Cass County leaders look to residents, business owners for feedback on housing

CASS COUNTY, Mich. -- Economic development leaders in Cass Country are taking a hard look at their housing market.

Home values have there have increased 44 percent since 2019, joining the nationwide surge of home prices since the Covid-19 pandemic.

On Wednesday afternoon, a community meeting was held to talk about how housing plays a role in Cass County's future and workforce.

"There's a lot of conversations about how to build our communities up and help them keep what's here going forward," says Ambrosia Neldon, Chair of the Cass County Economic Development Corporation.

Neldon says the housing market and the local workforce go hand in hand, but in Cass County, those numbers don't reflect that people work and live there.

According to her presentation at Wednesday's meeting, 80 percent of working age residents in Cass County work outside of the county, yet over 6,300 workers commute to work in the county each day.

"I don't think it's very surprising, a lot of people go to Elkhart to work or even up to Kalamazoo depending on what part of Cass County you live in but we'd like to get a lot more of those people to stay here to work, keeping those taxes here," Neldon says.

It all comes down to housing.

Neldon says Cass County is home to more than 25,000 housing units, but only 293 units were classified as available for rent and 278 as for sale only.

The other vacancies represent homes that are used for seasonal and recreational purposes.

Though, housing needs are different across the county.

The master plan found that countywide population change has been historically uneven.

For example, from 2010 to 2021 the population in Cassopolis grew 10.4 percent, but Edwardsburg's declined 5.7 percent.

"I would really like to build a relationship with the county and those municipalities and get a better understanding of what they'd like to see and give them the resources to do that," says Neldon.

That's the goal of a new Cass County housing survey launched this week.

Cass County leaders want to know: What are residents experiencing? What are employers experiencing? And what do our communities want?

"We'd really like as many people as possible to participate in that survey so that we get a really informed decision and make sure that we're not just going off what these assessors are doing at the Kalamazoo level and coming into Cass County, we want to hear what Cass County wants," says Neldon.

Residents have until November 11th to fill out the survey, and those responses will be used to inform the Cass County housing summit scheduled for Spring 2027.

You can find the link to fill out the survey here.

Neldon says it should take ten minutes or less to fill out.