Note: This article was originally published in the Spirit of Jefferson on October 5, 2022.
The issue of housing availability, and by extension its affordability, is one of the important concerns of the Jefferson County Planning Commission. The commission is obliged by state law to revise or redraft every 10 years a new Comprehensive Plan that directs what kind of development occurs where in the county. The next revision to the plan is due in 2024, so the commission will reconvene a committee to prepare the plan sometime in 2023.
The work of the committee will evaluate the extent to which the county’s demographics have changed, making it necessary (or not) to rethink the current plan. Some of the countywide issues and recommendations from the Charles Town homelessness report will likely be brought up for discussion.
One of the problems facing many wealthy communities across the country is the loss of housing diversity. It is maybe an unfortunate fact of our economic system that we can create communities that become too rich or too poor to remain healthy.
In very wealthy communities, it’s people, such as teachers, health care workers, restaurant staff, child care workers, police officers, among others who can be squeezed out, typically because they can’t afford housing. Keeping these communities healthy means keeping these essential workers.
It’s individual stories that better drive the point home. There are hundreds of these stories, but many people are understandably reluctant to tell them. Two people that I spoke with, though, were willing to talk at some length: one to tell of his past and the other to tell of her future.
The man, who I’ll call Bret, is 63, disabled and living in subsidized housing. The woman, who I’ll call Molly, is 21, a working student, living in a rental property. Both qualify by the standards of the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department’s measure as cost-burdened, meaning they need to spend more than 30 percent of their available income on housing costs.
Molly was born in rural Berkeley County, graduated high school there and enrolled at Shepherd University with the goal of majoring in global studies, a program preparing graduates to work in internationally focused businesses and government agencies. The program recognizes our proximity to the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area as the source for many job opportunities, although it also cites our abundance of government facilities here in the Eastern Panhandle as offering some additional possibilities.
Molly knew, as any incoming university student knows, that college is expensive. Annual tuition at Shepherd is approximately $8,000, housing roughly $6,000 and food about $4,000—$18,000 total per year. Molly’s family does not have the wherewithal to afford that amount, and she personally felt it would not be good to saddle herself with long-standing student debt.
In West Virginia, according to the Institute for College Access and Success, two-thirds of college students carry an average of $30,000 in student debt. Molly did not want to face years of repayment, which could constrain her ability to save for a down payment on a house or start a family, so she decided to work her way through her university education and pay as she went.
The problem is that the work Molly can find locally is enough to keep her going, but not enough to save up for college expenses. She works two jobs, one as a server in a local restaurant and the other as a clerk at a local store. Together, after taxes, she nets about $1,200 per month, working often more than 40 hours per week and seven days a week.
Meanwhile in a tiny apartment she shares in Shepherdstown with her boyfriend, she spends $450 per month as her share for rent and utilities. That’s almost 38 percent of her income, exceeding the cost-burden threshold.
She is able to sometimes find other odd jobs that can occasionally raise her income to about $1,400 in some months and that money can go into the kitty for school expenses. But, and this is a big but, working more than 40 hours per week doesn’t leave her enough energy or time to attend classes.
So Molly has interrupted her education. She is taking one class currently, but the demands from her work schedule sometimes mean she has to skip a class. During the COVID-19 pandemic years, she actually fared better financially because her unemployment benefits ran to $600 per week – $2400 a month for the two months of her eligibility.
So right now she’s inclined to do one of two things, wait until she’s 23 so she can apply for student aid without having to factor in her parents’ incomes to establish need, something that’s required of her now. Or, bite the bullet and move to a location where she could earn more money and find cheaper rent. The second option might make more sense, she said, since she foresees the likelihood that she’ll have to leave the state for work at some point anyway. If so, we will lose yet another West Virginian, someone who would prefer to stay.
Now let’s look at Bret’s situation. Bret is a fourth-generation West Virginian, his ancestors having been influential members in the business history of Shepherdstown. He himself set himself up in Shepherdstown as a young man, starting as a waiter at the Yellow Brick Bank, and then later went into partnership to open a delicatessen and then a bakery in town. Both ventures were successful up until he contracted a systemic fungal infection.
Bret underwent a long exploratory surgery and came out from it with a viral caused, life-threatening neural disease that shows up in symptoms of tremors, difficulty walking and difficulty speaking. His immune system ultimately recovered enough that drugs were able to control his health condition. His disease is now in remission, though the symptoms remain. This all took place about 20 years ago.
Since Bret’s illness was incapacitating, he qualified for Social Security Disability Insurance, which in addition to a monthly stipend of $1400 also made him eligible for Section 8 federally subsidized housing vouchers through the department of Housing and Urban Development. The Section 8 program is complicated, and one that landlords must apply for. If accepted into the program, the landlord can then advertise for elderly or disabled renters and be reimbursed up to the market rate for an apartment for any amount over 30 percent of the renter’s available income. The renter is responsible for that 30 percent. So Bret pays $323 a month for his share of the rent and Lowe Gardens, where he lives, is paid $427 from the Section 8 program. Bret also pays for his own electric to the tune of approximately $80 a month. These amounts are subject to change every year.
Lowe Gardens is the only Section 8 housing in Shepherdstown. It is a 24-unit apartment complex that got its start through the long and tedious process developer Ken Lowe navigated in 1984. Lowe was interested in providing affordable housing for the elderly and disabled in the county, inspired by his first-grade teacher, Virginia Hawn, who found it increasingly hard as she aged to afford to live in the community she had taught in. When the facility was built, Mary Lowe, Ken’s wife, took over the management and assisted renters in filling out the annual eligibility forms to establish their continuing need.
In this role, Mary Lowe went out of her way to encourage Bret, who she knew personally, to apply for an apartment. On the success of his application, he found an affordable home in which he has now been a resident for 17 years.
In an interview, Mary Lowe summed up the motivation for what she and her husband set out to do with Lowe Gardens. She said, alluding to Hawn, “We leave our children and loved ones with our teachers and caregivers. These are valuable people.” And the same goes for all the other individuals who make our communities healthy and functioning, including those intending to do so.
Chiquita Howard-Bostic, a vice president at Shepherd University and head of the university’s sociology department, talked about the staying power of our community.
Without minimizing the difficulties students face in deciding to stay or not in a place that can seem attractive but challenging, Howard-Bostic said the community has to present itself as worthy of staying. It has to come across to students as providing an array of facilities and a population that project a “positive moral compass and a set of appealing cultural norms.” Housing is a critically important factor in that equation.
If students or others perceive that a community wants them, they will desire to stay and expend the energy needed to make it happen. In other words, the passion that someone has for a place can influence the reality that they will stay, but it’s on the community itself to nurture and display the qualities that make someone passionate to begin with.