by Joe Miller
Pocahontas County needs more housing. Housing prices have increased from a median of $99,930 in 2017 to $214,360 in 2024. That’s a roughly 114% increase, which is about four times higher than the overall inflation rate.
(If you’re interested in the nerdy details, those figures come from Redfin’s county-level Housing Market Track-er dataset. The figures are weighted average median prices. The inflation figure is compounded from annual Bureau of Labor Statistics’ yearly figures.)
Supply and demand is the first concept taught in economics. When demand for a good increases, the price goes up. The increased prices will normally encourage more people to produce the good, which will in turn bring prices back down.
If increased supply doesn’t materialize, then prices will continue to rise.
That’s why things like a painting or a rare stamp or a classic car will get more valuable over time. No one is making ‘67 Shelby GT 500s anymore, so the dwindling supply means that each remaining one is more valuable.
The process works in the other direction, as well.
In 2024, China built enough manufacturing capacity to produce enough solar panels to produce around 500GW/year of electricity.
Globally, demand for solar power was only around 270GW/year.
Prices cratered by nearly 50% over an 18-month span, and the top six Chinese manufacturers posted a combined $2.8 billion loss in a single quarter. At one-point, solar panels were selling for less than the cost of their production.
In principle, housing should work the same way. A 4x increase in prices should have led to a boom in new housing construction.
That hasn’t happened.
According to the Census Bureau, Pocahontas County issued exactly 24 building permits for private housing between 2020 and 2024 – including one year in which not a single permit was issued.
In a bit of an ironic twist, the spike in housing prices has come during a period when the overall population of Pocahontas County is shrinking.
Fewer residents should lead to lower demand and therefore lower prices. So why are housing prices rising so rapidly in the face of population declines?
One major culprit: vacationers. It’s people like, well, me who buy a second home in Pocahontas County.
The Census Bureau classifies a housing unit as vacant if it is not used as anyone’s permanent residence. That means houses that are for rent or for sale, but not yet rented or sold, houses that have been rented or sold but no one has moved in yet and houses that are for migrant workers.
The number also includes housing that is used for “seasonal, recreational or occasional” purposes.
According to the Census Bureau, 2,911 of the coun-ty’s 6,834 housing units (or just under 43%) fall into that category.
Of course, tourism also brings a lot of money to the county – tourists spend over $140 million each year in Pocahontas County. Occupancy taxes on all those rental properties add around $1.5 million to the county’s coffers – money that goes on to fund the hospital, the libraries, the fire departments and Parks and Recreation.
But all those tourism dollars don’t mean much if the hardworking folks who staff the restaurants, maintain the forests and clean the rooms cannot afford to live here.
The fix is straightforward. We need to build more housing.
We know the county can support far more residents. At its population peak in the 1920s, a shade over 15,000 people called Pocahontas County home. The county still housed around 11,000 when my family vacationed here in the 1980s.
Pocahontas County is the most rural county in the state, with an estimated population of just 7,600. That works out to around 8.3 residents per square mile. If the county were to return to its 1920s population, it’d still be the third least-densely populated county in the state, trailing only Pendleton and Webster counties.
The only proven way to bring down housing prices is to build more homes. But the five-per-year we’ve averaged recently isn’t going to cut it.
More housing makes it easier to buy a home, cheaper to rent one and even more attractive for potential new residents.
More residents and visitors mean more tax revenue to support things like improved ambulance services in the northern half of the county, more funding for our overstretched schools and more people to share the costs of whatever replaces our aging landfill.
Meanwhile, lower housing costs means more disposable income in the pockets of those who already live here.
All of that leads to a better quality of life for the people who call Pocahontas County home.
