At the Hill Country Economic Summit on Thursday, Mar. 3, at the Hill Country Youth Event Center, organizers announced a change in the labeling of the housing crisis in Kerrville from “affordable” to “attainable.”
This move makes sense. Affordable is too subjective. What someone making less than $50,000 a year can afford is completely different from what someone making twice that can afford. Commercial builder Bruce Stracke, who was on the housing forum panel at the summit, noted that 51% of households in Kerrville make less than $55,000 combined income per household.
Making housing attainable, however, is currently more problematic than it seems.
Brian Bowers, president of Happy State Bank in Kerrville and moderator at the summit, said housing is “one of the biggest challenges we face in this market.”
According to Kerrville City Manager E.A. Hoppe, also on the housing forum panel, 66% of the Kerrville workforce doesn’t even live here. There’s simply no inventory. In addition, some who do take jobs here are forced to relocate after a few months, because they are unable to find somewhere to live.
Many are taking to short-term rentals, hotels and even RV living as solutions, but these are not sustainable solutions, especially if the new hire has a partner or even children.
Without sustainable housing solutions, employee retention becomes a problem for many businesses, especially those that are major employers for our community, which include James Avery Craftsman, All Plastics and Peterson Health. Some of these employers are planning expansions but foresee the lack of workforce due to the lack of housing as a major challenge.
Those who do own homes and are interested in selling are instead waiting until there is somewhere else in Kerrville to move to.
Builders don’t want to build right now. And it’s understandable, given the increasing costs of building materials. The cost to the builder gets passed on to the homeowner, so what would have been a $200,000 home is now a $350,000 home.
But again, with no or few new builds, there’s nowhere to move to.
While there are a handful of projects in the works, at best they won’t come available until later this year. And when they do, they’ll sell faster and at a higher price than we’ve likely ever seen for those types of properties.
Stracke made an effort to steer the solution to targeting the “missing” sector of housing, which includes mid-priced cottages, duplexes, townhomes and other smaller-by-the-square-footage homes on potentially zero lot lines that would appeal to single parents, couples and individuals who would carry a mortgage at an ideal one-third of their household income.
Attainable housing is only that if the wages earned are enough to compensate for the cost of the home. Right now, these types of housing projects, while more desperately needed than 1,800-square-foot luxury homes on a full acre, still run into the problem of the cost of building them, leaving us again arguing affordable vs. attainable.
Right now, we’re not seeing either.
Kerrville Daily Times
