By Stephen Smoot
One of the biggest challenges for Pilgrim’s Pride’s massive workforce in the area has lain in finding affordable housing for both its native and foreign-born workers. A stopgap answer for a time saw the company working directly with local landlords, but workers will soon have access to a more permanent solution.
Last fall, Region Eight Planning and Economic Development hosted a presentation from Daniel Eades, a West Virginia University Extension Service-based associate professor and rural development specialist. He went to Petersburg to discuss findings from a West Virginia Housing Development Fund and Virginia Polytechnic University study on housing in the Mountain State.
The purpose lay in “helping communities address housing needs” by “looking at where and why things are happening.”
At that meeting, Hardy County Commissioner David Workman related that while campaigning for re-election that he encountered instances where up to 13 people occupied a single dwelling, making do as best they could. Often, they would cohabitate with workers on different shifts and sleep in the same beds, but at different times.
Many factors, not just need for workers’ housing, has created the market pressures. Pilgrim’s Pride, however, has invested $14.8 million into a project that will at the same time provide housing opportunities for workers and families while also freeing up existing housing stock for others. This is on top of $860,000 already spent to provide more support for workers.
Tim Cullers, project manager for Pilgrims, wanted to make one thing clear at the start. Some social media posts have alleged that the two apartment buildings nearing completion on Water Street will only house workers from abroad.
“If we have Americans who need housing, I have helped them,” explained Cullers, who added that “this is for Pilgrim’s employees” and explained that place of origin and ethnicity had no bearing on who would have the opportunity to get housing in the new complex.
On the first level of the east building, Pilgrim’s officials elected to scrub plans to put six apartments on the ground floor in favor of providing a vital service. “We saw the need for a day care,” shared Cullers “and we redid the whole ground floor.”
The day care facility will have three large common rooms to separate children by age group, a fully functional kitchen, bathrooms for adults and children, a laundry area, and a fenced in yard for the children to play outside. The reception area has a single entry for security purposes.
“Our folks that run Little Peeps will be running this one as well,” Cullers said. When completed, it will have a capacity to care for between 90 and 120 children.
The project’s concept arose after the pandemic when, as Cullers noted “we saw that we didn’t have enough for people coming in.” Additionally “we had Little Peeps. It only took six months to fill that up.”
This created situations where families with children that had both parents working at Pilgrims had to have one work at night and the other during the day. Also said Cullers “some have been here long enough that they have had one or two children since they have been here.”
A release from Pilgrim’s states that this will help move workers from more outlying areas into Hardy County. This will relieve workers of commuting costs, while “creating a positive economic impact due to money being spent at Hardy County businesses, restaurants, and other services.
Some come from as far away as Cumberland to work at the complex.
The building’s design features spacious hallways. Cullers explained that he wanted the halls wide enough to accommodate moving in larger pieces of furniture such as couches and beds so that tenants would have no difficulties there. The hallway runs down the center of each floor and the doors lock on a keypad system.
Combined, the buildings will have 86 apartments. Apartment are available in one, two, or three bedroom options. A combined kitchen and living room area opens to the hallway. The kitchen has a full slate of necessary appliances.
Rents include all utilities and garbage collection. No pets, save service animals with official paperwork, will be allowed. Also, individual apartments will have limits on how many can reside there. Each floor has its own laundry facilities and a convenience store will come onsite soon after it opens.
Between 2020 and 2022, the number of housing units in the Potomac Highlands declined to just under 42,700 units. Almost 18 percent of housing was constructed prior to 1939 and a similar percentage are mobile homes.
According to the Virginia Tech and W. Va Housing Fund Study, “the region’s inadequate housing stock and the general lack of affordable sound housing limits the region’s population and labor force.” It cited concerns about how that could impact future economic development.
The addition of housing for, as Pilgrim’s estimates, up to 200 people, will add a little over 15 percent to the current stock of a little under 1,300 rental units in Hardy County.
