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Business Monthly
REAL ESTATE & CONSTRUCTION
Taking on A ordable
Housing in White sh
Business leaders meet to discuss worker shortage in town, possible solutions to lack of places for workers to live
BY MOLLY PRIDDY
Housing in White sh. BEACON FILE PHOTO BUSINESS MEMBERS OF THE
White sh Chamber of Com-
merce met on June 21 to discuss the importance of a ordable housing for employees in White sh, a topic that has reared its head in recent years as busi- nesses complain of not being able to hire and keep enough workers.
The meeting was centered on intro- ducing the work consultants are doing to establish a baseline for needs, which will then theoretically lead to more e cient solutions for housing.
The June 21 meeting was another in a series of meetings to discuss the a ord- ability of living in White sh. In Janu- ary, the White sh City Council began discussions about the issue, listening to a wide breadth of community members’ concerns.
Recently, the council hired Rees Con- sulting of Crested Butte, Colorado to build a comprehensive Housing Needs Assessment for the city. The consultants
have worked with multiple mountain resort towns struggling with maintain- ing a ordability for workers, including Colorado ski towns Breckenridge, Aspen, and Steamboat Springs.
Business leaders present at the cham- ber meeting drew a stark picture of their hiring woes in the last few years. They batted around theories for the worker shortage, including a lack of work ethic, but eventually settled on housing as the main issue.
Wendy Sullivan, the principal consul- tant with WSW Consulting out of Cal- ifornia, told the owners and managers about the importance of participating in the upcoming survey that will be sent to White sh businesses in August, seeking speci c employment details.
The report generated from the survey will be ready in September, she said, and then the city is supposed to begin the next phase of the project: developing strate- gies for addressing the problems.
Paula Greenstein, co-owner of Wasabi Sushi Bar and Ginger Grill, said nding people to hire and holding on to them hadn’t been a problem until recently.
“We got hit for about three years really hard,” Greenstein said. “We don’t have enough people who want to stay in a job long enough.”
Many of her workers have been on sta for years, she said, and were fortu- nate enough to take advantage of a low real estate market and purchase homes following the recession. But it’s been dif- cult to nd workers who want to stay for more than a year or two, Greenstein said, let alone a season.
An informal survey of the businesses present at the meeting showed a major- ity of their workers commute to White- sh for work. Two of the 18 employees at Shopko live in town, while the rest live in Columbia Falls. The Subway sandwich shop pays workers from Kalispell extra to account for the gas used to drive 15 miles
each way.
“They’re starting to live, really, in
Columbia Falls,” Greenstein said of her workers as well.
Ken Stein, a broker with PureWest real estate, said the a ordability indexes in Columbia Falls and Kalispell aren’t too far o from White sh’s, though the rent and home prices in the other two cities aren’t increasing as quickly as White sh’s.
A lack of a ordable housing val- ley-wide puts pressure on the existing rentals, he said.
“Rents have gone up dramatically in the valley,” Stein said.
White sh city manager Chuck Stearns said the city’s impact fees make it more expensive to build in than other cities, but that hasn’t stopped construction of new homes. But those homes are typically on the high end of the price range, he said.
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