- National eviction filing rate runs at 5-6% of renter households annually. Higher in distressed workforce housing markets at 8-10%
- Lower-income, non-white, and female-headed households with children face eviction disproportionately and precisely when most economically vulnerable.
- Stanford/SIEPR research (Humphries et al. 2024)
The Case for Change
Our current environment
The consequences
- 50% of tenants default on rent at some point
- NBER Working Paper No. 33155 (2024)
- For tenants without rent subsidies, total rent payments are only 86% of rent due: a loss rate exceeding US credit cards, mortgages, and high-risk bonds
- Landlords already informally forbear 2-3 months before filing eviction. Agape formalizes and documents what the industry already does informally, at lower cost and with better outcomes
Agape started as a hope the founder had to prevent some of the hardships she had faced earlier in her adulthood for others like her. As the research progressed, something became clear. Solving a housing problem in rural areas wasn't enough. The state she struggled for 23 years to get back to had more people leaving than coming in. While she understood this, as it was the reason she left all those years ago, she is now in a better position to stand and fight for an area she loves.
Here are the facts that reshaped the beginning and direct the efforts of Agape toward the illustrated need.
West Virginia rural communities are dying. Across the state 53 out of 55 counties are losing populations. Some slowly and, unfortunately, others with increasing velocity, but the overall picture is difficult. This trend is not limited to West Virginia alone. West Virginia is just where Agape starts and sets its roots.
The best place to begin to face a problem is usually in your own back yard. In July of 2026, two schools closed, in neighboring Roane County, largely due to declining student enrollment. That declining student enrollment follows a more systemic decline. In the last 15 years, Roane County has lost around 10% of its population.
Years 2011-2015 a loss of 518
Years 2016-2020 a loss of 391
Years 2021-2025 a loss of 671.
This is accelerating, this needs action to stop.
Note: 2020 increase is Census info correction not growth
When a county loses people, it loses schools. West Virginia's 2020 facility plans projected 60 school closures by 2030. As of 2026, 58 of those 60 have already closed, four years ahead of schedule, and the State Superintendent expects eight to ten more this year. The state lost roughly 5,000 students in a single school year. Enrollment has fallen 6.5 percent since 2021, and the National Center for Education Statistics projects another 13 percent decline by 2031.
School funding follows enrollment, so every family that leaves makes the next closure more likely. Children who lose a neighborhood school face longer commutes, some two to three hours a day, and families weighing whether to stay in a community factor that into the decision. The decline feeds itself.
Then the buildings sit. Of the 24 schools closed statewide in the 2024-2025 school year, only two have sold. Of the closures that followed, none have. These are structures communities built and paid for, standing empty, costing money to insure and maintain while returning nothing. They are the visible evidence of the loss, and they are also the most underused asset a struggling community still owns.
The Opportunities
Addressing two prongs of a systemic problem with existing structures that require less funding than building new, promote community cohesiveness, and bring new opportunities buildings that already stand.
Tenant Stability Program
Rural Economic Revitalization
The Tenant Stability Program is a regenerative fund held at each property. When a tenant faces a short-term emergency and reaches out before the rent is missed, the fund covers the gap and the tenant repays over time at zero interest. The fund is restored for the next household. No fees, no court filing, no vacant unit, no family displaced..
Rural Economic Revitalization puts vacant buildings back to work as centers of local opportunity. A closed school becomes workforce training space, a small business incubator, or a place to work remotely for people who never had reliable internet at home. The building that once served the community serves it again, and families gain a reason to stay that housing alone cannot provide.
Rural areas face a considerable barrier to education and development resources offered in any state. This is illustrated perfectly in the mountainous terrain of rural West Virginia.
The programs already exist and they work. West Virginia's WIOA adult workforce program reported a 77 percent employment rate for participants after exit, against a negotiated target of 73 percent, with median quarterly earnings above $8,100. The intervention is proven. The problem is that only 1,651 adults across the entire state were served in a full program year.
The barrier is not distance. It is time. Services concentrate in county seats, and in this terrain 29 miles is a 58 minute drive. For a person working an irregular shift, caring for a parent, or managing without a reliable vehicle, a two hour round trip is not an inconvenience. It is a disqualification. The on-ramp exists. It is simply somewhere most people cannot reach.
The Return on Rural Investment
The case for investment in rural America is not new, and it is not speculative. In 2011 the White House Rural Council documented what rural communities already knew: outmigration among young people had fundamentally shifted rural age demographics, and having fewer people of working age weakens the economic environment needed to attract the businesses that create more jobs. The Council named the mechanism precisely. It is the same one operating in Roane County today.
It also named the barrier. Rural entrepreneurs travel farther than urban entrepreneurs to reach capital, and they face a two-way information gap: less information reaches potential funders about rural businesses, and less information reaches rural communities about where funding exists. Distance restricts capital the same way it restricts training and services.
Fifteen years later the pattern has not corrected itself. The Federal Reserve reported in 2026 that rural counties hold a shrinking share of prime working-age adults while the population over 65 grew from 7.4 million in 2010 to 9.7 million in 2023. Between 2020 and 2025, 47 percent of rural counties grew, but only a quarter of them grew from within. More than 86 percent depended on people moving in. Rural America's future is now a question of who arrives.
What that record describes as a challenge is, read from the other direction, an opening. A market with documented unmet demand, low competition, and low cost of entry is not a poor investment. It is an underpriced one. The buildings are already standing. The land is affordable. The workforce is present and underutilized. What has been missing is the capital and the connection, not the opportunity.
And the investment shows a return. USDA's Economic Research Service reviewed twenty-four years of Rural Development obligations, from 2000 through 2024, and found that the rural counties receiving the highest per-person investment averaged 39.9 percent real income growth over the period. The counties receiving the least averaged 31.8 percent. USDA is careful to note the finding shows association rather than proof of cause, and that caution is fair. But the direction is consistent, sustained across a generation, and measured across the whole of rural America.
Money placed in these communities does not disappear into them. It compounds. What has been missing is not the return. It is the decision to invest.
The School Conversion Advantage
The schools that have closed, and the ones slated to close, were never choices taken lightly. Nobody wants to disenfranchise the young. But a bandage is what a bandage is: a temporary stopgap meant to buy time for healing.
While each surplus property can benefit the community, not every building should become housing. Each surplus property is analyzed for the use its structure, site, and community can actually support. A building in a flood zone cannot responsibly hold residences, but it can hold a workforce center. A building with the right layout and location becomes homes. The question is not what we want a building to be, it is what the building and the community need it to be.
This is what makes school conversion efficient rather than sentimental. The structures already exist, they were built to serve the public, and they sit where the population is. Matching each one to its highest use turns a liability the district is paying to maintain into either housing, economic opportunity, or both.
After the foundation is set the finishing element is added.
Financial Literacy Initiatives placed at either type of community building
A stable home and a local job can still be lost to a decision nobody taught you how to make. That is the erosion the third prong is built to stop.
The scale of the gap is not small. A national study published by TIAA in June of 2026 surveyed 3,602 adults across the country on 28 questions of basic personal finance. On average, they answered 47 percent correctly. It was the lowest result in the study's ten year history, and one in four adults now falls into the category of very low financial literacy, up from one in five in 2017.
The cost of that gap shows up in ordinary places. Workers with very low financial literacy spend close to eleven hours a week dealing with money problems while they are at work, which is most of a lost day, every week, for something education can address.
And it can be addressed. The same study found that adults who have received financial education score thirteen percentage points higher than those who have not. This is not a complicated problem to improve. It just has to be treated as a priority.
Agape arranges that education rather than delivering it. Local banks, credit unions, insurance agencies, and registered advisers bring the expertise they already have to the people who have never had access to it. Agape provides the space, the relationship, and the trust. The partners provide the knowledge, under their own professional standards. No one is sold anything. People are taught, and then they decide.
What the numbers and research tell us.
The case for investing in housing stability is not built on compassion alone. It is built on data. The research is clear, the numbers are compelling, and the cost of inaction is documented. What follows is the evidence base that drives every decision Agape Community Works Foundation makes.
The Gravity Payments Parallel
Investing in Stability Pays
In 2015 Dan Price of Seattle-based Gravity Payments set a $70,000 minimum salary for all employees. The decision was widely criticized. The results demonstrated the core principle that underlies the Tenant Stability Program: that investing in the financial stability of people in your operational ecosystem generates measurable returns:
- Employee turnover cut in half
- Company grew significantly
- The return on a 2% raise: 4,299% ROI when employee retention value is calculated
- The return on a 5% raise: 1,661% ROI
- The return on a 10% raise: 780% ROI
- Break-even point where a raise stops paying for itself requires an 88% increase.
- No realistic wage increase falls in that range
- The policy outlasted its founder and remains in place today under current CEO Tammi Kroll
The causal mechanism is identical to the Tenant Stability Program; absorb a short-term cost to invest in the financial stability of people in your operational ecosystem, generate returns through reduced churn, lower administrative burden, and improved relationship quality.
International Evidence
Housing Stability Investment Works
- Finland. Housing First (PAAVO program)
- The only European country where homelessness decreased in recent years. 88% retention rate in stable accommodation. Savings of €15,000 to €52,000 per person per year in shelter, healthcare, justice, and social services
- Helsinki.
- Single Housing First program analysis generated €250,000 in savings in one year
- New York City: Pathways to Housing
- $16,282 saved per unit per year in public costs, offsetting nearly all of the $17,277 provision cost
- United Kingdom.
- Nine Housing First projects evaluated showed consistent potential to reduce homelessness while generating significant cost savings to government and public services
- Italy, Sweden, Spain, Denmark.
- Housing First replicated across multiple national contexts with consistent results: housing stability investment generates returns exceeding the investment in every context tested
HUD Benchmarks Agape Measures Against
- HUD Public Housing Assessment System standard for well-managed affordable housing: 96%+ occupancy
- Agape properties benchmarked against county-level HUD Fair Market Rent data: not national averages
- Rents set within the 25th to 75th percentile of HUD FMR data for each county, updated annually
- 50th percentile used as the planning midpoint for financial modeling
The Logical Structure
The Tenant Stability Program is not a novel theory. It applies a documented economic principle across three independently validated tiers:
- Employment economics: validated by Gravity Payments and SHRM/Gallup research
- US housing research: validated by NBER, Stanford, and HUD
- International housing stability programs: validated by Finland, UK, and US Housing First initiatives
Agape Community Works generates the housing-sector data at the workforce rental level that currently does not exist and makes it available to researchers, policymakers, and operators nationwide.