Housing shortage “epidemic” impacts our workforce

“By Mae Stier

Sun contributor

If you have been to the Empire Village Inn in the last two years, you have likely noticed some changes. The menu has been revamped, the beer menu has expanded, and the bar has been rebuilt, all thanks to the newest general manager, Riley Scott, who was hired by owner Frank Lerchen in the fall of 2017. Scott had been working in the restaurant industry in Grand Rapids, and moved north when offered a management position to help make some changes to the establishment.

When she moved, she was told there would be an apartment available to her in the village of Empire. The housing option fell through, however, as the building was refinished for commercial use. Scott was luckily able to rent a room on short notice from a coworker. Scott says that the option of that room made it possible for her to stay in the area and to move forward with her position at the Village Inn. The coworker offers seasonal housing to many employees at both of Lerchen’s restaurants in Empire, and Scott believes that shared housing of this nature is an important component to workforce housing solutions. 

“What can save things is open and (shared) housing. If I did not have that room, I would not have been able to stay,” she said. However grateful Scott was for the solution in the interim, she continued looking for housing that would be more suitable for her long-term as she established a life in the area. 

Scott spent the next four months searching for long-term rental housing. “I was avidly looking every single day to find something within a 30-mile radius, and it was not happening.” The difficulty of finding housing, she says, was not due to the cost of housing, but rather the few options that existed for long-term rentals. “I had the option of doing a nine-month rental, but as a person, running a seasonal restaurant, I personally couldn’t pack up my entire life and move in the middle of June when I’m trying to (run the restaurant).” After looking nearly every day for four months, she had only found three options within a 30-mile radius of Empire, and none of them were ideal.

It “turned into winter, and that was the biggest disappointment. I would drive around the village and see how many houses were left vacant,” said Scott, adding that she came to the area not only to run a restaurant, but to be involved in the community. Driving around Empire in the winter made it feel as though there wasn’t an existing community at all. Scott began to wonder if there were housing solutions that could be created in shared spaces––a garage or basement apartment, or a vacant home turned into a multi-family rental. She was confronted with people’s fear of change in the small community, but realized the need wasn’t for a large apartment building with 50 units, but rather “five or seven, tops.” 

She found the apartment she now rents due to “serendipity,” and a good old-fashioned bulletin board. The apartment hadn’t been listed online, but thanks to an afternoon at a restaurant in Honor, 15 minutes south of Empire, she stumbled on a year-round rental at the right time.

As an employer in the village of Empire, housing shortages affect not just her as an individual, but also her ability to staff a restaurant. Many of the employees Scott staffs at the Empire Village Inn during the summer season are high school and college students who are living with family members and who don’t, for the most part, have to directly find housing. As the median age in Leelanau County continues to rise, however, Scott wonders whether there will be enough high school students in the coming years to supplement the increased need for employees in the summer, or if school enrollment, and the student workforce, will drop off as fewer families are able to live in the area. 

Even without the speculation that there may be fewer young people to work in the service industry in Leelanau County in the future, there are limitations to such a young crew. Having a staff comprised of individuals whose availability is determined by a school schedule makes it difficult to keep employees through the end of the summer. Many of Scott’s summer employees will be finished working at the restaurant by mid-August, which is before the tourist season and summer hours have ended for restaurants in northern Michigan. “There is a huge gap at the end of summer where we can barely sustain ourselves. I will have to be creative to figure out how to produce the amount of volume (needed), how to produce a healthy environment for my employees,” said Scott. “Right now we are running on local kids, but the pool of it is continuing to decrease.”

None of Scott’s year-round staff live in Leelanau County; they all commute from either Benzie or Grand Traverse Counties. While they could all get similar jobs in their own communities, Leelanau County businesses need employees if they are going to stay open, and with the state of housing as it is, employees will be required to commute to fill the needs for local businesses. 

The County not only needs year-round employees, but it also needs year-round residents to frequent the businesses or they won’t have the patronage needed to survive. With a workforce that is commuting into Leelanau County to work, it is unlikely that they are eating out or doing their grocery shopping at establishments near their workplace, when they could run errands in more year-round communities like Benzonia or Traverse City.

“I think it’s a deep-rooted issue of lack of community right now. We have enough people and enough passion and motives to come together to figure out solutions,” Scott said, but she worries that those who are interested in working towards finding answers aren’t receiving the support that they need. 

The members of our workforce and the young families in our neighborhoods bring an asset to our communities that is different than the assets brought by wealthy property owners who are investing financially in the area. The main asset of the workforce may not be monetary, but is just as vital and important. However, it doesn’t seem to be valued as much as financial contributions to our community or the ability to purchase land at high prices, and oftentimes when housing conversations occur there seems to be a dissonance between those who are struggling to find homes and those who don’t feel the effects of this issue directly.

But if we look at the ways our communities are morphing, we are seeing a shift away from the quaint communities that are often touted as being so valued in the region. Communities that used to be built upon a mix of workers and families and business owners and the elderly are now shifting to be made up largely of seasonal residents, who are either working remotely or are no longer working.

“The biggest thing we need,” Scott said, “is a mutual understanding that it’s a huge epidemic. I think creating committees and platforms for groups to (have) the conversation” is a start, while “allowing each other to converse and debate (with) the same motive of trying to help the community.” 

We may not all have the same outlook, but hopefully we have the same desire in the end: to see our communities continue to thrive and be a place we are proud to call home year-round. As we explore ways to ensure that our needs for more workers in our communities and our need for more patrons of our businesses are met, it is crucial that we attempt to find solutions for housing that are accessible to the workers in our county.