Housing Hub Raises Awareness of Affordable Housing Shortage in Tennessee
On September 28, 2023, I participated in a panel of experts presenting and answering questions for the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (TACIR). This came about from an interview with researchers with TACIR a month prior.
Being on a panel in front of state legislators and local elected officials was far outside my typical purview of Grundy County. However, I felt compelled to participate and share on behalf of my neighbors who are struggling with access to housing that is affordable, healthy, and safe.
One of the main points of my opening statement was that, as people making decisions about policy that creates programs, we must begin to honor cross-sector, community-based innovations by outcomes and not outputs. Instead of valuing housing affordability by the number of beds or units produced, we have to find a way of valuing our developments by the same cross sector impact out of which they are created. Funders should score our applications the same. Because we know that our personal and community health is driven by multiple factors, I believe that it’s too expensive not to factor in a forecast of cross-sector impact.
This past spring, working with partners in the substance use disorder recovery community, a community group led by Mountain T.O.P. was able to submit a grant that was eventually not funded. Though praised for its excellence, our grant proposal was the most expensive of all of the proposals. At first, I attributed this to our lack of experience and capacity in housing development. Grundy County does not have a Community Housing Development Organization. We have not had a steady flow of investment - private or public - in workforce housing that matches the disinvestment and geographical discrimination we have historically experienced.
A few weeks after the grant feedback, I heard from another person, working for a state level organization advising our county on spending grant dollars, that no one does affordable housing development in rural areas because it’s just too expensive. Again, it’s just too expensive.
As organizations seeking funding, we are required to show how we are collaborating on the front end of projects. However, in my experience, that same impact of collaboration is rarely valued on the back end by those who are deciding where the dollars go. Mountain T.O.P. does a version of this assessment. On average, I know that a volunteer, paying $225 to stay at our camp and be deployed to a worksite working a total of 16 hours, will turn that dollar and hour investment into $3,803 in short and long term impact for a family in Grundy County. And that does not factor in all of the social drivers of our health that might be positively impacted by a more standard housing situation.
In 2021, Mountain T.O.P. published the Grundy County Housing Study in which our data reflected that 1,041 units were overcrowded. The overwhelming reason for the overcrowding was not that there was no housing. Rather, the available housing was not affordable. While I believe that we have gaps across the housing spectrum, one major area that affects Mountain T.O.P.’s work is that of home replacement for families living in a substandard situation on land they own or have inherited.
Lance George, the Director of Research and and Investment at the Housing Assistance Council advocates for
“Flexible funding that enables multi-year grants and ongoing support so that rural communities can attract the necessary investment, including from federal programs, and manage implementation of locally led solutions that lead to economic impact.”
We need both capacity building assistance along with the critical infrastructure funding to implement our experiments and innovations.
In reflecting on my experience on the TACIR panel, I know that our rural voice must continue to champion our experiences as well as create innovations in housing affordability.