They moved into a trailer, a temporary home while they searched for a house.
That was three years ago.
Finding a new place to live in Greenwood proved to be harder than the Meredith family thought.
Nathan Meredith, his wife Samantha and his four kids moved into a three bedroom double-wide in the Winterbrook neighborhood in 2017.
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They intended it to be a short-term stay while they looked for an affordable house to buy or rent in the Center Grove area, where their kids are in school. For three years, they’ve scoured the web, constantly looking for a house in their budget. So far, no luck.
“We were trying to avoid the trailer park at all costs,” Nathan Meredith said.
He pays $1,000 a month in rent, when he could be paying just a little more to live in a larger single-family house with a yard for his kids to play in, he said.
The trailer is tight for a family the size of Meredith’s. His three sons, who are 14, 10 and 9 years old, share a small bedroom, sleeping in a bunk bed with a trundle. His 14-year-old son, who is nearly six feet tall, sleeps on the floor in the trundle bed he barely fits in. Their 7-year-old daughter sleeps in her own room.
There is a constant cockroach problem too, and hiring exterminators cuts into the family’s savings often.
“We’re fighting a losing battle,” Meredith said.
The problem the Meredith family is facing is common among people looking for a house within their budget in Greenwood and Johnson County — there just aren’t that many available. Ideally, they want a house that costs $200,000 or less in the Center Grove school district. Usually, only a couple pop up at a time, and they constantly monitor real estate sites, such as Zillow, Meredith said.
Those houses within their price range are listed and sold within days.
“We’re just running into the houses that are getting bought as soon as they hit the market. All the ones we liked, they were already being picked up,” Meredith said.
Throughout their extensive home search, Meredith noticed several of the lower-priced houses were bought by property groups and listed for rent, costing hundreds more than what a mortgage payment would be, he said.
There were 56 homes listed for under $250,000 on Monday in Greenwood, according to Zillow. There were 60 homes listed for rent, costing between $1,200 and $2,000 a month. Of the rental houses, most that are listed on Zillow were purchased by property management companies for less than $200,000, and are typically in neighborhoods with older, lower-priced houses.
The house search has left the Merediths between a rock and a hard place. Nathan Meredith looked into renting a house, but when applying, the rental companies ask him to show proof he can make at least four times the monthly rent, which isn’t something he can do.
“I’ve got to show I can make $5,800 a month for this to just even be an option,” he said.
Meredith is a former Bargersville and White River Township firefighter. He now works as a dump truck driver making about $30 an hour for about seven months out of the year, and then he picks up work at a commercial sewer company in the winter making $21 an hour. Working full-time — and overtime most days — he brings home more than $50,000 a year, right around Greenwood’s average household income of $55,000.
The average home price in Greenwood is about $250,000, according to Zillow, and new builds in many of the developments proposed in the city are priced between $260,000 and $400,000. Two recently approved subdivision plans by Arbor Homes and Lennar Homes fall within that price range.
A new house is not within the Meredith family’s price range. Due to the lack of options though, Meredith is starting to look more at buying a new house, which is not in the family’s budget.
“You look at your budget, you go, ‘oh crap, this is going to stretch our budget thin,’” Meredith said.
He is disappointed the City of Greenwood seems to have no interest in bringing lower-priced homes to the area. Instead, city officials continue to approve subdivisions full of houses that people like him can’t afford, he said.
“It’s like they are trying to compete with Carmel, but if you look at Carmel, Carmel doesn’t have the warehouses Greenwood has,” Meredith said. “Those folks there have the jobs that pay higher wages, those people have the salaries.”
They are catering to the wrong demographic, he said.
“There are more of us middle- to low-income families in Johnson County than there are high-income families,” Meredith said.
Editor’s note: Read the first story in this series, “Affordable housing out of reach in Greenwood,” in the Nov. 30 edition of the Daily Journal or online at dailyjournal.net.
