Housing Hub Hires New Director of Housing Development
When Cody Jorstad, 29, first came to Mountain T.O.P. with his church youth group as a 14-year-old, little did he realize some 15 years later he’d return as the director of housing development for the newly created Housing Hub.
Cody Jorstad, Director of Housing Development
Originally established as an information clearinghouse for aspiring homeowners, Housing Hub has quickly evolved into an organization dedicated to providing affordable housing on the South Cumberland Plateau, preparing future and current homeowners to buy and maintain homes, and developing a sustainable, local workforce.
As the full-time director of housing development, Jorstad, who started work June 3, will initially focus on finishing the homebuilding project started by Grundy County High School teacher Tim Tucker and his residential construction students in partnership with Mountain T.O.P., Communities in School, the South Cumberland Community Fund, and Housing Hub.
Tucker and his students built the first half of the home on-site at the high school last fall semester and had intended to finish the remaining half this spring. The plan was to transport the finished halves on a flatbed truck to a donated site in Coalmont, where it would eventually become home to a 37-year-old single mother and her teenage son.
The innovative plan, the first of its kind in Grundy County, ran into an unforeseen snag when they realized how difficult it would be to move a second pre-built half onto the lot. The first half that Tucker and his students built has been moved successfully, but they’ve determined it’s more feasible to assemble the second half at the site.
“My first priority coming on board is to take over the project from the high school program as it’s transitioning from what they’re able to do at the high school to the rest of it being built now at the home site,” Jorstad explained. “I’m going to be supervising the remainder of the construction of that project—a combination of working with volunteers and hiring out some jobs depending on what it is.”
Jorstad said that Tucker and his students have already assembled parts of the second half.
“They framed up wall sections that are going to be used and pre-cut some of the material,” Jorstad said. “Tim Tucker has it all planned out and how it’s going to go together. We plan to use some of the high school students to work with him to frame the remainder of it on site.”
Jorstad hopes the home will be complete by the end of the year, possibly as early as November.
“That won’t be our only building project—we want to be able to do more new home construction,” he said. “Right now, it’s a lot of planning.”
A Georgia native, Jorstad grew up outside of Atlanta and graduated from Georgia Tech in 2017 with a degree in civil engineering.
“I started going to Mountain T.O.P. as a teenager, worked on their summer staff there, and then worked full-time on their staff from May of 2017 through the end of 2020,” he said.
As Mountain T.O.P.’s service area manager, Jorstad supervised construction projects done out in the community by teams of volunteers.
During this time, he also met and married his wife, Rachael, who is another full-time staffer at Mountain T.O.P.
“At the end of 2020, my wife and I had just gotten married. She was starting grad school at Vanderbilt, so we were ready for new challenges, and I wanted to go get some experiences that Mountain T.O.P. couldn’t give me,” he said.
He became a construction manager for a large-production homebuilder, the Pulte Group, in Nashville while Rachael worked on her master’s degree in theological studies.
“I wanted to build new homes,” he explained. “Working for Pulte gave me a lot of good experience in a short amount of time, but in the back of my mind I’ve always known I wanted to go back into affordable housing work—that’s something that’s extremely important. I wanted to get that experience and eventually put it to good use again.”
He and his wife are very happy to return to the Plateau—she’s accepted a job with Mountain T.O.P.
“There are connections that we have just from spending a lot of really formative years in this area when we were young adults and working at Mountain T.O.P.,” he said, “but it’s also the way we’ve gotten to be a part of the community through those experiences and just the smaller-town feel where you know people and feel like you are known. It was an easy decision to come back to a community that we felt like we still knew and had a place in.”
Housing Hub Board Member Bob Willems is excited for Jorstad to come onboard.
“I first met Cody when he matriculated at Mountain T.O.P. and, over time, earned his contractor’s license, became an important member of the Plateau community, and gained the respect of professional colleagues,” Willems said. “He returns after working in the commercial contractor’s world in Nashville for a few years to the nonprofit world leading Housing Hub construction as we begin to address the affordable housing issues in our community here on the Plateau.”
Jorstad is grateful to get to work with Housing Hub in its earliest stages.
“To be able to help shape and grow this organization to fully meet the needs that are here is really exciting,” he said. “I know there’s going to be challenges and frustrations that come along with it, but I think that’s going to make it that much sweeter when things come together.”
Housing Hub’s office is located in Suite 230 upstairs at the Littell-Partin Center (old Grundy County High School) in Tracy City. For more information, visit its website at www.housinghubtn.org.
This article was published in the Grundy County Herald.