Rural America faces housing shortage. How one town is addressing it.
In one unfinished house of this cul-de-sac, the drywall is so new you can still smell the joint compound. In another, a carpenter works on beveling the counter of the kitchen island.
“We were desperate,” says Verlin Janssen, a city councilman for Gothenburg, of the mini building boom. There was so little available housing in this community of 3,448 that nurses, factory workers, managers, and others were turning down job offers to relocate here because they couldn’t find houses to live in.
It may be hard to believe, given the region’s overall population decline, cheap labor, and abundant land, but parts of rural America are struggling with a housing shortage. It affects everyone from low-income families to midlevel professionals. Even executives of hospitals
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