TENNESSEE

Gatlinburg affordable housing market struggles after fire

Rachel Ohm
rachel.ohm@knoxnews.com

GATLINBURG – On any given day, motel owner Alex Abrahams said he fields at least a few inquiries about his rooms at Ogle’s Vacation Motel.

The most common question: Is there a kitchen?

“I’ve been battling this problem since I saw it when I got here in 2004,” said Abrahams, who owns Ogle’s and two other motels-turned-long-term-rental unit buildings in Gatlinburg.

Alex Abrahams, owner of Roaring Fork Motel, stands Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2017, on the pad of one of his building that burned in the Gatlinburg fire. Abrahams is allowing some of his monthly tenants to live in his daily rental cabins after they were displaced by the fire.

Abrahams and others said there’s long been a shortage of affordable housing for workers in Gatlinburg, a tourist town at the entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and it’s only gotten worse in the aftermath of the devastating wildfires that wiped out more than 2,400 structures, many of them homes and apartments, or motels where working-class people were living long-term.

Gatlinburg residents Mike Conn and Wendy Malloy have experienced the problem first-hand.

Conn, 61, was displaced from Dudley Creek Apartments when his unit burned in the Nov. 28 fire.

He’s been staying with Malloy, a long-time friend, in a motel room at the Mountain Shadows Resort since.

On a recent afternoon, they stopped at Ogle’s in their search for an apartment with a kitchen. Their budget: around $1,000 per month between the two.

“We’ve looked everywhere,” said Malloy, 64, who works part-time at another hotel. “We looked in the paper. We’ve made phone calls. But we can’t find a place.”

Before the fires, nearly 43 percent of Sevier County residents who rent were living in cost-burdened housing, meaning they were spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, according to the Tennessee Housing Development Agency.

“It was already hard for people to find a place to live there, and now it’s even harder,” said Wes Bunch, East Tennessee community coordinator for the Tennessee Housing Development Agency.

In the wake of the fires, the agency has sought to bring in some relief for renters in Sevier County. They waived income restrictions for low-income tax credits and provided additional Section 8 housing vouchers to affected income-eligible families.

They also provided $164,000 in grant money to three local agencies helping to deal with Sevier County’s housing problem: The Tennessee Valley Coalition on Homelessness, Helen Ross McNabb Center and Family Promise of Blount County.

The Helen Ross McNabb Center, a social services agency that focuses on mental health services, received $25,000 in mid-December and has spent less than $1,000 so far, said Shellie Hall, director of Sevier County services. She said many people don't think of the center as a housing resource, so requests for help have been slow, but they have used some of the money so far to help a client find housing in Morristown.

Most people who have been displaced want to stay in Gatlinburg so they can stay near family or their jobs, she said. A lack of public transportation also makes it hard to look for housing elsewhere.

"It was a huge problem before the fires, the lack of affordable housing," Hall said. "Now that we’ve lost even more, even though it’s what we might consider sub-standard housing, at least it was a roof over people’s heads and they weren’t living on the street. So that’s going to be a big concern for us moving forward, is what’s going to happen, is affordable housing going to be built for people? Because we’re going to need it for them to work in the establishments in Gatlinburg."

The grant money at the McNabb Center is available to anyone affected by the fires, although there is an application process and some income-based guidelines, Hall said.

Long-term or weekly rentals in motels are "very much the norm" among the poor and working-class residents in Sevier County, according to Hall, and some owners of such properties said they hope to rebuild what they lost.

The Roaring Fork Motel and Cottages, also owned by Abrahams, was half-burned-down in the fires. The motel and cottages were previously a mix of long-term rentals and overnight guests, but since the fires Abrahams said he has put a hold on vacation bookings, moving some of his long-term renters that were burned out into the motel rooms, cutting into his income but making sure his tenants have a place to stay. He said he’d like to rebuild at Roaring Fork, or even remodel some of his other rooms to include kitchenettes, but the expense of complying with city building codes is daunting.

Stuart Kaplow, who owns six motels that he runs as weekly or long-term rentals in Gatlinburg, including the mostly burned-out Travelers Motel, also said it would be expensive for him to rebuild what he has lost, because it would require bringing what used to be old, outdated buildings up to 2017 building code standards, but he is hoping to receive aid from FEMA or a small business loan.

"Something facing all of us that had damage or destroyed properties is we had old properties and now, if we want to rebuild, we have to bring it up to today’s code, 2017, so that’s going to be an issue. The desire is there, the motivation is there, but I can't tell you with 100 percent certainty that it's going to happen."  

-- Stuart Kaplow

Kaplow lost more than 40 rental units between Travelers, the Rocky River Motel and the Ski Mountain Motel, displacing about 100 people.

"The supply has diminished greatly," he said. "Even though I have empty rooms now, come the summer these people are going to have a real tough time finding housing. There won’t be enough housing for workers probably this summer, or there will be less of a supply."

Alex Abrahams, owner of Roaring Fork Motel, is allowing some of his monthly tenants to live in his daily rental cabins after they were displaced by the Gatlinburg fire.

At Roaring Fork, Dashnyam Batkhishig, a 22-year-old restaurant worker from Mongolia who came to Gatlinburg as a student a little over a year ago, was displaced from the two-bedroom cottage where he had been living.

He dreamed of opening a computer repair shop in town, but lost almost all of his equipment in the fire. Now he is staying in a motel room that shares a kitchen with another room.

“For the meantime it’s fine. But it’s a motel room; it’s not like a home,” he said.