then, on July 27, Haiti’s temporary protected status (TPS) was terminated, throwing an unknown number of Springfield residents into limbo. Not every Haitian resident relied on TPS, and some hold another legal status. But many families are now deciding whether—and how—they can stay.

The community is “scared to death,” says McClelland, a volunteer with G92, a local faith-based advocacy group.

“Some of these people have been here 15 years," he explains. "They’ve got families here. They’ve got homes. They’ve got jobs.”

And for a city that had been building its comeback around Haitians, their departure could threaten a housing recovery decades in the making.

Springfield was running out of people

The city’s population fell from 81,926 in 1970 to 60,608 in 2010, a decline of 26%, according to U.S. Census Bureau records.

“A 26% population loss over four decades puts Springfield in the same category as classic Rust Belt ‘legacy cities,’ driven mainly by manufacturing job losses,” says Hannah Jones, senior economist at Realtor.com.

By the early 2010s, that demographic decline had become a housing crisis. From 2013 to 2017, census records estimated that 4,010 housing units were vacant—roughly 1 in 7 homes.

“A 14% vacancy rate is quite high, well above the roughly 6% to 8% considered healthy, and typically signals a self-reinforcing decline: depressed property values, weaker tax revenue, and less landlord investment in an aging housing stock,” Jones says.

It also translated into a significant public cost. As homes sat empty, many deteriorated beyond what their values could support, becoming hazards for neighbors and liabilities for the city.

Springfield responded with nuisance abatement efforts that included demolishing, boarding up, and securing vacant properties. In 2020 alone, the city spent more than $764,000 on those measures. 

The following April, Deputy Community Development Director Steve Thompson told the City Commission that 609 vacant properties had been demolished over the previous decade.

Then new residents began filling the gap

But in the early 2020s, something began to change. Springfield went through a period of rapid population growth, driven by what the city describes as “an influx of legal immigrants choosing Springfield, Ohio as their new home.”

It seemed that Springfield offered a combination that had become difficult to find almost anywhere else: comparatively inexpensive housing and accessible work.

At $1,099, Springfield’s median rent is nearly half the national median, according to Realtor.com data. And newcomers found jobs in manufacturing, warehouses, and service industries where employers needed workers, the city says. Then they encouraged relatives and friends to follow.

The precise size of Springfield’s immigrant population is difficult to measure. The city estimates that 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants now live across Clark County, with Haitians making up a majority of the most recent arrivals.

It wasn’t long before that growth became visible in Haitian grocery stores, restaurants, and other businesses that opened around the city, according to McClelland.

“All of which are visible symbols of what’s going on here,” he says.

But the storefronts were only one sign of a more consequential economic shift: more workers earning wages, more customers spending money, and more businesses contributing to the tax base.

“Imagine what that kind of influx does to things like having a new workforce, having people starting their own businesses, having people paying taxes,” McClelland says. “So the economic impact is just immense.”

Statewide figures offer some sense of the potential scale, though they do not measure Springfield’s immigrant population specifically. Immigrants in Ohio earned $27.3 billion in 2023; paid $7.3 billion in federal, state, and local taxes; and retained $20 billion in spending power, according to the American Immigration Council.

Growth brought new pressure—and new construction

But the rapid growth was not without complications for the city.

“An increase of 12,000 to 15,000 against a base of about 59,000 is a huge shock in planning terms, a sizable 20% or more jump in a few years versus decades of slow decline,” Jones says. “This influx would strain any midsize city’s schools, clinics, and housing, regardless of who the newcomers are.”

“It is true that a large influx of people like that put a real strain on certain services, particularly education,” McClelland adds.

Those pressures were especially visible in the housing market.

By early 2022, the city’s Annual Action Plan was identifying the arrival of Haitian residents as one source of growing housing need. Later that year, a city-commissioned strategy found that the supply of affordable rentals had not grown while demand had increased substantially. The report explicitly identified Haitian immigration as one contributor.

That created a unique bind for the city: Though Springfield still had vacant properties, many were not homes a family could move into. And the 2022 housing plan estimated that the community lacked nearly 2,000 decent, safe, and affordable units.

But stronger demand also changed what builders believed Springfield’s market could support.

The city had begun trying to attract residential development before the largest Haitian migration wave. A 2019 housing study described several planned projects as tests of whether builders would return after years of limited construction.

After 2020, the increase became more sustained.

Springfield authorized an average of roughly 119 new homes and apartments annually from 2020 through 2025—more than twice the roughly 46 units it averaged during the previous 19 years, according to Housing and Urban Development records. In six years, the city authorized 716 units, compared with 868 between 2001 and 2019.

Then federal policy changed the forecast

Springfield had already contemplated what could happen if the residents helping drive its recent growth could no longer remain.

In its 2025–29 federal housing plan, the city said conventional census estimates had failed to capture the full scale of its recent population growth. It warned that if Haitian residents lost the ability to stay in the United States, Springfield’s population could “rapidly decline.”

Jones says that could upend the tentative housing recovery underway.

“But 716 new units against 12,000-plus new residents is still small,” she says. “If that population were to decline again, new construction would likely be the first thing to pull back, before vacancy returns to the older housing stock.”

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine drew an even more direct connection between new residents and the city’s recovery.

“You’re seeing in Springfield a city that is coming back,” DeWine told "PBS NewsHour." “One of the reasons it’s come back is because of the Haitians.”

It’s still too early to know what, if any, fallout will materialize. Community leaders say some families have already left or made plans to go. But no reliable public count shows how many households have departed—or what their departure has meant for the housing market so far.

“Springfield is going to take a big hit when all those people leave,” McClelland says.

Mayor Rob Rue has emphasized the same point.

Immigrants "contribute to our local economy, support our schools, strengthen our neighborhoods, and have become part of the fabric of Springfield,” Rue said after the Supreme Court ruling allowing the termination of TPS to proceed.

But to McClelland, measuring the potential loss only in economic terms misses the deeper point.

“This is their home, and suddenly they’re being yanked out of that.”