"If You Could Afford to Live Here, You'd Already Be Home!"

More than speaking out, Lake Region became a financial supporter of the Central Community Housing Trust. Likewise, Lake Region and a handful of other local employers have become contributors to the Chaska Community Land Trust, another of the city’s affordable housing efforts in recent years.

Now, Roehl says, “Chaska is a city that I consider extremely proactive in listening to the needs of employers.”

It might also be a city at the forefront of a suburban trend to come. Central Community Housing Trust began work on a project in Roseville last year, the redevelopment of the Har Mar apartment building. And this winter, another developer, Bloomington-based Hartford Group, announced that it had closed on financing for Lakewood Apartments in Lino Lakes, a project “designed for work force families with qualifying incomes.”

Meanwhile other Twin Cities suburban communities have established land trusts similar to Chaska’s, and some of their civic and business leaders are taking steps to ensure that there’s housing stock for a range of workers and incomes in their communities.

“I don’t know that many employers are aware of this issue yet,” Roehl says—but more should be.

$18,000 Trial Periods

A household would need to earn $76,056 to comfortably afford—at no more than 30 percent of gross income—a $240,000 home, the median price in 2006 in Carver County, where Chaska is located. That puts home ownership well beyond the practical or prudent reach of most hourly wage earners, even those working in skilled manufacturing jobs.

Affordability has gotten harder to come by for many people, not just in Carver County, but around the state. As the median home price in Minnesota rose 32 percent, from roughly $150,000 to more like $200,000, between 2000 and 2005, the median income fell slightly, according to a December 2006 report from the Minnesota Housing Partnership, a nonprofit affordable-housing advocacy group. 

Is the problem simply that employers aren’t paying their workers enough? For its part, Lake Region Manufacturing, a 60-year-old company that’s an original-equipment and contract manufacturer of medical devices and components, says it provides a “very competitive” wage and benefits. Production workers start at $12.40 to $14.35 an hour, Roehl says, and can earn up to $19.55 an hour as they gain experience.

Nonetheless, Human Resources Director Clayton Benish says Lake Region has had difficulty attracting workers, something he first noticed a little more than a decade ago, when the company underwent an expansion and needed to ramp up its work force and about the same time that a run-up in local housing prices began. Benish knew he needed to recruit workers from Minneapolis and St. Paul, and he looked especially to communities of recent immigrants from southeast Asia and Russia; Lake Region had already had good experiences with the work ethic and skill level of immigrants from those regions, he says.

But he saw a pattern in his efforts to grow the company’s employee rolls: Either the lack of affordable housing in Chaska came up during the interview process and cut the conversation short, or “in some instances, we would be successful in attracting them for a period of time,” Benish says. But when new employees tired of their long commutes after a few months, “they would seek an area to live and find that there was no availability here for them, so then they would quit.”

The cost to the company was substantial. Because the microassembly and other production positions at Lake Region Manufacturing require skill and several months of intensive training, those employee “trials” of three or four months were happening at a price of about $17,000 to $18,000 per hire, Benish says.