THOMAS – In a bank parking lot along the tiny main drag in Thomas, Sandra Frank was recently selling felted items like koozies, bowls and keychains alongside other vendors selling local produce.
In addition to selling her creations at festivals throughout the state, Frank has three kids, co-founded a Montessori school, bookkeeps for local businesses, works at ski resorts and serves on the board of the Tucker County Development Authority.
“We have a very small population, and then the percentage of the people that are of working age is even smaller,” she said. “Everyone I know works. They just have all the jobs they want.”
A New Jersey native who studied geography at West Virginia University, she moved to Tucker County in 1998. Frank and five friends found a four-bedroom house and split the $250 rent, $40 per person.
In the summers, they worked in the ski areas, and in the winters, they went to Fayetteville to work as raft guides.
These days, she said it isn’t as easy for the town to attract or keep young people.
With few major employers, and housing prices on the rise, Tucker County has experienced population decline at a faster rate than the rest of the state on average in recent years.
During a trip to the county as part of this year’s election season coverage, Mountain State Spotlight asked residents what they wanted to hear candidates talking about as they compete for votes.
County residents said the increase in short-term rentals for tourists has coincided with a housing shortage, driving up prices. And while tourists attracted to the scenic isolated area do support local businesses, residents said they need more types of business and an increased population to give nature-loving people the ability to stay.
The housing crisis, exacerbated
At Hellbender Burritos in nearby Davis, co-owner Melissa Borowitz and her husband Robert are hurrying to get the restaurant ready to open shortly before 4 pm.
She said applicants who wanted to live in an “outdoor mecca” have called but couldn’t take jobs at her restaurant because they couldn’t find housing.
As people from other cities and states have discovered Tucker County’s natural beauty and small-town charm, some have bought second homes in the area or moved there for remote work. Others have remodeled apartments to live in during weekend escapes and rent them out as Airbnbs for tourists.
Borowitz said not all out-of-town acquisition of real estate takes away housing from local workers, because some people from out of the area have purchased and renovated otherwise abandoned buildings.
In Thomas, Frank noted that the people who renovate historic downtown buildings, like those that hold the locally-owned shops and upstairs Airbnbs in Thomas, do so at significant cost. And the downstairs local businesses, highly dependent on seasonal tourism revenue, can only pay so much for their part of the rent.
She understands why renting upstairs apartments out as Airbnbs – at prices similar to hotels – makes more economic sense than renting them to low-paid workers for long-term housing.
“They’re charging a fair rent for the space,” she said.
But the trend has left less housing for those in lower-income brackets, like young people who work in the local shops and restaurants that those tourists frequent.
“It’s hard to get people to move here for a job when they can’t find a place,” she said.
Warning signs
At the office of the Tucker County Family Resource Network inside a former schoolhouse in Parsons, employees said the organization sees higher demand from seniors, including grandparents raising grandchildren.
Low-income young people who would otherwise need their services are more likely to have moved elsewhere in search of more opportunity, according to April Miller, executive director.
David Cooper, CEO of the Tucker Community Foundation, also works inside the former schoolhouse. He stopped by the FRN office and said that along with assistance with grants for nonprofits, his organization also offers college scholarships.
But Miller and Cooper said the number of young people in the area has steadily declined, in part because Parsons never fully recovered from the 1985 Cheat River flood, and in part because people have left for jobs.
They noted that a shoe plant closed, followed by coal mines. The well-known major employer Kingsford Charcoal plant has become more automated, and the wind farm in the area provides limited jobs, according to Cooper.
Photo by Erin Beck / Mountain State Spotlight
They said housing is more affordable in Parsons than in more touristy parts of the county, but it is still unattainable for many. The town also lacks transportation and child care.
Tourism does help the area in some ways. People kayak the Cheat River and hike the Allegheny Highlands trail. Some of the people that have second homes here have also financially supported the FRN’s programs.
Locals appreciate easy access to outdoor activities as well.
“Most people live here because they like the outdoors, and the four seasons,” Cooper said.
“Or you were born here, like me,” Miller added. “We’re lifers.”
But Parsons has fewer options for tourists than higher-elevation towns in the county like Thomas and Davis.
They agreed that there aren’t enough major employers and jobs in other industries.
Miller said it would help if lawmakers reduced restrictions barring people from safety net programs, and she’d also like to see them give low-income families help through direct cash assistance, since expenses like medical bills change from month to month.
At the same time, she wants to reduce the need for these programs. She said the FRN has recently begun shifting its focus to work more with schools, connecting kids with mentors and teaching healthy decision-making.
“You’ve got all these beautiful things here,” she said. “It’s showing people how to use what we have here in our backyard to build physical health and mental health.”
And there are warning signs even for the tourism industry in the county.
Following a drought this summer, river water levels were low throughout the area.
More droughts could make the county less of a draw for tourists and less of an appealing place to live for locals.
Judy Rodd, executive director of Friends of Blackwater, sees the area’s reliance on tourism, especially snow sports, as short-sighted as climate change worsens.
She said that climate change led to less snow and a shorter ski season and is a threat to rare species like brook trout that need to live in cool mountain streams.
The environmental group also opposes lawmakers’ efforts to permit timbering and hunting in state parks, as well as to allow four-wheelers there, which she said would tear up trails.
She said lawmakers will tell her, “We need more money for state parks, so we’re going to cut the trees.”
“But that takes away their appeal,” she said. “They should find money elsewhere.”
“Out of their habitats”
Bella Hubbard, who grew up in Philippi, spent her childhood along a river catching bugs, snakes and frogs. She just graduated with a biology degree from WVU and started working as office and fieldwork manager for Friends of Blackwater in August.
She was sitting on the stoop of the Friends of Blackwater Building in Thomas trying to get residents and tourists in the area to come together in support of a federal campaign to prohibit logging in old-growth forests like those in Tucker County.
She explained that mature, large, “old-growth” trees are good at storing carbon, mitigating the effects of climate change. They also provide habitat for endangered species, including local animals like the Cheat Mountain salamander and the West Virginia northern flying squirrel.
“I think that it’s really important to respect the things that have been here so long and appreciate their beauty and not drive them out of their habitats,” she said.
A few doors down, baristas Sasha Hess and Orion McClurg sell pastries, breakfast sandwiches, mushroom-infused coffee and CBD-infused seltzers at TipTop coffee shop.
A couple of years ago, McClurg, 24, moved back to the area to help relatives with health problems.
“I have to make it work,” she said.
A former pet-sitter, she noticed that seniors with dementia or mobility problems lacked in-home help. McClurg provides that help and drives them to doctors’ appointments. She charges only what they can afford.
“I somehow went from cat and dog sitting up to husband sitting,” she said.
In the rest of her time, she helps her father, a farrier, with his work putting shoes on horses, and she’s taking college classes to become a biology teacher.
She said she was lucky to snag someplace to live locally, but others who work at the coffee shop have to travel up to an hour. Visiting tourists who want to move to the area often tell the baristas they can’t find housing.
Across the street, some of the changing leaves are already crinkling and dropping earlier in the season than normal.
A nature-lover, McClurg sees them as climate change’s “canary in the coal mine.”
She said the drought exacerbated the problem, because the sediment in low levels of water damaged the filters.
Despite a boil water advisory, most people relied on bottled water for weeks because even the boiled water was dark brown.
“It was root beer colored water,” she said.
After the restaurant where she was working in Pennsylvania cut her hours, Hess, 24, moved in with her parents to an isolated area between Scherr and Keyser. She drives about half an hour to work.
“It wasn’t my plan to move here,” she said. “It was either this or be homeless.”
She can’t afford to live on her own in a rental property. And she doesn’t have the money or time to rehabilitate a dilapidated home.
“The price of things and how much you’re being compensated doesn’t match up with how expensive things are,” she said. “And I don’t think the older generation understands that.”
She had wanted to live in Thomas, even though it’s small, to make it more likely for her to make friends and find a romantic partner. But even in town, she said most young people she runs into are tourists or are already in relationships.
Hess wants to become a stay-at-home mom and plans to homeschool her children.
She dreams of taking them to explore in the woods and learn about trees and plants.
“Thomas would be a perfect place to do that, if you could live here,” she said.