Rural America Faces A Crisis In 'Adequate Housing'

Along the country roads that fan out from Ogallala, Neb., there are abandoned, weathered old farmhouses and collapsed barns, remnants of the hardscrabble settlers who first tapped the Ogallala aquifer and turned the dry, high plains into lush wheat and corn fields.

Like a lot of the Midwest, western Nebraska slowly emptied out over the years, which is why a lot of locals say the current housing shortage is nothing short of a paradox.

"It's a tricky situation," says Mary Wilson, director of the local economic development office in Ogallala, population 4,500. For Wilson, the crisis that rural towns face would be more aptly dubbed a shortage of adequate housing.

"People aren't updating their homes before they throw them on the market," she says. "And people are living in their homes longer here."

Economists say this phenomenon of "aging in place" is one of the main factors driving a shortage in housing nationwide. According to one analysis, people are living in their homes twice as long as they did before the Great Recession. Small towns like Ogallala are no exception to this trend. Ogallala's residents tend to skew older. And the town's remoteness and distance from a major power center like Omaha or Denver mean its problems with housing could be even harder to solve.

When Wilson moved to town from Colorado five years ago, drawn back to the small town Nebraska she grew up in, she and her husband had a hard time finding something suitable.

"We had to settle for what was available," Wilson says, driving down a quiet, leafy street of larger homes in the center of town. Many homes here were built for a far different time, before mechanization, when you needed big families to work the farms. Most are outdated. The few that are on the market, Wilson says, often need thousands of dollars worth of upgrades.

Most people can't — or aren't willing to — pay that.

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