There are 340 guest rooms at Perdido Beach Resort in Orange Beach.
This summer, about 40 of them will be unavailable to guests, used instead to house some of the hotel’s summer staff.
Like others along the coast, Perdido Beach Resort has struggled in recent years to hire enough workers. And each year, a lack of housing becomes a bigger issue.
“There’s not enough and it’s not affordable,” Penny Groux, the resort’s director of corporate affairs, told Alabama Daily News about rental housing on the coast.
Groux said the hotel wants guests to have resort-style experiences.
“We want them to be taken care of the moment they walk in the door,” she said. “That means we have to have a lot of staff here to make that happen. We realized about five or six years ago that we were out of options.
“… We decided to put them here.”
Taking 40 rooms offline for the summer costs the hotel more than $10,000 per day, Groux said.
Groux and others are hoping the state will soon help the workforce housing situation impacting cities from the coast to the Tennessee line. A bill to give state tax credits to developers who build affordable housing for low-to-mid-income income workers is expected soon.
Sponsor Rep. Cynthia Almond, R-Tuscaloosa, told ADN the Alabama Workforce Housing Tax Credit Act will likely be filed with other workforce development bills, including a child care tax credit, outlined earlier this year by Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth. The housing bill will be similar to one Almond sponsored last year, though the cap on possible credits may be lowered to about $5 million annually to start, Almond told ADN.
“We’re trying to ease into it and see how well it is used and what difference it makes,” she said. “If it works well, as we think it will and it has in other states, we hope to continue the program and increase it as we see fit.”
Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee already have similar programs.
The credit, she explained, could be used to tap into existing federal funding, so far unused in Alabama, to build multifamily housing developments specifically meant for workers earning between about $11 and $30 per hour. Workers include those in construction, retail, hospitality and entry health care positions.
In exchange for tax credits, developers agree to cap rents at 30% of an area’s median income.
The median rental price in Orange Beach this month is $2,400, according to the website Zillow.com. In Huntsville, it’s nearly $1,500. And in Montgomery, it’s just over $1,100.
Under the proposal, for qualifying renters, a new two-bedroom tax credit property will be about 55% to 60% of an equivalent market-rate rental property.
State leaders have been studying how to improve Alabama’s workforce participation rate of 57.4%. Barriers to workforce entry include a lack of affordable child care, housing and transportation.
“We have so many in Alabama who are able-bodied and unemployed and we’re trying to figure out ways to get those people back on the tax rolls,” Almond said.
Almond said currently, if someone receiving federal housing assistance gets a job, they may no longer qualify for that housing.
“This would ideally provide transitional housing for someone like that, to incentivize them to go get a job,” Almond said. “It would be a place they could afford and then ideally, after they’ve been there awhile they could go and live on their own or buy their own house. That’s the way we hope it works.”
The tax credit program would be overseen by the Alabama Housing Finance Authority and Almond said it could be used by the Alabama Department of Commerce as a job recruitment tool to bring more employers to the state.
Alabama Arise, which advocates for low-income residents in the state, couldn’t comment directly on the yet-to-be-filed tax credit proposal, but did speak to the need for the state to invest more in affordable housing.
“… One important step in that direction would be to provide state funding for the Housing Trust Fund,” said Chris Sanders, Arise’s communications director. “This funding would help support construction, maintenance and renovation of affordable housing for Alabamians with extremely low incomes, especially in rural areas and small cities.”
Almond said her proposal will direct most of the available tax credits to high-growth areas like Baldwin and Madison counties, but about 25% would be targeted to rural counties in need of affordable housing.
Among the supporters of the bill is the Alabama Realtors Association.
“We have seen a chronic need for affordable workforce housing for years,” association Executive Director Jeremy Walker told Alabama Daily News.
Walker said development fees and local taxes are limiting the amount of single-family homes being built, especially at a price point low- to mid-level earners can afford.
Walker said after a few years of living in the rent-capped developments, residents, hopefully, will be in a position to buy their own home.
“But in the short-term, they have good, stable housing to help them get back in the workforce and hopefully in a place that is close enough to their work to be meaningful,” he said. “Long commutes in search of work are a real problem.
Sen. Chris Elliott, R-Josephine, plans to sponsor the bill in the Senate. Baldwin County is growing by about 7,000 people a year, putting pressure on the housing market.
“Our workforce has a real struggle keeping up with that,” Elliott said. “And so our businesses consequently have trouble finding employees who can live close to work. Right now, affordable housing is a 10-year-old travel trailer in an RV park. We need to do better than that.”
Groux said Perdido Beach Resort and others along the coast are known for southern hospitality. It’s a brand that is dependent on a strong workforce.
“If we don’t get some assistance, the brand is really going to suffer,” Groux said.