Dr. Bryan Hodge remembers his struggles to find lodging when he was a medical student doing rotations in rural areas in the early 2000’s.
Sometimes, he would have to live in someone’s basement. Other times, he would live with a roommate or in an apartment attached to a hospital.
Now, as a family physician and chief academic officer for Asheville-based MAHEC – Mountain Area Health Education Center – Hodge is spearheading an initiative to increase housing options for medical students in rural Western North Carolina.
A key part of the solution: Tiny homes.
“What we heard loud and clear from the students is they wanted personal space, private space,” Hodge said in an interview Tuesday. “And so, the modular or tiny homes ended up being a real easy example of personal space but at the same time generating a little bit of a community.”
Hodge spoke during a tour of four new MAHEC tiny homes in Sylva. The 350-square-foot units are arranged in a cluster off Allen’s Branch Road, just outside downtown, with a beautiful view of the mountains in the distance.
Each of the homes will host a student of medicine, pharmacy, behavioral health or another health science discipline, generally for a two-to-four-week rotation in Sylva or the surrounding area. The homes feature a combination living room-bedroom-kitchenette, a porch, a full bath, high-speed internet and a washer and dryer.
“It’s conveniently located so that it’s close to downtown and can showcase some of the best aspects of the community, and it’s also close to the hospital, the health department [and] a lot of the other local primary care practices that people can rotate through,” Hodge said.
“The demand has been there. And we think with this type of community, it’ll actually be even more popular – these rotations will be even more popular than they already were,” he added.
The homes are set to host their first round of students later this month.
All nine of North Carolina’s health education centers own or rent apartments for students or provide housing through arrangements with private individuals. The Sylva initiative marks the first time tiny homes will be used.
A recent study in the Journal of Graduate Medical Education examined the housing challenges facing students in rural residency programs.
“Rural communities often have less available housing than urban communities,” the authors wrote. “Rural housing is more likely to be owned (81%) than urban housing (60%), leading to a smaller rental market.”
Ron Fagan, MAHEC’s director of facilities management, said the Sylva project was in the works since 2019, but that the coronavirus pandemic and resulting budgetary and logistical challenges led to delays.
On Tuesday, Fagan said it was “very gratifying, after five years, basically, to see this actually alive and ready for the first group of students to come in this month.”
“One of our big challenges is finding the right kind of housing for students to do their rural rotations,” Fagan told BPR. “If you're in the bigger cities — Asheville, Hendersonville — there's lots of managed apartment complexes. You get out in the rural areas, it gets harder to find the housing that they need.”
Fagan added that he just spoke with MAHEC’s housing manager, who told him that a student who had initially put their rotation location as Asheville called yesterday and said they will actually be working in Franklin. The student asked the housing manager if MAHEC might have anything closer.
“She said, ‘Well, we just might,’” Fagan said. “So, we may have a student next week.”
