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Rural Housing Playbook Presentation
November 20th, 2008 by Mike Knutson
Not surprising, my favorite presentation at the SDHDA Housing Conference was “Implementing the Rural Housing Playbook” by Rita Edwards of the South Dakota Rural Housing Collaborative. Rita was gracious enough to allow me to embed her presentation in the post below.
What I learned
A few of the main points that I took away from the presentation include:
- The Rural Housing Playbook is an introduction into the housing development process. It serves as a guide for rural communities who recognize the need to do something about housing but don’t know where to start.
- The real work will get done in a planning process that the Collaborative is implementing. (more on that in a future post). I really wish we’d had this process in place when we started our work in Miner County.
- The Rural Housing Playbook is about creating a plan for your community’s housing needs and not just building a specific housing project. Everybody wants to see action, and a project does that. But a project is more likely to fail when it is not a part of a community plan. Case in point, back in the 1980s, Howard, South Dakota had a rental housing development that failed miserably, in part because it wasn’t done within the context of a community plan.
- The Playbook currently focuses on single family housing and not rental housing development. That’s not to say that rental housing isn’t important in some communities. The Collaborative just didn’t have the resources to address rental housing.
- Housing Development is Economic Development, but just building housing won’t create a sustainable economy in a rural community. I think that statement fits well into the Rural Learning Center’s maxim “It’s all connected”.
To get your own copy of the Rural Housing Playbook, go to the Collaborative’s website . In a few days, they’ll have a signup form for you to complete. They will then send you an electronic version of the Playbook for free.
Tags: rural housing, Rural Housing Collaborative, rural housing development process, Rural Housing Playbook, SDHDA, South Dakota
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