Housing

Our goal.

Berrien County’s Strategic Leadership Council is a collaboration of individuals from the public, private, and non-profit sectors who seek to collectively identify countywide challenges and devise thoughtful solutions to them. Council members found a clear consensus around the identification of housing as a challenge. But neither the specific problems nor their solutions were as clear. This StoryMap tool is the byproduct of the SLC’s effort to allow for data to drive initial understanding about the state of the housing market, then to have that initial understanding vetted by the expertise of its membership. Ultimately, the process seeks to yield clear and actionable solutions to housing challenges. Moreover, it is understood that standard housing “studies” may give a snapshot of the current conditions but because it takes a period of many years to see change, a single snapshot may not be what is required. Rather, the approach taken by the SLC is to build a durable, credible, recurring methodology to regularly take the “temperature” of Berrien County’s housing sector, understand how it is trending and evolving, and respond accordingly with tools for action. The work is made possible by generous funding from organizations that include the United Way of Southwest Michigan, the Berrien Community Foundation, the Pokagon Fund, and the SLC itself.