Tag: workforce housing

  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 ...

  Reed Anfinson, editor and owner of the Swift County Monitor-News in Benson and the Grant County Herald in Elbow Lake, continues his conversation this week about the issues our new governor from Greater Minnesota will be working with. Transportation is, of course, big, and so is workforce housing. But the real problem, says Reed, ...

  Kelly Asche, research associate at the Center, has just completed an article that gets to the heart of the question of why it’s so hard to get housing built in rural Minnesota. While rural communities recruit workers to alleviate the workforce shortage, they find they don’t have the appropriate housing for workers they would ...

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 ...