Timberline Mountain Ski Resort General Manager Thomas Price made a presentation Sunday before the legislative Joint Commision on Economic Development.
Timberline Mountain Ski Resort General Manager Thomas Price made a presentation Sunday before the legislative Joint Commision on Economic Development.
He said when the Perfect North Slopes company out of Indiana purchased the bankrupt Tucker County property three years ago, the infrastructure was nearly useless.
“We took three old chair lifts off the mountain and replaced them with brand new technology. One is a high speed, six person detachable chairlift, the first one in the state,” Price said. “We made a real statement that this was going to be a mountain that everybody could trust and that they should come and see. We spent almost $9 million on chairlifts, the rest was in lodge improvements, parking lot improvements, and a lot of snowmaking equipment.”
Price said, with state support, Timberline has made upwards of $20 million in capital improvements. He said the resort has an in-season workforce of 250 with a $6 million payroll output over the past three years.
He said there’s a challenge for his employees to find affordable housing anywhere near the mountain.
“It’s really tough when the cheapest house you can find is $500,00,” Price said. “We’re surrounded by so much forest service land, federal lands, that there really isn’t a whole lot of development that’s going to happen in the county.”
Price said completing the Corridor H project will encourage area growth and housing availability.
“I think it is really going to be one of the keys to making some of the towns like Elkins or even Buckhannon just a lot closer, right into our back door,” Price said. “I think that could really fix a lot of the housing issues that we currently have.”
Price said Perfect North Slopes is also interested in managing or consolidating with the neighboring Canaan Valley Resort.
“They have been struggling in the last few years to really put out a product that can compare with ours,” he said. “We think we could do a great job with that ski area and I think it could really complement what we have going on in the valley.”
The Mountaineer Recovery Village, a sober-living housing development being built in the Eastern Panhandle, is getting extra funding from Congress to help get it off the ground.
The Mountaineer Recovery Village, a sober-living housing development being built in the Eastern Panhandle, is getting extra funding from Congress to help get it off the ground.
The development is part of Mountaineer Recovery Center, a substance use treatment campus in Kearneysville. The project will provide patients with housing and transportation after treatment to help them re-enter the workforce.
The funding comes after a Congressionally directed spending request made by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito last year, and will see $1.5 million go towards the development.
“This will help members new to recovery reintegrate back into the workforce in a healthy living environment and reconnect with their families and help break the patterns of relapse,” Mountaineer Recovery Center CEO Jonathan Hartiens said in a statement announcing the funding.
In an email to West Virginia Public Broadcasting, Hartiens said the funding will specifically go towards infrastructure for the community, including water and sewer utilities.
“The funding is important because many grants offer funding for personnel and services, but very few offer funding for construction or infrastructure,” Hartiens said. “This project could not be completed without these funds to provide the infrastructure for the village since grants do not provide funding for these kinds of costs.”
The project officially broke ground last October during an official ceremony. It’s in the middle of its first phase of development, which will see three houses supporting 30 residents that are expected to be fully built by July 1. The community is set to house around 200 families when completed.
Officials broke ground Friday afternoon on the Mountaineer Recovery Village, a first-of-its-kind sober-living housing development in the Eastern Panhandle.
Officials broke ground Friday afternoon on the Mountaineer Recovery Village, a first-of-its-kind sober-living housing development in the Eastern Panhandle.
The development is part of Mountaineer Recovery Center (MRC), a substance use treatment campus in Kearneysville. It’s set to provide its patients with housing and transportation after treatment and help them re-enter the workforce.
CEO Jonathan Hartiens said it’s a way to help provide the resources and environment needed for those struggling with substance use disorder.
“It’s so easy for people to revert to drug and alcohol abuse when they hit hurdles trying to reintegrate into the community,” Hartiens said. “Those hurdles can feel so insurmountable and with no other resources, they just as easily say ‘forget it.’”
The first homes being built are focused on housing for those who have been involved with the justice system, including those who have been recently released from incarceration and have been undergoing substance use treatment.
“One of the key components for people that are in recovery is to have a safe place to be,” said Neil McLaughlin of nonprofit Semper Liberi. The organization cooperates with the MRC to help those discharged from the program re-enter their communities. “Having a place where others around them identify with the issues they’re confronting as well is a much safer place to be than just going to the community at large.”
Among those present at the event were Sen. Shelley Moore Capito and state Delegate Jason Barrett, as well as representatives of Rep. Alex Mooney, Sen. Joe Manchin and Gov. Jim Justice.
“It’s a vision that’s coming to life,” Capito said. “Housing is very difficult for people who are transitioning and have been in recovery and are trying to set their lives on the positive course they want it to be on.”
The project has entered its first phase, building three homes that will house around 30 residents. The community is set to house around 200 families when completed.
Companies like Airbnb and Vrbo are part of the same gig economy as ride-sharing apps like Uber, or food delivery services like Doordash – they act as online marketplaces that connect property owners with tenants for a short period. They’ve become increasingly popular as an alternative to hotels, allowing tourists to stay in unique lodgings in the communities they’re visiting.
As West Virginia becomes renowned for its outdoor tourism spots, short-term vacation rentals like Airbnbs and Vrbos are increasingly in demand.
These companies are part of the same gig economy as ride-sharing apps like Uber, or food delivery services like Doordash – they act as online marketplaces that connect property owners with tenants for a short period. They’ve become increasingly popular as an alternative to hotels, allowing tourists to stay in unique lodgings in the communities they’re visiting.
Jamie Lopez, a real estate agent based in Martinsburg, has been an Airbnb owner and consultant for six years.
“I think about 25 percent of my traffic comes from tourism,” Lopez said. “And when I tell local people that people are actually coming to Martinsburg to be a tourist, it shocks them sometimes.”
Lopez says the average Airbnb renter tends to be more invested in the community they’re staying in, noting they spend more money in town and contribute more to the local tourism economy.
“The same $100 spent on an Airbnb spends about $100 in town. They spend multiple days in town. It’s a huge difference, the traveler that stays in an Airbnb,” Lopez said.
West Virginia’s Secretary of Tourism Chelsea Ruby says the state has been monitoring the growth of short-term rentals for some time. She says the state has seen a huge increase in the sales tax revenue from what are called “marketplace facilitators” like Airbnb since 2019.
“In the month of August of this year, there were $10.6 million in taxable sales, and the state collected $638,000 in sales tax on these properties,” Ruby said.
That’s an increase of more than 350 percent since the state began collecting sales tax from these companies three years ago.
For the companies’ part, they’ve made more than $100 million dollars in in-state revenue over the past year, with around 4,400 vacation rental listings statewide. The popularity of these rentals has gotten such that West Virginia’s tourism office has partnered with the rental sharing company Vrbo to promote some of the state’s tourist destinations.
“We’re clearly one of the fastest growing vacation rental states in the country as far as new rentals coming online,” Ruby said. “But we’re lagging behind in consumer education, meaning that we’re quickly becoming a vacation rental state, but we haven’t told the world that we’re a vacation rental state.”
But the success of short-term rentals across the state’s real estate and tourism industries could be putting a strain on local workers, especially in more rural areas. Daniel Eades, associate professor and rural development specialist for WVU Extension, says it makes it harder for workers to find housing in the communities they work in.
“This ends up causing real problems when those rental properties that folks could afford at $750 are now being used as short-term rentals where the owner can get $1,000 a month,” Eades said.
It’s not a problem that’s unique to West Virginia, but rural communities in the state are seeing the effects. A town hall meeting document from Davis in Tucker County says 30 housing units in the town have been converted into short-term rentals as of last February.
“I think the absolute number isn’t that high,” Eades said. “But when your town only has 500 homes, that’s five percent of the housing stock that’s potentially been taken out and is being used for short-term rental.”
As one of West Virginia’s premiere vacation areas, around 37 percent of Tucker County’s housing units are second homes. The county average in West Virginia is 3.9 percent, and the national average is 3.1 percent.
But property owners converting homes into Airbnbs isn’t the sole reason why housing is hard to come by in rural communities. Emily Wilson-Hauger of Elkins-based community development organization Woodlands Development and Lending, says it’s an issue that dates back to the Great Recession and housing crisis of the late 2000s.
“I think just the lack of any significant housing being built in the last, you know, 10, 12 years is at play,” Wilson-Hauger said. “High construction costs in the area, it’s pretty remote. Developable land is really hard to find.”
Old housing stock and a stagnant market led to a shrinking workforce in areas like Tucker County. In 2015, Woodlands launched an assessment of housing needs in the area.
“The bigger issue is that even at that time, the employers, the major employers and the small businesses, were saying they could not find enough workers,” Wilson-Hauger said. “Almost everyone we interviewed, every focus group, those employers attributed that to the lack of workforce housing.”
A more recent housing assessment made by economic development consulting firm Downstream Strategies says there is an estimated deficit of 321 units of workforce housing in the county.
State leaders have recognized the issue and are trying to fix it. House Bill 4502 was passed during the legislature’s last regular session, which encourages the development of new housing in the communities that need them by offering tax credits to development companies.
The bill officially took effect in September, and Chelsea Ruby says the tourism office is working with the Department of Commerce and Department of Economic Development to designate areas in the state in need of more workforce housing. She says it’s a way to support these local communities so that they can in turn support the influx of tourists.
“There are a good number of state and federal credits that help with low-income housing,” Ruby said. “But, well, we don’t have our incentive programs to help with that middle market housing, which is exactly where these houses come into play.”
Wilson-Hauger and her team at Woodlands are doing their part to help as well. They’ve just finished building an eight-unit townhouse project in Tucker County and have plans for a larger workforce housing subdivision in the future.
“All the things that go into a development like that will just take time, because we are targeting this median income range, where there’s not a lot of public subsidies to support it, like there is for very low-income households,” Wilson-Hauger said.
And though housing remains a need, they think they can strike a balance between vacation rentals and providing comfortable, long-term housing for the locals that need it.
“I use Airbnb and when I go on vacation, too, you know, they are a very fun way to experience the community and the destination, they can be a really great wealth generator for families,” Wilson-Hauger said.
West Virginia will receive millions of dollars from the federal government to help provide housing across the state.
Updated on Tuesday, May 17 at 3:30 p.m.
West Virginia will receive millions of dollars from the federal government to help provide housing across the state.
Sens. Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito announced Monday that the state would receive more than $41 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). However, on Tuesday, Manchin’s office reached out to WVPB with a correction, stating that the total funds would be closer to $37 million.
In the press release, Manchin highlighted the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on housing and expressed his gratitude to HUD for helping to, “expand opportunities for stable, accessible housing in our communities.”
The money will go to 20 West Virginia housing authorities. The state of West Virginia itself will receive close to $27 million across six grants and programs including the Recovery Housing Program aimed at providing transitional housing for individuals in recovery from a substance-use disorder.
The city of Huntington will receive the next-largest portion of more than $2 million across three grants.
Other recipients include the state’s major cities like Charleston, and Wheeling, as well as four counties: Marion, Kanawha, Cabell, and Mingo. The Housing Authority of the City of Point Pleasant is the only entity on the list that is not a state or local government.
*Editor’s note: This story was edited to reflect the corrected funding amount.
Issues of housing and homelessness can be very complex. A group called Humans of Morgantown is using art created by unhoused citizens to bring a humanizing perspective to the discussion.Chris Schulz spoke with Corbin Mills and Jordan Stosic about the group’s “Neighbors Beyond Neighborhoods” exhibit.
Issues of housing and homelessness can be very complex. A group called Humans of Morgantown is using art created by unhoused citizens to bring a humanizing perspective to the discussion.
Chris Schulz spoke with Corbin Mills and Jordan Stosic about the group’s “Neighbors Beyond Neighborhoods” exhibit.
Schulz: What is the Humans of Morgantown Project?
Mills: Humans of Morgantown is a partnership between Morton Hall Agency, the WVU College of Media and the Morgantown City committee on unsheltered homelessness. We have a bunch of backers and fantastic partners we’re working with.
What we’re doing with Humans of Morgantown is really just trying to tell the story of our unsheltered neighbors, and then maybe shed light and create a conversation.
We have an exhibit set up in Morgantown Art Party on Walnut Street. It is every Saturday and Sunday until April 21, which is our closing exhibit on Thursday night.
One thing that’s a pretty common misconception is that people don’t sometimes look at their unsheltered neighbors, like people who have passions and hobbies and goals and dreams. A lot of our unsheltered neighbors are fantastic artists. This is a place where we could really show off the talent, what they have, and what they bring to the community.
Schulz: Jordan, do you have anything to add to that?
Stosic: Humans of Morgantown is a space and it’s a way for our community members to meet each other, learn about who our neighbors are, and sort of work to understand the experiences of our neighbors experiencing homelessness and create some sort of a destigmatizing notion.
Schulz: Jordan, can you explain to me how this project came to be?
Stosic: Over the last four months, our Humans of Morgantown team has been developing this concept for an exhibit where we really settled on creating a space where our community can meet, learn, and understand the experiences of our neighbors
Mills: I think our favorite thing has just been getting to know everyone in the community that we wouldn’t have had otherwise the chance to meet. Whether that’s the unsheltered artists that we’re featuring in our exhibit, whether that’s the people at Friendship House, who are doing fantastic social work, like recovery coaches, and peer support specialists.
It’s been really great to see it all come together, and to really create those connections and build those relationships with people that we may have otherwise not been able to do.
Stosic: Definitely. And that’s something he mentioned, the Friendship House. That connection was absolutely huge for us. With the help of everyone at the Friendship House, we were able to feature a lot of great work.
On our opening day we had a couple of musicians come by and play on the keyboard, play some guitar. We had so many artists produce paintings, mixed media work, we had sculptures. There’s a whole plethora of things
Alexandria Holsclaw
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
A sculpture on display at the “Neighbors Beyond Neighborhoods” art exhibit at the Morgantown Art Party.
Schulz: So Jordan, can you tell me a little bit about the focus on the unhoused population? Why choose art as the way to communicate your message?
Stosic: Housing status is not expressive of morality, value, humanity. So creating a space that’s fun and creative was sort of our idea where we can show the value and the fun and the life and humanity through art, and their own forms of expression.
Schulz: Corbin, what can you add to that?
Mills: A person is so much more than their housing situation. And I think there might be a misconception that some people have that a person’s housing situation kind of defines who they are. And what we discovered is that that’s just absolutely not true.
Art is a great way for us to tell these stories, because it’s kind of a universal medium, right? Everybody understands photos, everybody understands paintings, everybody gets their own little take away from it. So being able to use something as universal as art to tell those stories that people may not have otherwise been hearing has been successful. For us, it’s been a really rewarding part of the process.
Schulz: What do you think is the importance of this type of project right now?
Mills: I think what a lot of people realized over COVID is that community is everything, especially when you may not have the chance to see people in person or spend time with people socially, like you may have before.
Your relationships, whether it’s with friends or family or even people that you live next to where you see them every day in your daily life, all that stuff is really, really important. It’s crucial to having a happy and successful life. And we wanted to just remind people that that level of community can be extended to everybody, and everybody benefits from that level of community. Everybody benefits from those like, you know, good vibes and positive friendships and relationships.
Stosic: Which is why we did choose to title the exhibit “Neighbors Beyond Neighborhoods,” because we really wanted to challenge people’s idea of what it means to be a neighbor.
Is that someone you just see at the store or constantly see at the park down the street? Is it someone that sends their kids off on the same school bus? You know, what really does constitute a neighbor?
Schulz: Corbin what’s been the biggest standout to you?
Mills: At the end of our exhibit, after walking through, you get a chance to write your thoughts down and your reflections on a post it note. So by the end of Saturday at like 4 p.m., when everyone had left and the exhibit was kind of winding down, we as a team went over and had the chance to take a look at what people were saying after they’d gone to the exhibit.
It was really powerful to see what people had written down. You had people saying, “Wow, you know, I never knew that the people around me that I see every day were this talented. I’ve never considered the circumstances of the things that I saw today, in today’s exhibit.”
Schulz: Jordan, what was the standout for you?
Stosic: The standout for me I think would have to be getting to see how this exhibit was sort of intended to do meet my neighbors. Actually getting to now walk down the street and be like, “I know Doug, I know Dana, I know April.” It’s honestly so nice as well, because that is a friendly face, someone you can wave to.
The exhibit featuring their stories is something that I hope gives everyone else that same sort of feeling of, “Wow, I now know a couple more people in my community and have some friendly faces to smile at.”
Mills: Yeah, I actually have something to add now that I was thinking about as Jordan was talking.
The standout moment for me was seeing the people whose art we featured coming to the exhibit and see themselves and their work being celebrated by everyone in a way that they really had not been able to experience before. And to see them see other people appreciating and loving what they were creating was really, really rewarding.