MIDC launches pilot housing program
MF In the News
MARYVILLE, Mo. — The Maryville Industrial Development Corporation is running a pilot program designed to build affordable homes for families working in industry in Nodaway County.
The MIDC was created in 1957 to focus on growing the manufacturing base in Maryville, which often meant a traditional look at buildings or land that the corporation could acquire, make more appealing for industrial partners and then sell to a company to use for its factory.
The local nonprofit organization is probably most associated with working to spur growth in what is known as the Maryville Industrial Park, a cluster of factories and other enterprises, along with vacant real estate bordering Wilson Industrial Road on the east edge of town.
In more recent years, the MIDC has transitioned to looking at the new challenges manufacturing companies and employees face and pivoted to working on new kinds of solutions. The MIDC found that today, the biggest issue is a lack of people, a multifaceted problem primarily stemming from a lack of child care and affordable housing in the area, which makes it difficult to attract a workforce.
The new pilot program takes aim at the housing issue, essentially doing what the MIDC does for factory locations and instead applying it to houses for employees — purchasing land, building a house and then selling it to manufacturing workers.
The program will start with one house in Maryville and one in Hopkins.
“The MIDC formed a housing committee made up of a number of folks, including myself, that was going to look at housing needs in the community,” said Josh McKim, executive director for Nodaway County Economic Development, which provides administrative duties to MIDC after the private corporation launched NCED. “What is affordable housing? What is that? You know, you throw that word out all the time, but what does that actually mean and how do you get to that number? And then how do you rectify the cost of construction for a home with the ability to pay for the home?”
The MIDC used the average starting salaries from different manufacturing plants and traditional lending practices to determine a monetary range for affordable housing and came up with a range of $175,000 to $200,000, with a little room for fluctuation.
But houses found in that range in this area don’t typically have the amenities that a growing family would want in a home. The committee decided to aim for houses with three bedrooms, two bathrooms and 1,300 square feet. Normally, the cost of building a house like that in this region would push it outside of the range the committee was targeting. That’s one of the reasons cited in a 2018 study commissioned by the city of Maryville which found that houses in that range — roughly from $125,000 to $200,000 — were critically short in the region, potentially stunting population growth.
The prohibitive cost of traditional construction led the committee to look at alternative methods, like 3D printing.
“It’s an interesting concept that works in the southwest part of the U.S.,” McKim said. “They’ve tried to do a couple in southern Iowa and they haven’t been able to get that mix right, so it doesn’t set up quite right. So, that was interesting (as a) future option to look at, but for right now, it doesn’t work.”
Instead, the committee determined that the best solution was to purchase two manufactured homes — houses built in a manufacturing plant that is shipped in on a truck and put together on site. These homes will be on a slab foundation for the pilot program and without a garage, but constructed so future homeowners can add one if desired.
“This is a viable solution that gets homes that we can put into our communities at a price point that we believe is the right price point,” McKim said. “Otherwise, we don’t have a lot of options to hit that price point. That’s the tricky part, you know, ideally, you’d do stick-built or you do something more traditional, but the traditional stick-built and other types of homes just don’t hit that price point.”
However, that only covered one part of the cost. Next, the MIDC needed the land to put the houses on.
McKim said the land for the structure in Hopkins came from a local citizen, Ron Houston, who wanted this project to benefit the town. For Maryville, the MIDC worked with the city and the county to find a lot at the right price.
The first two homes in the pilot program are projected to be completed in April or May, McKim said. Once done, there will be a 60-day hold on the properties to ensure the homes are available to manufacturing employees first. If still available after the 60 days, the homes will be put on the open market.
McKim said that originally, Maryville and Hopkins were the only communities that voiced their interest in this program when the MIDC reached out to each community in Nodaway County. Now, there are individuals in Barnard and Graham who are interested in helping obtain land for future manufactured homes. ‘“If this works out this time here, we’ll start doing fixes down there,” McKim said. “But we gotta make sure this works.”
