Business View Civil and Municipal | May/June 2022

78 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 3, ISSUE 5 Housing is another issue the community is working to improve. One project, which the city is working on with Lennar Homes, will bring 130 workforce units to Kerrville. Other plans include two, low-income units – one for families and the other for seniors. As for how the city is going to meet ongoing housing challenges, Hoppe offers, “Housing has been a strategic focus of the community for over a decade. It’s been particularly acute over the last five years. It’s a whole chapter within our comprehensive plan. We are really cleaning up and aligning and clarifying our codes to make it very clear what is expected of the development community. We are also actively engaging with development partners to bring that housing product to market for school districts and for some of our local companies, from the state. That’s one of the things that came out of COVID, it accelerated the whole process, and made it a lot more urgent for us to work on it. Workforce has become front and center for economic development for our organization in the last 18 months, and will probably be the case for the next five years.” Making the community more attractive for those who have left to pursue a college education is an area that Kerrville Mayor Bill Blackburn would like to see focused on. He acknowledges, “They live in a metropolitan area, and now they’re married and have kids and Kerrville looks really good to them. I think we could see more done to attract them back.” XAS