The Daily Yonder Rural Assembly Everywhere Will Focus on Repairing Relationships and Infrastructure Two days of online interactions will feature White House policy official Susan Rice, U.S. Representative Terri Sewell, and a wide range of artists, performers, policy experts, and more.
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Rural Assembly Everywhere returns April 20-21 with a diverse slate of national and local leaders, rural experts, artists, and civic organizers, including Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council Susan Rice.
The free, two-day virtual conference will focus on how to repair a divisive and hurting nation.
The theme “Road to Repair” is a response to questions about how we build a nation that serves all and to calls for unity and repair, said Whitney Kimball Coe, director of the Rural Assembly, which presents the conference.
Sevier County Housing Summit
On Mar. 11 elected officials from city and town governments in Sevier County, along with mortgage lenders, commercial real estate developers, residential developers, planning commissions, and planners presented their perspective on the current housing conditions in the county.
A lack of affordable housing, along with a lack of housing overall, were two of the topics discussed along with being more prepared for commercial businesses. One individual compared the current housing market to the toilet paper frenzy of 2020, with the high demand leading to high prices.
From Nov. of 2019 to Nov. of 2020 the average sales price of homes in the county jumped from $155,072 to $283,643, an increase of 82.9%. This price rise was attributed to less homes being for sale as more and more people have been moving away from cities to come to smaller communities causing a 61% decrease in the number of homes for sale.
The Daily Yonder Groups Organize Effort to Delay OMB’s Redefinition of ‘Nonmetropolitan’ The Aspen Institute and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution say the Office and Management and Budget should pause to learn what the full impact of the change will be and to look at other issues.
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A group of researchers, service organizations, and nonprofit leaders are organizing a national campaign to urge the Office of Management and Budget to delay redefining Metropolitan Statistical Areas, the county categorization system that underlies many rural-focused federal programs.
The change would increase the minimum population of cities that constitute the core of Metropolitan Statistical Areas from 50,000 to 100,000. The proposal, which is open for comments through Friday, March 19, would result in reclassification of about 140 metropolitan areas as nonmetropolitan, affecting about 250 counties with 18 million residents, according to an OMB estimate based on
Like many Minnesota communities, the southwest Minnesota town of Windom has a shortage of homes for sale at a time when more housing is needed to keep businesses and the local economy humming.
Homes for workers are at a premium, but the Cottonwood County city of 4,400 residents needs to expand and preserve its housing stock across the spectrum, said Drew Hage, Windom’s economic development director.
By way of example, the city has a mere 15 homes on the market at a time when there should be 50 homes for sale to maintain a healthy vacancy rate, Hage said. A new 45-unit apartment building, he added, was filled to capacity within a month of being completed last fall.