A Leelanau County Housing Report, With Housing North Executive Director Yarrow Brown

Leelanau County has a residential rental vacancy rate of 0.2 percent, a median rental rate of $1,965, a median home price of $672,000, and a need for 2,335 new housing units by 2027.

Those statistics come courtesy of Housing North, the northwest Michigan organization working to “build awareness, influence policy, and expand capacity so communities can create housing solutions that meet their unique needs.” With a potentially game-changing housing conversation currently playing out in Northport, the Leelanau Ticker sat down with Housing North Executive Director Yarrow Brown for a report on the county’s housing progress.

Numbers-wise, Leelanau County is perhaps the toughest nut to crack of all 10 counties where Housing North is currently active. According to a dashboard on the organization's website, the income required to shoulder the median rent in Leelanau is $78,600. To afford the median home price, meanwhile, a household would have to be bringing in a combined income of $197,160. Those numbers dramatically outstrip every other county on Housing North’s radar, including Grand Traverse County.

“Leelanau has the highest home price,” says Brown, herself a Leelanau County resident. “A new build just up the road from me, a two bedroom/two bath, is $750,000. And if you couple that with the rental market and what’s available, we're in a really dire place. So, it's even more important in Leelanau than in other counties to put some things in motion [for housing reform], because otherwise you're never going to be able to build housing at an affordable rate for people.”

That reform could include things like allowing accessory dwelling units (ADUs), approving higher-density builds, utilizing tools like Payment In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT) and Tax Incremental Financing (TIF) to promote housing development, or simply streamlining approval processes to remove barriers for builders. Of the 14 units of government in Leelanau County, Brown tells The Ticker that “about half of them are making small, incremental changes to support housing, or at least talking about it.”

At the top of the list, she says, are Northport and Leelanau Township, which earlier this month hosted a community workshop to discuss using government-owned land for housing projects. While those conversations have generated some controversy – community members have pushed back against the potential conversion of Buster Dame, a popular Northport Park, into a housing site – Brown, who facilitated the workshop (pictured), characterizes the discussions as productive.

She also praises Suttons Bay – both the village and the township – for “really trying” to move the needle on housing; Empire, for undertaking a master plan update that will likely include zoning changes for housing; and Solon Township, which has reached out to Housing North to inquire about ADU language for its zoning ordinance.

But progress is lagging significantly behind benchmarks for what Leelanau County actually needs. Per Housing North, which conducts periodic housing needs assessments for the entire 10-county region, Leelanau requires 2,335 new housing units, including both rental and for-sale options, by 2027 in order to keep pace with demand. For reference, last year, just 405 housing permits were issued in the county.

Brown says Leelanau has a unique mix of attributes that slow housing progress. A big one is the county’s heavily rural nature, which makes it a challenging place for development.

“It’s just going to be tricky to build the density we need in Empire, or in Glen Arbor, or in places like Maple City, because they don't have the water and sewer infrastructure,” Brown explains.

Leelanau’s biggest challenge, though, is its stark split between affluence and poverty. While Leelanau has the highest median income of any county in the region ($82,200), it also has a hefty share of households struggling to make ends meet. United Way classifies 43 percent of Leelanau County households as ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed), and another 6 percent fall below the federal poverty line. According to Brown, that “disparity between the haves and the have-nots” becomes heavily apparent at housing-related focus groups, or at any public meetings where zoning changes are on the docket.

“A lot of the people that show up [to those meetings] are older; they are the retirees, not the working residents,” Brown explains. “It’s hard to capture the people who are actually experiencing the housing crisis, because they're working; they have kids; they're not able to go to a lot of these meetings and engage with us. And so, everything ends up getting dictated by the people that are affluent and have a lot of time on their hands.”

She continues: “A lot of the older people in our region just do not understand the struggle, both because they’re affluent and because, when they first bought a house, it was only $60,000, so ‘What’s the big deal?’ And then some of the people on the affluent side also just don’t want to see things change. I had a business owner say to me, ‘Well, if we need 2,300 homes in Leelanau County, that's 2,300 more cars on the road, and I don't want more traffic.’ I’ve had people say, ‘Well, I don't care if someone has to commute three hours to clean a house in Leelanau. That's what they do in Los Angeles.’ Some people really don't care, and that makes me really sad.”

Brown points to the recent Northport workshop as something communities could try replicating to get a more representative segment of the population. “It was in the evening, so the timing worked out; they provided food; they had child care. They really thought about it,” Brown says. “And as a result, there were over 100 people there.”

More than just trying to reach the full population, though, Brown thinks Leelanau municipalities simply need to recognize the need for housing as a means of keeping their communities alive. In her mind, that means adopting written policies supporting housing in their master plans and zoning documents – and then staying the course toward those goals, even when there is loud, vocal opposition.

“That's the hard part, because our elected officials are very swayed by comment,” Brown concludes. “My hope is that they would have thicker skin and be able to go and reflect back on their master plans – on the decisions that were made collectively, and the charge of that unit of government – and not just listen to the NIMBYs or the naysayers.”