You don’t get very far into a discussion of the labor shortage in Iola before the town’s lack of affordable housing surfaces.
Iola has a fair number of available houses on the upper end. It has a scattering of public, income-limited homes and apartments on the lower end. And it has hundreds of very old homes — many vacant — whose potential for rehabilitation is ebbing fast.
“What we desperately need,” says Jim Gilpin of Iola Industries, “is affordable housing for working families. We’ve been at this…
If you build it, they will come
