Castles For A Cause Contest
If every person’s home is their castle, then building a sandcastle on the beach is a great way to think about housing and helping the Dare Housing Foundation get the word out about the work they are doing.
“Castles for a Cause” is how the newly formed Dare Housing Foundation (DHF) is combining fun in the sand with their message about a critical need for housing on the Outer Banks. It’s a fun way for anyone to get involved by building a house—in this case probably not a permanent home, but at least it’s a start!
Entering the contest is easy. Visit Castles For A Cause online, decide the age group or size of the group building your dream castle, build it, take a picture, and send it in. With a little skill and maybe a bit of luck, some cool beach merchandise could be headed your way. The contest runs during the summer months.
It is an excellent way to support an organization that just started its mission to “identify and expand housing opportunities” for people living and working in Dare County.
Housing, or more accurately, the lack of housing, is a critical need on the Outer Banks, and that shortage impacts everyone.
Summer is our peak season and, of course, it’s understood that there are, at times, going to be lines in stores and restaurants. But what’s making those lines and that additional waiting time worse is that there is no place for all the summer workers needed to staff businesses to live. Those shortages show up in the restaurants that cannot open seven days a week in the peak season and in the retail stores where shoppers have trouble finding help.
The Dare Housing Foundation is focused on permanent year-round housing for Dare County residents rather than seasonal, but a lack of housing in one area certainly spills over to other areas. Of course, our staffing needs go way up in the summer, but even in the off-season, our businesses have year-round employees who work in reservations and property management and manage stores and restaurants. And to truly thrive, all communities need police, first responders, medical personnel, and town and county office staff.
All those essential people are part of what makes the Outer Banks such a wonderful place to live, work, and visit.
Dare County, which is where most of the Outer Banks is located, is experiencing the same housing issues that seem to be constantly in the news of our nation. Exacerbating those concerns, however, are the same concerns that seem to plague almost every location where the most important industry is tourism: property that typically would go to housing the workforce is in the rental market.
Those homes and properties that so many of our visitors enjoy every year are at the center of our economy and needed, so we’re certainly not complaining. It has, however, created a significant housing shortage for our workforce.
The DHF focus initially will be on creating homes for essential workforce employees. There are successful models for how that can be done. One of the most tried and true methods has been to create land trusts where the local government owns the land, but the home that is on the land is owned by the homeowner.
The ins and outs of how to make a land trust work are fairly complex, but they do work and have been in place and successfully used for 30 or 40 years in some locations.
There are other options for creating workforce housing as well. There may be ways that multi-unit homes and apartments could be created, and there may be other options that no one has quite thought of yet.
The DHF is less than a year old, so there is still a lot of discussion and thought going into what will be the path forward—and it may well be that there will be more than one path to be explored.
And who knows, maybe the perfect design to help our workforce is just waiting to be created in a sandcastle by the sea.
