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City and school leaders announce more than 100 apartments on the way to relieve housing crunch

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Editorials

February 16, 2022 - 9:54 AM

School board members Dan Willis, left, and Doug Dunlap in the new science and technology center on the IHS campus. On Monday, the board announced Iola's three elementary schools will be repurposed into apartments. Photo by Vickie Moss

Iola leaders helped ensure the city’s future in two big ways Monday night.

First, local school board members announced the district’s three elementary buildings will be renovated into apartments.

And second, Iola council members rezoned land so that a developer can convert an abandoned nursing home into apartments.

Altogether, the changes will add more than 100 one- and two-bedroom apartments to Iola’s housing stock as well as several single-family homes, duplexes and possibly four-plexes in the case of the school sites.

That’s hundreds more people shopping for food and clothing, dining in our restaurants, buying fuel, paying utility bills and sales taxes and overall making our city a more bustling place.

THE NEWS is a balm to our collective psyche, worn thin by the warning that a dearth of affordable housing threatens the future of our biggest industries, Gates Corporation and Russell Stover Candies.

No more. Now we have  concrete answers that affordable housing is on the way.

And it couldn’t be more ideal than with the four locations scattered about town in established neighborhoods. 

For the schools, the investment is substantial on two fronts.

The first is when voters paved the way in 2019 by passing a $35 million bond issue. In the last two years that has meant  expenditures of $2.8 million to replace the HVAC at the middle school, $7.2 million to build a new science and technology center on the high school campus that opened last fall, and $25 million to erect an all-inclusive K-5 elementary school that opens the beginning of next school year.

Already, the jobs created and the disbursement of funds for these projects have been significant.

Not to be lost in all these brick-and-mortar success stories is the difference it makes to our students and teachers to have state-of-the-art facilities, because yes, they make a difference to everyone’s educational experience.

The second leg of the successful school bond issue was assuring voters that the old elementary schools would be repurposed in some fashion.

That school district leaders secured the top-notch architect and design firm BNIM of Kansas City, Mo., is something to crow about. BNIM plans to plow $20 million into the old schools. Jefferson and Lincoln were built in 1939, followed by McKinley in 1950.

An investment of that magnitude assures that not only the integrity of the buildings will be kept but that they likely will look better than ever.

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