 "Photo: Cass Green")
Editor's note: This is the second of a 3-part series about affordable housing in Oxford. Read Wednesday to find out what the city government is doing to help the situation.
Oxford, true to its city motto, is just a nice place to live, and that's part of why it's becoming so hard for wage-earning families to find a reasonably-priced home in the city or even the county.
Police Chief Mike Martin, who worries about losing employees to other less-pricey cities, says it all comes down to common sense as to why it's hard to rent a house at the fair market rent or buy one for the going price across Mississippi.
"Oxford, with its beauty, low crime rate and charm, draws people who are tired of the high crime rates, etc., of the bigger cities," he said. "It's the basic supply and demand. The demand is high, so the prices are also."
With help from the University of Mississippi, the city might also be growing at too high a rate to adequately mitigate these concerns. The University U.K. research group calls this effect "studentification," or the growth and replacement of original social and cultural communities with that of students. This often results in property value inflation, a decrease in owner-occupied homes and drastic changes in neighborhoods overall.
"There are more houses available now, but they are just the wrong kind of houses," said Beth Dorris, a senior library assistant at the University of Mississippi's J.D. Williams Library. "They are too expensive. It's also harder to get a loan now than it was a few years ago."
Dorris looked for a home in Oxford twice but gave up, finding only housing geared toward students and the affluent people who visit Oxford during football season, she said.
Oxford Mayor Richard Howorth has also seen this type of growth take over his own neighborhood, and where friendly neighbors once were, complete strangers now live.
"Again, where an old single-family house used to be that actually had an old, little, small barn in the yard that actually had a barn owl in it that used to fly from that barn over to the woods next to my house and I could hear it at night," he said. "But once the condominiums were developed, the owl was gone, the sound of the owl was gone."
For Howorth, it's not just the nuisance of living next door to strangers that bothers him. Many houses in the city sit empty except for a few weekends a year, which makes communities less safe and less charming, he said. Some people even rent out their homes like "rogue" bed and breakfasts, which is illegal without a permit. This phenomenon contributes to high home prices, fewer available homes and more "itinerants" roaming through residential areas.
The university used to attract new professors to the area, tempting them with the ease of homeownership compared to other booming college towns, but that's no longer a reality, Howorth said.
"One of our strengths was that you can afford to by a house on your salary here, which 10 years ago was not the case in Ann Arbour (Mich.) or Chapel Hill (N.C.) or Berkeley (Calif.), and so we had an advantage," he said. "And now we've lost that, and I think it's becoming hard for us to recruit faculty and students and graduate students because of the cost of housing."
Oxford has also attracted retirees with strong connections to Ole Miss, or who simply want a peaceful retirement community. Police investigator Jimmy Williams says this drives up home prices because university students and affluent retirees will pay what they must to live in town. Everyone else ends up being forced out.
"You have to pay to live here; they know this," he said, explaining why he believes gas, groceries and even contractors are more expensive in Oxford than Water Valley or Abbeville.
The growth of both the university and Oxford is a positive in Howorth's eyes, but he wants to get the integral community backbone of teachers, policemen, firemen, nurses and other wage-earners back together within the city or at least county limits.
After all, Oxford is just another small town, no matter how large it gets, and Howorth is dedicated to keeping that character.
Stephen Rogers contributed information to this story.
