Near the industrial edge of Fort Morgan, Colorado, there’s a tidy apartment complex with solar panels on the roofs and a couple of playgrounds for the kids.
A sign out front welcomes visitors to Sol Naciente, “An Agricultural Labor Housing Community."
The development seemed perfect for Abdoul Aziz Diallo, who moved to Fort Morgan for a new job at the local Cargill meatpacking plant.
“My friend told me about this company that does agricultural work in Fort Morgan,” Diallo said through an interpreter. “He said I should look for work there.”
Diallo, who is originally from the West African country of Mauritania, said the new job entailed cutting open animal carcasses and trimming excess fat from the meat. It was hard work, but he liked it, and the pay was good. He thought the job could work out long term.
What wasn’t working out, though, was Diallo’s housing.
Early on, a friend told him about Sol Naciente, which was purpose-built in 2016 to solve a stubborn problem in Fort Morgan, a rural town of about 11,000 people: There simply wasn’t enough affordable housing for the local agricultural workforce.
But when Diallo approached property managers at Sol Naciente about an open unit, they turned him down, telling him that while he might be an agricultural worker, he didn’t qualify to live there because his income was too high.
For months after that, Diallo bounced between temporary rooms, staying with accommodating friends and acquaintances, with no clear way out of his personal housing crisis.
“I’ve been looking since I first got here,” he said. “I’ve been looking for a place to live.”
What he found was housing in very short supply that was largely unaffordable.
“I’ve seen lots of homes that are very, very, very, very expensive,” he said.
Ag worker housing that’s failing ag workers
Sol Naciente is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Off-Farm Labor Housing Program that offers developers very low-interest loans and grants to build affordable rentals for very low- to moderate-income ag workers.
That means the federal government dictates who can live there. Tenants must earn most of their household income from agricultural work. They need to be documented. And there are strict caps on household income that vary from property to property, depending on the population local providers are trying to house. At Sol Naciente, tenants can’t earn more than about $37,000 a year for a household of one.
In Fort Morgan, those federal restrictions disqualify most of the workforce that the Off-Farm Labor Housing program is designed to help, according to Arturo Alvarado, head of the Community Resources and Housing Development Corporation, the nonprofit that developed and manages Sol Naciente.
“What we're finding in the Fort Morgan area, where Sol Naciente is, is that a lot of the agriculture workers are making over the income that qualifies to live in the property,” Alvarado said. “The income restrictions are making it hard for us to fill all the units.”
That tracks with Diallo’s experience, a now-familiar story at Sol Naciente – agricultural workers are turned away, even as units sit empty.
Dolores del Campo, a regional director with Project Protect, a Colorado-based farmworker advocacy group, was hopeful when Sol Naciente first opened.
“I was excited because I'm thinking, finally, people will have a good place to live: safe, clean and with dignity, you know?” she said. “For the people who qualify, it’s perfect to live there.”
Her hope soured when she saw how many people were turned away.
“I feel frustration with Sol Naciente because none of our people qualified to rent houses there,” she said, adding that the federal restrictions didn’t seem to account for local economic conditions.
She spoke of the housing eligibility requirements at Sol Naciente as “a game.”
“The people who make under the limit for money don't have a social security number. The people who have a social security number, they make too much money,” del Campo said, explaining it as a catch-22. Undocumented workers meet the low-income requirements, but don’t qualify because they lack documentation. Meanwhile, workers with qualifying documentation inevitably get higher-paying jobs that put them over the income cap.
“Who can live there?" she shrugged.
A growing problem across the country
More than 320 properties across the country are part of the USDA’s Off-Farm Labor Housing program. Many of them have no problem finding qualified renters to fill their units. But a growing number of them do.
While the USDA did not respond to inquiries, Harvest Public Media and the Midwest Newsroom confirmed other Off-Farm Labor Housing Properties have perpetually vacant units – not because local farmworkers don’t need the housing, but because federal restrictions prevent them from qualifying for it.
Some properties have periodically empty units as seasonal workers come and go. But at other developments, USDA data suggests units are remaining vacant long term.
Public records show 25 Off-Farm Labor Housing properties – representing more than 1,100 units – in California, Washington state, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado and West Virginia were sitting completely or almost completely empty as of July. Other projects in states like Texas, Ohio, Oregon and Florida, have vacancy rates over 25%.
Marty Miller, the executive director of the nonprofit Office of Rural and Farmworker Housing in Washington state, said it’s because farmworkers across the country face the same issues as those in Fort Morgan.
“They make too much for the low-income housing, but they still can't afford market-rate housing,” he said.
The mismatch between federal income caps and rising farm wages means housing providers can't fill their empty agricultural worker housing units.
“When we're in the middle of a housing crisis, people can't afford places to live,” Miller said. “There can be good quality available units, but they have a hard time finding someone eligible to live there. It's a real conundrum because it can lead to vacancies and sometimes ongoing vacancies, which is really problematic."
Jose Martinez, the executive director of UMOS, a farmworker advocacy nonprofit headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that operates Off-Farm Labor Housing in two states, has seen this problem develop at one of their properties in Claremont, Minnesota. According to USDA data, two-thirds of the units are currently unoccupied.
“All of a sudden you could have an individual that was low income or an individual that was on the threshold of poverty, and now they're over the limits of income,” Martinez said. “It would make them ineligible for services.”
In Longmont, Colorado, the Boulder Housing Authority has operated Casa de la Esperanza, a 32-unit Off-Farm Labor Housing property, since the early 1990s. According to agency housing developer Tanya Jimenez, they started having difficulty finding eligible tenants in 2017.
“It's very frustrating. Farmworker housing is still very much needed,” she said. “We want the units filled because that's our mission: to provide housing. But it's clearly not keeping up with today's needs.”
In a region of northern Colorado experiencing a severe housing shortage, nearly 40% of Casa Esperanza’s units sit empty.
Economics and ag worker housing
With more than 2,000 employees, Cargill’s Fort Morgan meatpacking plant is a major driver of the local economy and the biggest employer in town. But for years, this global food processing behemoth has not been able to keep the operation here fully staffed.
“As we continue to focus on getting employees into the plant, one of the biggest drawbacks to that is actually not having housing,” said Jarrod Gillig, president of the business operations and supply chain for Cargill Protein North America, a global meat processing company. “A lot of times they're having to find houses in other communities that are a distance from the plant.”
The company regularly buses workers in from out of town, and they see a lot of turnover at the plant.
“When we look at open positions, we've got the highest percentage of open positions in Fort Morgan,” Gillig said. “And we believe housing is a significant portion of that.”
Other local agricultural employers have similar staffing problems. To recruit and retain essential staff, some have been sweetening the deal by offering workers more money.
“Farm wages are definitely rising across the nation,” said Michigan State University agricultural economist Zach Rutledge.
Farm work generally pays a lot less than jobs in other parts of the economy. But for years, the supply of agricultural labor has been dwindling, causing farm wages to rise much faster than non-farm wages, shrinking the gap. The pandemic only accelerated that trend.
On the face of it, higher pay is a clear benefit for farmworkers. But according to Rutledge, those bigger paychecks could make it harder to access housing, since federal income caps at USDA Off-Farm Labor Housing projects like Sol Naciente haven’t kept up with the new economic reality.
“If you have higher earnings that are getting close to the threshold, then obviously if that trend continues into the future, fewer employees would be eligible for the housing,” Rutledge said.
And with no policies on the horizon to increase the availability of agricultural labor, he expects more of the same.
“All of the indications point to wages continuing to go up,” he said. “I don't think that trend is going to slow down.”
A small wage hike creates a big housing problem
Houefa Akpamoli and her family were the first tenants to move into Sol Naciente when it opened in 2016. Signing the lease was a relief; it put an end to their years of scrambling to find suitable housing elsewhere in Fort Morgan.
“As the first tenant, I can say that it was a good place to live,” she said. “Everything was new.”
They qualified for the unit because Akpamoli’s husband, Arnold Akele, worked at the Leprino dairy plant in Fort Morgan. At the time, Akpamoli was attending nursing school and looking after the couple’s five children. The family, which immigrated from Benin in 2013, enjoyed the growing community at Sol Naciente and soon felt settled in what they assumed would be their long-term home.
Before the year was out, income limitations at Sol Naciente would force them out.
One day the property manager knocked on their door and gently explained that Akele had brought in too much money the previous year, making the family ineligible to stay. The news was hard to absorb. His earnings had gone over the annual limit by just $10.
“It was a joke between us: Maybe if you miss work for two hours, maybe we will be fine,” Akpamoli remembered. She was shocked such a minuscule sum could so abruptly end their stable housing. “Now it's funny. But at the moment, it was not funny because we had to be out of the place.”
Ultimately, Akpamoli’s family survived their housing turmoil. After leaving Sol Naciente in 2017, they managed to buy a home. And it wasn’t long before Akpamoli finished nursing school and started working again.
But looking back on her experience at Sol Naciente, she’s still baffled by what happened.
“I think that's not right,” she said. “Because the people making these policies never think about how much the person living in these agricultural places makes an hour.”
Rural housing experts agree. Miller, with the Office of Rural and Farmworker Housing, said it could take an act of Congress to update the federal income caps for housing eligibility. Even so, he called for policymakers to rethink their approach to Off-Farm Labor Housing.
“The agencies that supply the funding that helps build this housing need to recognize that incomes have changed, but the needs haven't,” he said. “There needs to be more latitude to allow the farmworker households to be able to live in the housing that's built for them.”
With no major policy changes on household earnings, some Off-Farm Labor Housing projects are starting to request waivers from the USDA to accept non-farmworker tenants who do meet the tight income restrictions.
Sol Naciente obtained one of those waivers last fall, which solved their vacancy problem.
But it didn’t help agricultural workers like Abdoul Diallo, who still can’t find a place to live. For Diallo, the months of short-term, ad-hoc housing have been stressful.
“It’s uncomfortable. I’m living with someone who’s only letting me stay here a little while,” he said. “I want to live in my own apartment.”
This summer, he hit a breaking point and decided it was time to leave Fort Morgan. So, he quit the agriculture workforce for a restaurant job in Denver. It doesn't pay as well as the meatpacking gig, but at least in the big city, he'll be able to find a home.
“I just want to have my own place,” he said.”So I can live my life in peace.”
This story comes from a collaboration between Harvest Public Media and The Midwest Newsroom.
Harvest Public Media is a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
The Midwest Newsroom is a partnership between NPR and member stations to provide investigative journalism and in-depth reporting with a focus on Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska.