By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
A housing shortage hampers workforce development in St. Joseph.
St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce President Natalie Redmond says there is a paradox to the problem, because she says St. Joseph is an extremely affordable place to live.
“We do have some challenges around housing,” Redmond says. “I know we’ve been highlighted recently for a great place to buy a home, but we have some challenges around housing. Our rental rates are high, because we just don’t have enough housing available so that drives your rental costs up.”
St. Joseph has a shortage of housing as well as rentals. That becomes a problem for the Chamber as it attempts to build the workforce needed for existing businesses and those it hopes to lure to the city. Members of that workforce need a place to live.
Simply put, there isn’t enough houses to buy or apartments to rent.
“When we don’t have houses for the teachers in town and the nurses and the production workers or the young engineers,” Redmond says, relating a conversation she recently had. “The chancellor at UMKC when I had a chance to meet with him as they started this new medical school here for rural docs, I said what’s the one thing we can do for you? He said find housing; my doctors don’t want to drive from Kansas City during medical school.”
Redmond calls that interaction “eye opening.”
Redmond says the housing shortage is widespread.
“Young professional coming out of college that wants a rental home and then you transition into their first starter home that’s affordable. Then they upgrade, get some raises to a median size home. Then, they have that retirement home for that senior portion of their life,” Redmond says. “We really have deficits in each of those categories.”
Redmond says several factors are in play here: inflation driving up construction costs; an aging population leaving the workforce, but not leaving their homes; too many dilapidated structures that need work; a lack of homeowner education; and a lack of a strategic plan for housing.