State and local attempts to address Leelanau County’s housing crisis were among the topics discussed at the 10th annual Northwest Michigan Housing Conference Oct. 24-25. Elected officials, business leaders, and community members gathered at the Hagerty Center at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City for this year’s conference.
On the second day of the summit, local housing leaders could attend one several concurrent sessions. One of these sessions was hosted by Leelanau County’s Larry Mawby, the founder and president of Peninsula Housing, and Jeff Schwaiger of Urban Design Associates (UDA), who have been working to develop housing at several parcels in Suttons Bay.
Peninsula Housing was awarded $50,000 in 2023 through Michigan’s Rural Readiness Grant program to help plan affordable housing with the Pittsburg-based architecture firm UDA, and the group held a series of community work sessions earlier this year where local property owners could provide input on design ideas.
“Our goal with this was to engage … in a conversation about what the community needs and what they’d like to see, with the hope that we could come out of that with a plan that’s not just acceptable, but enthusiastically accepted by the community,” Mawby explained.
“We’re hoping that our successes and failures, and ultimate success, could be a model for other communities that want to develop affordable housing,” he continued. “That’s part of the reason we were able to get the grant: we said, ‘We want to do this here, and we want to tell people here how we did it.’ This session is the beginning of how we did it, and another year from now, we’ll know more about what worked and didn’t work.”
Schwaiger said that Leelanau County “faces some of the steepest hurdles when it comes to (housing) affordability” in the region, citing a median list price of $975,000. Peninsula Housing is trying to reach people who earn between 80-120% of the Area Median Income, or between $86,160 and $129,240 per year.
Peninsula Housing is a community land trust, which means they would retain ownership of the land while selling or renting the homes on these parcels for less than their appraised value. They would then lease the land to the homeowners for a “nominal yearly fee.” This business model seeks to make housing more affordable.
The nonprofit organization seeks to develop affordable housing at two locations in Suttons Bay: a 10-acre farmstead and a neighboring parcel on Herman Road in the township, and another parcel north of the intersection of Fourth Street and St. Mary’s Avenue in the village.
Mawby and Schwaiger recapped their recent work towards developing these parcels. Some of the challenges have included drafting designs that can facilitate multi-family housing while staying in character of downtown Suttons Bay in the eyes of the village council, which denied permits for the St. Mary’s Avenue twice last year over concerns about them being over their height requirements.
Peninsula Housing plans to reconfigure the designs to “not be as big, but still satisfy the design requirements that the public said, (which include building) nothing more than two stories tall,” Mawby said.
Mawby said Peninsula Housing is advancing development on the Herman Road locations by working with Suttons Bay Township and Leelanau County to create a tax increment financing district.
He also said they are advocating for an intergovernmental agreement between the village and township that will allow the former to extend water and sewer services to the latter on a case-by-case basis, which Mawby says will improve Peninsula Housing’s chances of getting federal tax dollars even when not exercised due to the village’s limited capacity.
The summit was hosted by Housing North, a nonprofit organization focused on addressing the housing shortage in Northwest Michigan. According to Housing North, over 31,000 new homes are needed in the 10-county region by 2027, including 2,335 homes in Leelanau County.
The rental vacancy rate across the ten counties is 0.7% and a Bowen National Research study says a healthy vacancy rate should be between 5-8%. Leelanau County has some of the lowest rental vacancies in the region at 0.2%.
These numbers are based on a 2023 assessment by Housing North. Housing North Executive Director Yarrow Brown said at the housing summit that the area is making progress, but they still have a long way to go towards these goals. In the last year, 271 new units were built in Leelanau County, with 89 units in progress.
Brown recently presented some of this information to the Leelanau County board of commissioners at their Oct. 1 executive session. According to Brown, focus group studies suggest the lack of affordable housing particularly affects teachers and first responders, like emergency medical services (EMS) technicians.
“If you are an EMS technician or elementary school teacher, you are basically priced out, or unable to afford to rent or live here,” Brown said. “These numbers are averages – they’re not perfect – but you shouldn’t be paying technically more than 30% of your income on housing. Once you get above that 30%, you’re considered cost burdened.”
Housing North is working on a “housing action plan” with some goals, strategies, and timelines for action. Brown said she hopes to come back sometime in the next two months to the county board with this finalized housing action plan, asking for “approval … or commitment to following through on some of (its) action items.”
Some of its goals include increasing workforce and “missing middle” housing, increasing options for households with extremely low incomes, expanding equitable and holistic zoning practices, and enhancing collaboration on housing among state agencies, philanthropic organizations, local and tribal governments, and private-sector organizations.
