March 18, 2024

Housing study to assess market needs, viability in Jasper County

Joint JEDCO, Hometown Pride effort will focus on nine communities

The Jasper County Economic Development Corporation and the Jasper County Hometown Pride Program have announced plans for a joint housing market study to examine the development need of the nine Hometown Pride communities.

The study will asses current markets and pent up demand for new housing starts in Baxter, Colfax, Kellogg, Lynnville, Mingo, Monroe, Newton, Prairie City and Sully. It aims to evaluate what housing types — townhomes, apartments, condos, traditional homes — are desired and would be successful in each community. The report will include a breakdown of needs in each community and Jasper County as a whole.

The study will address several questions, including how to attract new families to Jasper County towns, how to increase the property tax base and generate new students and revenue for local school districts and communities codes and ordinances set up to allow housing to be successful.

According to Jasper County Hometown Pride Community Coach Jeff Davidson, the study was born out of a call for help from former Prairie City City Administrator Manny Toribio. The town of 1,700 currently has only one new subdivision lot left for sale and development.

At a Prairie City Economic Development Committee meeting earlier this year, Toribio told Davidson and JEDCO Executive Director Chaz Allen that a property owner in town was unable to secure a loan to develop new subdivision ground because the lender wanted to see an up-to-date housing analysis on the area.

“This is something that would really benefit the whole county because in every one of my hometown pride towns the issue of housing comes up,” Davidson said. “I told Chaz (Allen) housing comes up as an issue, not only the number of platted lots, but the different housing types. Do our communities have housing that will attract young families?”

JEDCO and Hometown Pride have hired Omaha-based RDG Planning and Design to conduct the $13,000 study. The firm will perform five site visits on Dec. 15 and 16, and meet with representatives from each Hometown Pride community. Results of the study are expected in March 2017.

Allen is securing funding commitments from major utility companies that service Jasper County to pay for the study. He said the remaining funds will likely come from JEDCO itself.

Davidson said the model of buying an existing, fixer-upper home is becoming “outdated” and doesn’t always work for families with two working parents and after school commitments.

An example is Baxter. Although the community is working on new senior housing with the acquisition of land earlier this year from a former mobile home park, traditional housing starts are priced high. According to Davidson, most new housing starts in Baxter are in the $285,000 range. The community coach sees that price tag as too expensive for the young families the local school district wants to attract.

“Families don’t have time to fix up a house, so we have to make sure we have starter homes that are new homes in that $140,000 to $180,000 price range,” Davidson said.

With housing developments at this price, leaders hope growth in Jasper County towns could maintain steady at roughly 2 percent per year to keep adding property tax dollars for city and public school coffers.

Allen cites Sully as an example of a town implementing an alternative style of housing that is working. The community recently completed a two-unit town home and is starting a second. Leaders hope the JEDCO-Hometown Pride study can give other communities a better idea of what will work in their communities.

“When you get someone into an age-specific townhome, you can open up their (current) house for a small family,” Allen said.

One of the key groups RDG representatives will meet with as part of the study is school districts. Davidson said new, affordable housing can also attract teachers who want to live in the communities in which they work.

Leaders see the housing study as another step toward hometown pride’s goal to make Jasper County communities appealing to new families and get on the radar for workers in the greater Des Moines area employment market.

One area the market study will not address is incentive packages for builders and buyers. Offers such as tax abatements or “dollar lots” currently offered by some Jasper County communities will still be decisions made at the local levels.

“There may be some guidance in the report on how valuable those kind of incentives are, but the report is not going to say ‘Colfax, you should have dollar lots.’ That’s still going to be the domain of the city council,” Davidson said. “But it may be something that logically flows out of the report.”

Contact Mike Mendenhall at mmendenhall@newtondailynews.com