By Blake Haas

BLOOMINGTON – Due to a booming local economy, McLean County finds itself in a housing shortage.

With the rapid growth of Rivian Automotive, Ferrero, and other large employors in the area, the local economic development council reports the need for housing is significant.

“We ended up hiring a firm out of St. Louis to come up here and do a housing study for us, just to show projection-wise and how much housing we could need. And they were going off some demographics that were done in 2020 and that time, they said by 2030, we’re going to need 4,000 new homes,” Patrick Hoban, the CEO and President of the Bloomington-Normal Economic Development Council, said on the afternoon show.

So based on 2020 data, I think Rivian was between 500-1,000 employees, and now they are over 6,000, so if you run a model on that, you’re going to need another 4,000. So we’re about 8,000 homes short by 2030 right now.”

To tackle the housing shortage, the EDC is planning a real estate summit in early November.

“There’s a lot of opportunity right now,” Hoban added. “There’s a lot of plans in the works. We’ve seen a variety of almost creating a doughnut around the entire community, but also in the heart of uptown, and there’s plenty of opportunity in downtown as well.”

At the developer summit, the EDC plans on hosting local developers and contractors across the state.

Blake Haas can be reached at [email protected].