Project an important investment in community

Dear Editor,

Recently, I toured several Nebraska towns with the Nebraska Community Foundation and its People Attraction Committee. The goal of this committee is to share how our communities can be more attractive places for people to live. It was interesting to see all the progress and investments our fellow rural communities are making across Nebraska.

Several of the biggest people attraction issues discussed in People Attraction Committee include housing, daycare, youth engagement, and recreation opportunities.

Housing seems like a counterintuitive problem; if the population is shrinking you would think that there would be a lot of houses to buy or rent. But that is simply not playing out in housing availability, with the most recent housing study showing McCook is 200 housing units short of demand. According to the census data for Red Willow County, the number of occupied housing units shrank from 4,663 in 2010 to 4,532 in 2020; with the number of vacant housing units increasing to a total of 625 in the 2020 census.

Several of the communities we toured, including Hebron and Superior, discussed how they have been dealing with similar issues of high vacancy yet low availability. Although plenty of these vacant properties need rehabilitation, many are in livable condition if they were put on the market.

Our City, MEDC, and others have been working on the housing shortage for some time, but there are no easy ways to address the challenges for new construction and improving occupancy rates of our existing housing stock to meet our economic vitality needs.

We also saw how communities are leveraging their recreation and cultural activities to make their communities more attractive. From a new fitness center in Hebron to the Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, these can be the selling points that helps attract or retain people to our communities.

McCook has an excellent arts scene, three great lakes only a short drive from here, the ever busy Kiplinger arena, great high school and college athletic programs to follow, and much more. This fall voters will get to decide on a recreation bond funded by sales tax for a new swimming pool and ball fields. It is access to these cultural and recreational opportunities that help us offset the fact we are so geographically distant from an urban center.

As other recent opinion letters have pointed out, sales taxes have an economic impact. But there also is a real, but often hidden, economic impact of failing to attract and retain residents too. While the demographic realities we face are rather grim, our community has many assets to show current and prospective residents why our community is an excellent choice for them to live.

Swimming pools and ball fields alone won’t change our demographic future, but we must continue to make investments like these in our community if we want to effectively compete to be the place people choose to call home. Please vote Yes for McCook’s recreational bond this fall.

Sean Wolfe,

CFO,

Community Hospital.