Workforce Housing A Must For Economic Growth

By Gordon HopkinsAs the country continues to struggle with a labor shortage, a lack of adequate workforce housing has proven to be an impediment to rural communities trying to attract new workers.In an attempt to address the problem, representatives from Saline and Gage counties, along with Fairbury Mayor Spencer Brown, met with Jefferson County Commissioners on Tuesday, July 12, to discuss possible solutions.“We all share in this challenge of having adequate, mid-level housing, called workforce housing,” said commissioner Mark Schoenrock of Jefferson County.Schroenrock tried to explain what he saw as the crux of the problem, “We have found that, you know, across our multi-county area, we have a lot of houses down the low end of things, you know, most of you probably wouldn’t even want to live in.”“And so, we’ve got really, really nice houses, really high-end housing. But we are really short of what we would call mid-level housing, where we can especially recruit, like, young families to come in here, people that are in the middle of the workforce,” said Schoenrock.The City of Fairbury has been engaged in a program of tearing down blighted housing. Mayor Brown estimated almost 40 have been demolished so far. Getting new houses built on those now empty lots is another matter.To that end, commissioners invited Hometown Housing, USA, a company that assists communities with housing, to speak at the meeting.Clint Fichter, legal counsel for Hometown Housing and himself a onetime small town city manager, attended the meeting via Zoom and said the solution would require support from both government and businesses, “So what we’re looking at doing is creating a public-private partnership that allows people to see those housing opportunities, in the same way that your great, great grandparents would have seen a homesteading opportunity, a chance to live in a community that I want to, raise my family in a school district that I want to be in, close distance to where I work, hopefully, in the town I work.”Fichter added, “It’s very people focused.”The service Hometown Housing offers is to research the local labor and housing needs by speaking with local employers and then use that data to create a proposal. Hometown Housing would then pitch the proposal to investors as well as local contractors.The group also emphasized that their focus is to use local resources. Shane Gilbert, a home builder with Hometown Housing, said, “So we, we don’t come in and take business away from banks. So, if there’s banks locally that can or are willing to participate, we definitely want them to be in conversation.”Gilbert also pointed out that creating workforce housing must be a group effort, “The investor might not come for one collective cohesive group. They might come for five or 10.“The employers don’t want to own housing either. Some of them are because they have to,” said Gilbert. “And they have to get involved because they don’t have a choice. They don’t want to. They would rather have an investor come in and do it for them. But they would much rather have four other businesses with them partnering on that and mitigate their risks.”Schoenrock said he would like to see a regional approach rather than having Jefferson County go it alone, which is why he invited other counties to the meeting, “These problems don’t know a county line.”Fichter concurred, “We more often get one county at a time approach. But the regional approach that we have had has generated more synergy.”No decision was made at the time regarding contracting with Hometown Housing. Schoenrock said, “I’m thinking a matter of weeks for us to discuss it and then to come forward.”

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