ALICE In Wonderland: The Hidden Struggle for Survival in Niceville

Christopher Saul
July 15, 2024
3:08 pm
Bluewater Bay, Charities and Nonprofits, Crestview, Eglin Air Force Base, Fort Walton Beach, Government, Housing, Local Luminaries, Niceville, Okaloosa County, Real Estate, Religion, Valparaiso

In Brief:

Luis Torres, a Niceville Walmart employee, struggles with high childcare costs and restrictive housing options, exemplifying the challenges faced by the ALICE population.
Local leaders, including City Manager David Deitch, are working on solutions like increasing affordable housing inventory and advocating for policy changes to support working-class families.
Community efforts include initiatives by the Crestview Housing Authority and United Way to provide affordable housing and support services for financially constrained families.

By his own admission – Luis Torres was on the verge of losing his job when I met him in the Walmart parking lot a couple of months ago.

Torres is a member of a group experts call Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed (ALICE). For this group, a required car repair or other unexpected expense can lead to homelessness because of the inability to pay.

I noticed him speaking to his manager with his toddler son on his hip in an impassioned conversation at the store on John Sims Parkway while going back to an aisle for a new jar of something I’d accidentally dropped and shattered at the self-checkout line.

I’d recently listened to Niceville City Manager David Deitch talk about the difficulties of getting childcare and its strain on local families – so I wanted to ask Torres what he had to deal with.

As he walked out of the store – I introduced myself and asked him his and his son’s, Decu’s, name.

He told me he couldn’t get to work today for two simple reasons – housing and childcare. That’s a problem because if he gets too many callouts, he’s out of a job.

On the housing front – Decu’s mom lives in a community that doesn’t allow children. It’s the only place she can afford to live – so Luis ends up trying to find someone to watch his kid. If he can’t find anyone, he’s got to stay home. “All this makes me feel miserable. So miserable. Like, I try not to show this around the kid, but it’s difficult. It makes me feel miserable,” he told me.

Childcare, especially around here, is out of the question – he can’t afford the cost, ranging from about $800-$1,000 per month per kid in parts of Okaloosa County. Wages at the Niceville Walmart (according to their postings on Indeed.com) would put him somewhere between $2200-$2800 per month before taxes if he worked full time.

According to a 2020 CNBC report, Walmart employs the most people on welfare. The company’s 2.2 million employees account for about $6.2 billion in government assistance—about $2,818 per employee.

For the top pay advertised at Walmart in Niceville of $18 per hour – a family of one adult and one child like Luis and Decu’s – does not have enough money for what the United Way calls a “Household Survival Budget.” In fact, of the 1,106 counties in the Southeastern United States – only three of them (all in the exurbs of Memphis, Tennessee) could Luis and Decu have what they call a survivable budget.

University of Florida Economist Hector Sandoval says the local trend in the panhandle when it comes to basic necessities for working parents – housing and childcare – is in line with the rest of the country: it’s becoming unaffordable to find employment as a working class parent in Okaloosa County.

“Last year (2023) we had this huge increase in inflation and then on top of house prices, now you need to pay a lot on food, utilities and all these other things,” Professor Sandoval said. He worries that the distance between the working class and their jobs in cities like Niceville creates another problem that lengthens the generational financial instability cycle. Everything from gas for a longer commute to the need for daycares to open longer can contribute to the cycle. “Their living standards are going in the opposite direction of what we want,” he added.

But it’s not all bad news – according to the United Way’s local leader, Kelly Jasen. The number of ALICE households county-wide shrank by five percent overall since their last full report about two years ago. “That’s a really positive sign that there are households, families and individuals that are a little more financially stable,” Jasen said.

The Donut Hole

In most ALICE households, the car breakdowns and broken arms of the world are pretty bad. But under our national safety net programs like Medicaid and Medicare or CHIP (Child Health Insurance Program), a raise can cause alarm, too.

Many of the government programs that ALICE families or families in poverty need to get by are income-limited. That means a raise, sometimes as little as a quarter an hour, ends up hurting the family more than it helps – creating something of a disincentive to move up the ladder at work. The space between getting a raise that is enough to move a family to financial security and too much to qualify for assistance from the government is called a benefits cliff. “you might get literally a 25-cent-an-hour raise, and then no longer be eligible for an $8,000 a year childcare subsidy,” Jasen said, “And you’re at the end of the year in a worst financial position because of that small raise. And what we see is that that’s really the cohort that United Way’s now across the nation are trying to wrap around, you know, services and supports to protect these households because they’re doing the right thing, so to speak, you know, they’re working, they’re working, sometimes two or three jobs, but their minimum wage jobs are there, it’s just really difficult for them to get ahead.” The United Way of the Emerald Coast and other support services say they now want to focus on these households. They claim these people are just as hardworking, if not more so, than any other income group in our area. “In our community, less than two percent of our ALICE households are unemployed,” Jasen added, “So, it helps us to shift the narrative around who is accessing support services, who in our community really needs help.”

Housing: We're Not Too Good To Have Teachers and Firefighters Live in Our Town

Housing costs have shot up – especially in Niceville. After all, most of the available inventory for rent in the city is single-family housing – as it is for most of Okaloosa County according to the Okaloosa County Attainable Housing Strategic Plan. The strategic plan says when it comes to the members of the ALICE population – several factors, including the number of homes used as short-term rentals and the base housing allowance doled out by the Air Force to its members have serious knock-on effects on the rest of the population. “The housing mix has significant gaps in supply for single renters and owners, young and growing families, and downsizing seniors, which will take dedicated efforts to address. If aging households are without options for downsizing, they will choose to remain in their larger homes, which may be better suited for younger families. This reduces options for younger, growing households, and some families, who would otherwise choose to stay in the county, are forced to leave,” the report noted.

That means two things. One, the ALICE population that used to live in Niceville, or even Okaloosa County, can’t afford to live here anymore. Two, the people who used to be financially secure in the city stand on shakier ground than they did just a couple of years ago.

Mari Plante, a leader at Niceville’s Sharing and Caring Food Bank, says she’s seen the changes in who comes into the facility to ask for help. “What used to be middle class is now going down closer to poverty level – and we’re seeing a pickup of people coming to ask us for help with the utilities and rent and groceries that we didn’t see before,” Plante says that this cohort that used to be stable in their finances, but now needs to at least sometimes rely on help to make ends meet, has a hard time asking for help. “A lot of our previous clients are leaving the area, so we’re seeing new clients,” Plante said, “I’m seeing more new clients that I see the kids at school sometimes because I have four kids here. Before, it was a lot of older people, elderly people.” She added that the demographic changes aren’t just age or family-sized, either. “We do see a lot of middle class, the people who were doing well before, that just can’t keep up. What changed? Well, the rental increases when the base ups their money for [Base Housing Allowance, BAH]. When [BAH] goes up, all of the landlords up their rents to match it.”

According to the United Way’s Statistics about seven percent of Niceville residents live in poverty – while eighteen percent are ALICE households. Compared to the rest of the county, which has a six percent poverty rate and a thirty percent ALICE rate, the numbers are less severe. But those statistics don’t reflect poverty alleviation from residents of Niceville – just the moving of the poor away from the city to somewhere else.

Out of sight, out of mind – as the saying goes.

But not for Niceville City Manager David Deitch.

Deitch says he grew up in a situation similar to Decu’s. His single mother had him and his sister, and he worked multiple jobs to make ends meet. But Deitch says this ALICE designation applies to more people than we might initially think – and it also means those people cannot live in Niceville – even with a ‘good government job.’ It’s not just the Walmart employees who are struggling and cannot live in Niceville any longer. “You know, these these are our our cops our teachers, our firemen, our public works, our CNAs our nurses, our military,” Deitch said. But it also applies to the people who punch a clock every day to make society run. The people who can no longer afford to live in Niceville. “Most people don’t think that this is an issue, but it is an issue. It’s a very, very big issue. Most of the teachers in Okaloosa County don’t live in Niceville… Less than 40% of my team lives in Niceville. They serve this community and sometimes they’ve served this community for decades, but they don’t live here because they can’t afford to. So they have extra financial burdens on their lives because they have to commute in from Crestview or Freeport, Navarre or wherever. And so they have this added expenses of travel costs, gas, maintenance on the cars time away from the families etc, etc. And so, we have to do we have to do a better job focusing on this demographic,” said Deitch.

For his part, Deitch says he’s looking at several ways to change the paradigm. He wants the people to work here to be able to live here – a big lift when the median house on the market in Niceville sold for more than half a million dollars in May of 2024. To cover the mortgage on a half-million dollar home with the best possible current mortgage rate (7.77%) with a 20% down payment of $80,000, a buyer is still looking at a monthly payment of $3,600 per month; more than 150% of monthly pay advertised for a Walmart employee in the city. Teachers don’t fare much better, nor do firefighters. A teacher would need to pay roughly 88% of their pre-tax salary to afford the median home in Niceville. A firefighter must shell out about the same amount to purchase the median home.

To make that happen, he hopes to purchase or work with the county to acquire acreage currently owned by the US Air Force that sits in between College Boulevard and Spence Parkway to the east of Northwest Florida State College. The several hundred acres of land, which currently serves as nine holes of the Eglin Golf Course, has come up in the news lately – Okaloosa County has asked for permission from Eglin Air Force Base to buy the land with one or several community partners to put affordable housing on. A recent proposal put in front of the Okaloosa County Commission aims to mix single-family detached housing, townhomes, condos, and apartment blocks on the land as a way to massively increase housing inventory at lower-than-current price points in the middle part of Okaloosa County.

Deitch hopes this hail mary could relieve some of the shortage and put more inventory at the bottom of the market for the backbone of society to get a piece of the community they serve. But, the word cautiously in the phrase ‘cautiously optimistic’ does the heavy lifting. “I’ll be honest, if it happens, it’s years and years and years off. I’m not super optimistic it’s going to happen at all,” Deitch said at a recent Coffee and Conversations he hosted at the Niceville City Complex with Mayor Daniel Henkel, “But if you don’t ask, you won’t know what the answer is. So we asked, and we will see what happens.”

In the meantime – Deitch and the bureaucratic apparatus at the city say they are working a couple of other angles to increase housing inventory and, hopefully, make that inventory on the market a little more affordable.

For one, city leadership wants to look at opportunities to increase density on land in the city to allow for apartment blocks and other less expensive housing options in the Niceville area. “That’s one part of the strategy that the county has,” Deitch added.

In the meantime, something must be done, not near the Niceville City Limits.

Enter Cecil Williams. Pastor Williams has served as pastor of a local church in Okaloosa County for more than thirty years and has more temporal experience as a civil servant for more than thirty years. That means his passion for helping other people is tempered with a ‘how can we get this done’ mentality.

After retiring from the civil service in 2023, Williams took a new job as a manager of the Crestview Housing Authority, a government organization that provides low-cost housing to the most needy.

As a pastor, his church is also dedicated to providing affordable housing. They have a ministry that purchases multiunit housing, refurbishes it, manages it, and rents it out to people at a little bit over cost—usually about $600 per month for a two-bedroom unit. They also do the same thing for homeless veterans in the area.

The only way they can do it right now is through state and federal grants, as well as lower-interest loans. That combination of funding allows them to build a small stock of affordable housing in Crestview: two-bedroom apartments for rent at $900 per month. “I’m probably playing with less than $2,000 a month [in revenue leftover after expenses]. And that’s not what businessmen do. That’s not where Jay Odom or Peter Bos – they would not play in them numbers,” Williams said.

To acquire the rest of the housing stock, he needs to keep the people with the least means under a roof at night; it’s a local lobbying game. “I got a lot of friends with rental property and they won’t put their programs on the HUD program. You know, it’s sort of ‘those people’ type attitudes. And it’s a stigma out there. And it’s happened over the course of time,” Williams said.