(Picture: our kitchen, that January, after all our belongings got soaked by a burst pipe in the storage facility)
Another thing you’ll hear me talking about as I campaign is the need for housing the people who work in Ankeny. Now, the main reason for that is that the church is one place people turn when they can’t pay their rent, so I hear the stories of people needing to stretch paychecks and figure out lean months. But another reason is that I moved to Ankeny on December 1, 2013. I had never owned a home, and never really aspired to owning a home (I don’t like debt, or, as my neighbors can attest, yard work). I spent a month looking for good rental options, and found that the only apartments I could rent were ~$1300/month for 2 bedrooms. Beth was leaving her job, and we didn’t know what her prospects were going to be here. We’d been stretching things a bit in North Carolina for 3 years already, and wanted to live within our means. And we couldn’t do that at $1300/month.
So, in the first week of December, staying with generous parishioners, I went out house-hunting, with Beth and the kids still in North Carolina. As a realtor friend said to me, “Nate. There IS no market in December.” We wound up managing to take advantage of that fact, and paid $143,500 for a 3BR house originally listed at $160,000 (for everyone in the neighborhood, yes, I kept our assessments down for the next two years!), at something like $930/month, all told. We were lucky that we still had money for a down-payment, six years after I’d left my last full-time job to go to Divinity School.
We’ve had developers do great work in building out a wider variety of housing since then, but we continue in our years-long worker shortage. On the City Council, I’ll work with developers to look for ways to get people the housing they need to work here in Ankeny, whether that work is at a church, in a school, in a senior living community, at Casey’s, or at McDonald’s.