Tag: housing

Season 3, Episode 2: The Big Build in Otter Tail County

In this episode, Marnie Werner, VP of Research and Operations, interviews Amy Baldwin who works as the Community Development Director for Otter Tail County. Probably one of the top three issues facing most rural community and economic developers is solving the housing shortage. In this conversation, Marnie and Amy talk about Otter Tail’s new initiative ...
chalkboard with words online survey

We asked and rural MN spoke: CPRD’s upcoming research agenda

By Marnie Werner, Research Director So, what keeps you up at night, worrying about rural Minnesota? Is it economic development? Housing? Access to healthcare? Long-term care? Child care? The deepening workforce shortage? These are the types of concerns the Center was created to research: subjects that may be universal for the whole state, but have ...

Season 2 Episode 11: Home ownership and housing churn in rural Minnesota

This week on the Center of Everywhere hear researchers Phil Jensen and Kelly Asche discuss the topic of Phil’s newest report, “Why Grandma May Stay at Home: Property taxes and home ownership in rural Minnesota.” Attracting workers to more rural parts of the state is a complex problem, but housing plays a major role. Encouraging ...

Rural Minnesotans are more likely to own their homes outright

By Phil Jensen Owning a home outright, or without a mortgage, can relieve strain on a household budget. Households without a monthly housing payment can achieve a higher standard of living with the same earnings, or can get by more easily with lower incomes. For these reasons, outright homeownership can especially impact households with smaller ...

Restoring the churn to rural housing markets

  By Marnie Werner, VP Research I’ve been talking a lot about child care in the last month, and in those presentations, I’ve been telling people how the two biggest barriers to attracting workers in rural areas is a lack of child care and a lack of housing. This week, instead of child care, I ...

The Workforce Housing Shortage: Getting to the heart of the issue

Providing housing for a community or region’s population is complex and dynamic. A healthy housing market should be able to provide housing for most people and their diverse needs through a combination of natural churn and new construction. In rural areas, however, economic and demographic forces are at work creating a housing shortage that many communities ...

Realtor.com: Out in the Country, Home Buying Isn’t Idyllic at All

EXCERPT: “Affordable housing is tougher to find in much of rural America—home to about a fifth of the nation’s population—than in the country’s big cities and prominent suburbs. ‘Rural areas across the country have not recovered from the Great Recession as well as bigger cities [have],’ says Bob Rapoza, executive secretary of the National Rural Housing Coalition, ...