Forum Editorial: New housing plan is smart solution for critical problem

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Every community, including ours, strives to provide a safe, welcoming community that offers a place where young professionals can prosper, families can grow and roots can go down deep. But our future rests on our ability to find creative ways to solve interconnected problems.

How can families grow when they can’t afford to buy their first home? Or find child care? Or long-term career opportunities? Or health care?

These hurdles, certainly not unique to our community, are the biggest obstacles looming over our shared future. And they aren’t going to go away without new, innovative ideas.

So we applaud an initiative put in motion by the Maryville Industrial Development Corporation to work with both public and private partners to construct affordable manufactured homes in Nodaway County with the intention of selling them to industrial workers.

An oft-cited 2018 housing study commissioned by the city of Maryville estimated that a whopping 63 percent of people who work in Maryville live elsewhere. The study found what is immediately obvious to anyone interested in moving to the area or looking for a new home: there is very little housing available that matches the income levels of the positions that are open.

And the city’s largest employers have frequently cited a lack of affordable homes as a significant obstacle to hiring new employees. It’s just too difficult for families to try and afford a home if it’s over the $200,000 benchmark that the housing study cited as the most glaringly scarce in the area. And once they grow their families elsewhere, that’s where they put down roots.

Although Josh McKim, one of the individuals spearheading the efforts for the MIDC, admits that it’s an experiment to see if it works out well for all involved, this is the kind of experimentation we need to engage in if we want to start building our bridge to a sustainable future. The hope is that either new employees will find an affordable home here or existing employees will decide to upgrade, opening up their existing home for someone new.

Maybe it won’t work. But if it does, the program could be scaled up and — fingers crossed — could one day help to bolster our region’s industrial workforce and serve as a model for more generalized development.

We hope that our local governments and legislators are keeping a close eye on the experiment and will be ready to incentivize further development in the future. And we hope local businesses are doing the same.

All will need to contribute and work together to ensure that Maryville and Nodaway County remain a community where families can grow and prosper at all stages of life, well into the future.