美国国家公共电台 NPR Rural America Faces A Crisis In 'Adequate Housing'

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Home prices are skyrocketing in some places that might surprise you, including remote towns in rural America. And the problems facing those places may be especially hard to solve. As part of our series on the new housing crisis, NPR's Kirk Siegler sent this report from rural Nebraska.

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SIMON: Along the country roads that fan out from the Ogallala, Neb., there are abandoned, old farmhouses¹ and weathered, caved-in barns - a remnant of the hardscrabble settlers who first tapped the Ogallala Aquifer², turning these dry, high plains into lush wheat and corn fields. Like a lot of the rural heartland, Western Nebraska slowly emptied out over the years.

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KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE³: So why then is there a housing shortage today in Ogallala, population 4,500? The answers are complicated. But if you ask Mary Wilson, she'll tell you it's more like a shortage of adequate housing.

MARY WILSON: People aren't updating their homes before they throw them on the market. People are living in their homes, I think, longer here.

SIEGLER: On average, people are living in their homes twice as long as they did before the Great Recession. So the market is tight. When Wilson moved to Ogallala from Colorado, drawn⁴ back to the small-town Nebraska she grew up in, she and her husband had a hard time finding something suitable.

WILSON: You know, we had to settle for what was available.

SIEGLER: Wilson is in charge of economic development here. She's driving down a quiet, leafy street of larger old homes in the center of town. They were built for a far different time when you needed big families to work the farms. A lot of them now are outdated⁵. The few that are for sale need 40 grand worth of rehab at a minimum. And most people either can't or aren't willing to pay that.

WILSON: My role as the economic development director is bringing business and industry to town - retaining the business and industries that we have, you know, doing what I can to expand that tax base. Well, it's difficult to do that when we don't have adequate housing.

SIEGLER: This is the classic chicken and egg that's long plagued rural America but is being magnified now by the national crisis in the housing industry - a crisis blamed on lots of factors. Lumber⁶ is hugely expensive due to tariffs⁷ on Canadian wood. And there's a labor⁸ shortage, made even worse in an isolated⁹ small town like Ogallala. Doug Davis is a longtime local real estate man and developer.

DOUG DAVIS: In the bigger cities, you have a selection. I mean, I couldn't go out and get like 5 bids on a plumber¹⁰ to do this house because they're all busy.

SIEGLER: And a lot of the contractors¹¹ who are here are getting older and looking to retire.

DAVIS: I think the need is there. If we could build 40 houses in the next two to three years, we'd sell more.

SIEGLER: For now, Davis is just proud to have gotten three homes built - no small feat¹² in a town that hadn't had a new private home put up since the 1990s. And they sold in less than three weeks, one even before it was finished.

DAVIS: I tried to make it, so it all flows. You know, like I said, it's 1,300 square foot.

SIEGLER: Now this place closed at just under 200,000. That's a lot in Ogallala where wages are depressed¹³ from the boom and bust¹⁴ of farm commodity prices. The few other homes on the market right now are mostly selling north of 300,000 too. As in a lot of smaller markets, newcomers are driving up prices.

DAVIS: Yep, the folks I sold the house to next door are from Denver. And they just got tired of the Denver hassle. The houses I'd built up on 10th Street, I think that was a win-win situation because those were all three people that came from outside the community.

SIEGLER: Now, the easiest answer is just to build more homes. But small towns like this are still considered risky¹⁵ by most outside developers. They can make a lot more money in cities where land and home values are even higher. Ogallala is learning this the hard way as it struggled to find capital to redevelop a shuttered school into condos to help ease the shortage.

JACOB HOVENDICK: In rural Nebraskan, you don't typically have tons of seed money just laying around waiting for a project to come across it's door.

SIEGLER: At Adams Bank and Trust downtown, I met Jacob Hovendick. He's a financial adviser¹⁶ and accountant. His extended family is from here. And he jumped at the chance five years ago to move over from Lincoln and raise his young family. Now, the shortage of adequate or even available homes has clearly led to some soul-searching.

HOVENDICK: I feel like we're at a very pivotal point in rural America's development because you now are finding opportunities through technological¹⁷ advancements¹⁸ to be mobile as a workforce¹⁹ - to maybe work from home but work for a company three states away.

SIEGLER: Hovendick says rural America is so close to rebounding²⁰, but now there's no place to live. So he and other business leaders are behind a plan to ask voters here this fall to approve a small sales-tax hike. The money would be used to build more workforce housing and offer incentives²¹ for developers to come here.

HOVENDICK: The federal government's not coming to help us. The state government, to a certain extent, can't come help us. No one's coming to our rescue. We kind of have to start helping²² ourselves.

SIEGLER: Nationally, rural housing experts say the same thing. You've got to have a well-organized local group of leaders committed to raising money and getting things done, in this era where federal funding for rural development is trending down.

WILSON: Just watch for rattlesnakes.

SIEGLER: That's only a half joke for Mary Wilson, who just hopped²³ out of her SUV on a dirt road north of Ogallala. Campers and boaters are whizzing by, headed to nearby Lake McCaughnay, lately a big economic driver.

WILSON: So they started moving dirt last week to prep this site for this new development.

SIEGLER: Wilson wanted to show me this site because a Nebraska developer, on his own, saw the need and decided²⁴ to come in and build four new duplexes.

WILSON: The cul-de-sac here, this is an entire subdivision. The developer bought this entire subdivision.

SIEGLER: She hopes these starter homes will help the local hospital in particular attract new doctors and nurses. Wilson, who grew up in an even smaller town near here, says for too long rural America has suffered from a confidence problem. If you hear over and over that you're withering²⁵ away, well, you start to believe it.

WILSON: Some people out there have the perception of Ogallala drying up and dying. And we're not that at all.

SIEGLER: To hear people in Ogallala tell it, the housing shortage is more a wake-up call than crisis for rural America. Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Ogallala, Neb.