Larry Griffin
lgriffin@thesmokymountaintimes.com
When a new teacher couldn’t find a place to live on their own, Tommy Dills, Human Resource Director for Swain County Schools, said school personnel recently took to social media to help them out. Luckily, it worked out and the teacher was able to find a place to move in and start working in Swain.
“We put it out there,” he said. “We tapped into social media. I don’t know how else it would’ve worked for this person – the place we found just lost a renter, and they had one [the new teacher] could use.”
It was the first time Dills had used social media to find housing for a new employee moving to the area, but he said they’d do it again if they had to. “It worked last time,” he said.
Other business owners echoed Dills’ troubles. Brett Hackshaw, one of the owners of Bryson City Outdoors, said they’d lost employees because they couldn’t find anywhere to live in town.
“They moved to Asheville or Waynesville,” Hackshaw said.
Eugene Shuler of Fly Fishing the Smokies said there have been people who accepted jobs with his company only to find it near impossible to find housing.
“I’ll hire employees, and they can’t find a place to live,” he said. “They can’t find housing that’s affordable or housing, period.”
Shuler said he’s also posted on social media to find tips on where people can live in the area.
Hackshaw said BCO has thought about doing even more.
“We’ve contemplated more than once building housing for staff, but there’s no land to purchase at a reasonable price,” he said.
Everything is expensive
Hackshaw said the problem is a “domino effect” in which the land and building costs are expensive, which feeds into expensive rent as owners try and get back what they’d spent.
Dills said high prices for homes have made it difficult for teachers to settle down in Swain County.
“Teachers don’t make a tremendous amount of money,” he said. “If you make $40,000, you can’t buy a $400,000 house. $300,000 to $400,000, that’s what they’re selling for. That’s a lot of money to ask from a teacher.”
Rent in Swain County has gone up 11% in the last year and 26% in the last five years, per statistics from the North Carolina Housing Coalition. That may be a far cry from nearby Buncombe County, which has seen a 69% increase in rent prices in the last five years, but it’s still making an impact.
There’s a real challenge – the Housing Coalition says 20% of households in Swain are cost-burdened and 39% of renters have difficulty affording their homes.
According to Sue Ledford, Executive Director with Four Square Community Action, a seller’s market has cut down on the number of long-term rentals.
“Prices have gone up in the mountains, and because they’ve gone up, people can sell their properties,” she said. “Rent has gone up in the last few years, and a lot of owners do Airbnb and things of that nature.”
HUD help
Local governments are trying their best to remedy the issue.
For the past few years, the Southwestern Commission Council of Government’s NC HOME Consortium, which covers Haywood, Jackson, Macon, Swain, Clay, Cherokee and Graham counties, has been soliciting funds from the federal Home Investment Partnerships Program, or HOME.
The program is funded by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and aids in housing-related initiatives including rental or down payment assistance, construction, site improvements, relocation and other costs.
LeNay Shular, project manager of housing for the Southwestern Commission, said the commission wants to fund projects to build new housing. Applications for this year’s HOME funds will open in March.
“New construction is high on our radar,” Shular said.
One recent project funded was the Four Square For People Rental Assistance & Repair Program (FSFP RARP), which Ledford said helps landlords make repairs to residences not up to HUD standards, to boost the numbers of available rental units.
Working with landlords
Four Square serves Swain, Cherokee, Clay and Graham counties and helps with various housing needs and other related projects. Ledford said they have a program offering vouchers to help people with rent.
“If there’s a three-bedroom apartment to rent for $1,000, based on their income level, they could get as much as $700 from the voucher,” she said. “The majority of people that need the vouchers are elderly. A lot are elderly or disabled, and they cannot afford the rent that’s out there.”
Four Square also works with landlords and sometimes provide funding to help them get their properties up to the standard to be able to provide the vouchers.
“Maybe they need steps repaired going in and out, we can help with that,” she said.
The idea is to incentivize landlords to do it, but Ledford said many landlords were very willing to work with Four Square and try and get better housing options.
“We want to work with the landlords,” she said. “If we don’t have a good landlord, we can’t place people who need to rent. Many landlords are not wealthy people. They have limited resources, they’re willing to work with us and we’re willing to work with them.”
There have been some landlords slowly developing properties to house people, though. There will be three new residential apartments on the second floor of the building at 200 Main Street, said developer Mark Petit.
“There will be three apartments on one floor, and commercial space on the lower floor,” Petit said. “The apartments will be long term rentals, not vacation rentals. It’s an older building, so it needed a lot of updating. But it’s a beautiful building, with a lot of history.”
Petit said the work would be completed within “the next three months; the next 90 days, God willing.”