Benzie County is two worlds in one place. One world is populated by well-off retirees or part-time summer residents who live on the lake and eat expensive meals at restaurants. The other world consists of workers who staff those restaurants and clean those homes, people who live in trailers or ramshackle houses or even the woods.

As Patrick Sullivan writes in this week's Northern Express - sister publication of The Ticker - life for these working people in recent years has become such a struggle that some of those well-off retirees have decided to do something about it. For the last year, they’ve been trying to figure out how to make life better for everyone in Benzie County. The group called Advocates for Benzie County began at a meeting of the Sunrise Rotary in Beulah when Richard Robb and a friend listened to a speaker talk about rural homelessness. The retired automotive executive found himself intrigued by a virtually invisible problem – Benzie County’s homeless living in the woods.

“Afterwards, we looked at each other and said, ‘We’ve got to learn more about this,’” Robb says. “It’s not obvious. We don’t have people walking around the streets like you do in Traverse City or in a big city.”

Robb and a group of like-minded folks – John Parkins, Tim Bannister, Gerald Wilgus and Peter and Jill Brown – decided to organize with a mission “to promote a better quality of life for all the residents of Benzie County.” They hosted a meeting in January of 2016 and asked every local expert or decision maker they could think of to come. That first forum led to sub-topics that spurred more meetings. They’ve since talked about housing, employment, healthcare, education, infrastructure and childcare. “It’s an aggressive thing, but it’s not, ‘We’re going to solve this tomorrow,’” Robb says. “We want to be sure we’re not just a bunch of old white guys with beards trying to push something on people we think are in trouble.”

Possible solutions range from addressing the lack of childcare options in the county to an urgent shortage of housing, particularly senior and low-income housing. Part of the reason there’s so little affordable housing is that there’s no one around to build it, a consequence of vocational programs being cut in the county’s high schools a decade ago. Another reason involves infrastructure and the fact that there are few places where developers could build HUD developments even if they wanted to. Those developments require water and sewer hookups, and the economics of operating the projects require access to natural gas because propane costs too much. 

Kay Bond, the treasurer of the Advocates and chairperson of the housing committee, says increasing affordable housing will require creative solutions, such as getting natural gas to Thompsonville to spur affordable developments. “What a great place for workforce housing, and it’s right around the corner from our largest employer [Crystal Mountain],” Bond says.

Read more about the fight to improve life for Benzie residents in this week's Northern Express cover story, "Building A Better Benzie." The Northern Express is available online, or pick up a free copy at one of more than 600 distribution spots across 14 counties.