Little more than a week before Claudia Perez moved to Eagle County from Colombia to begin teaching Spanish to second graders last year, she had no idea where she was going to live.
Perez, part of a group of international teachers Eagle County School District has hired, scrambled to find a place that she could both afford and that would give her, her husband and their two sons plenty of space.
“I was really, really nervous,” she said. “It was our first time leaving the country, leaving our families, leaving our life in Colombia, and it was distressing finding a place to live in a place we didn’t know.”
She found her family’s first apartment a week before she and one of her sons relocated — a furnished two-bedroom apartment across the street from Avon Elementary School, where she paid $2,250 each month on her salary alone. It was a squeeze for her budget and her family, who all shared one bathroom. But last month, Perez and her family upgraded to a three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in a 37-unit complex Eagle County School District took the lead in developing in Edwards. She pays less — $2,130 each month, not including internet — for more space and covers rent with part of her $57,000 salary and income her 19-year-old son brings home from the Avon Recreation Center.
Her new home has given her a sense of relief and a place her family and friends can more easily gather — including for Thanksgiving last week.
The apartment complex, called Miller Flats, is one of several ways mountain districts like Eagle are taking it upon themselves to open up more affordable housing for teachers and staff. As the demand for affordable teacher housing takes on more urgency, districts’ solutions have become all the more creative. A report published Thursday by the nonpartisan Keystone Policy Center spotlights the pioneering efforts of two Colorado districts — Roaring Fork and Eagle County — to develop housing that can accommodate as many educators and staff as possible so that they can live in the communities where they teach and work.
Both mountain districts are facing a daunting reality: Rapidly rising housing costs mean they may need to shelter much of their staff in the coming decade, at least those new to the districts. That has forced the districts — already strapped for employees and resources — to add real estate to their growing list of responsibilities, similar to other districts affected by the same housing pressures.
“We also then find ourselves in a gray area, where we’re like, is this really our job?” said Anna Cole, Roaring Fork School District’s interim superintendent and chief of student and family services. “Are we outside of our scope, that now we are in the real estate business in some respect? And I would say part of it is the reality of trying to meet our mission of providing an excellent education for students — we need to take care of excellent teachers.”
The new report focuses on specific ways Roaring Fork and Eagle have found success in chipping away at the housing crisis looming over their communities after a report published by the Keystone Policy Center last year that found that fewer than one-fifth of homes across Colorado are affordable to teachers who make an average salary in their district.
In response, some districts have turned to tiny homes as one piece of a broader solution to teacher housing. Others have pleaded with their local community members to open up vacant spaces to teachers at rates they can afford. And others still have watched as some of their educators have raced to nail down cheaper housing options on their own — including one Summit County teacher who converted a van into her home.
The lack of housing presents “a huge challenge for school districts to maintain a steady workforce,” said Alan Gottlieb, a Denver-based communications consultant and writer who authored the report and also co-founded the national education news nonprofit Chalkbeat.
“Since nobody else is addressing it, if districts don’t, then they’re going to be increasingly facing a problem of holding onto, attracting and retaining teachers,” he said in an interview.
150 applicants for 37 units
Roaring Fork and Eagle have taken an entrepreneurial approach to opening up more housing for educators, “starting small but working towards scale,” Gottlieb said.
Eagle County School District, which educates about 6,600 students across Edwards, Avon, Eagle Red Cliff, Gypsum and Minturn, started tackling housing by developing its first master housing plan. That plan, released in April 2020, helped the district understand available resources, identify professionals qualified to assist with teacher housing and determine what kind of data it would need, Superintendent Philip Qualman said.
The district used its own land to construct its 37-unit apartment complex, Miller Flats, near Battle Mountain High School in Edwards. Some apartments are already occupied, and other teachers and staff will move in this spring, Qualman said.
Land owned by school districts often sets them up to immediately begin exploring more cost-effective solutions for teacher housing, the report notes, quoting Rob Stein, former superintendent of Roaring Fork School District.
“School districts are uniquely positioned to do this, because they have land that can’t be used for other purposes,” Stein says in the report. “Whether it’s vacant school buildings, or whether it’s little corners of property here and there, districts own land that can be utilized for housing.”
Miller Flats is one piece of Eagle’s master housing plan, which originally set a 10-year goal of building 120 units. Now, after housing prices have ratcheted much higher, the district needs at least 300 units to meet employee demand for housing, according to Qualman.
The district, which has about 1,000 employees and about 70 staff vacancies, funded its apartment project in Edwards using certificates of participation so that it would not have to put a bond issue in front of voters, which would have meant a tax increase if approved.
The district caps rent at 30% of the starting salary for a first-year teacher — about $50,000 — and has selected renters through a lottery.
Eagle is eyeing another housing project in Gypsum that will create at least 30 rental units and one in Minturn that will build 125 units — some rentals, others available for purchase through a partnership with Habitat for Humanity Vail Valley. Both projects are anchored by a $100 million bond that voters approved earlier this month.
Roaring Fork, which has about 900 full-time employees and covers Glenwood Springs, Carbondale, Basalt and nearby rural stretches, has taken parallel steps to build staff housing. With a $20 million commitment to housing — $15 million from a bond issue approved in 2015 and $5 million from the district’s general fund — the district built and purchased 66 rental units: 20 in Carbondale, 23 in Basalt and 23 in Glenwood Springs. The district also sets rental rates through a sliding scale based on people’s income so that no tenant spends more than 30% of their household income on rent and utilities — a benefit to renters made possible by the bond and general fund money.
The rental revenue the district collects from tenants is now helping fund another 50 housing units in Carbondale, said Ben Bohmfalk, chief operating officer of the district of more than 5,800 students.
The $29 million project, which encompasses three buildings, is expected to be completed late next summer, the report noted.
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When Roaring Fork created the 66 affordable housing units for its teachers and staff six years ago, district administrators were confident they had enough housing for staff with limited options. Fast forward through a pandemic — when Colorado resort towns became a hub for remote workers and second homeowners, causing home prices to double — and the rural district is now clamoring for nearly a couple hundred more apartments and houses.
Next year, the district will have 130 housing units for staff and educators, but to meet demand it needs more than double that number — at least 300 units. Within the next 10 years, that number could jump to 450, Bohmfalk said.
“We knew we had a challenge and we were addressing the challenge, and it felt like we were way ahead of the game and we were in good shape,” said Bohmfalk, who is also the mayor of Carbondale. “And now it feels like we’re way behind again.”
Originally, Roaring Fork allowed staff to live in district housing for no more than five years in hopes that teachers and other employees would save up money and be able to afford their own properties. The district axed that limit in light of how expensive the housing market has become within the past five years, Bohmfalk said.
“People are now raising their families for multiple years — for kind of their kids’ whole education — in our staff housing and not really using it as a launchpad because there’s kind of nowhere to launch to,” he said.
Roaring Fork and Eagle have also collaborated with Habitat for Humanity so that staff members have a better shot at homeownership.
District housing has drawn overwhelming interest from staff and educators in each district: Eagle received 150 applications for the district’s 37-unit apartment building in Edwards and 100 for 16 units Habitat for Humanity built for people to purchase. Meanwhile, Roaring Fork is netting more than 20 applicants for each unit that becomes available.
“A cascade of impacts”
In both Roaring Fork and Eagle school districts, the prospect of a teacher candidate accepting a job offer routinely comes down to one main factor: whether they can secure housing.
One of Roaring Fork School District’s high schools has been trying to hire two special education teachers since March and has drawn only two promising candidates in nearly nine months, Cole said. Both could not move forward with the district without housing in place, and so both positions continue to be vacant, she said, adding “that’s just one slice of what we see happening quite frequently now.”
Current staff and students also end up feeling the painful effects of the affordable housing shortage, she said. The district must rely on its staff to cover additional classes and sometimes condenses and centralizes programs, causing school bus drivers to have to transport kids farther than their neighborhood schools.
“We just see kind of a cascade of impacts from the actual classroom where we don’t have that position filled to all support staff that are leaning in to pitch (in), to rearrange,” Cole said. “And we worry a lot about the quality of education in the classroom because of unfilled positions — the consistency, the continuity, our ability to train and support new teachers. It’s really layered, and it’s really complex.”
In Eagle County, Qualman has watched classrooms suffer because of staff and teacher turnover, in part due to housing.
“It takes a few years to become an excellent teacher,” he said, “so if you have constant churn of staff members then you’re never developing that expertise and knowledge of the kids, the school, the community that it takes to really hit your stride as a veteran educator.”
The deficit of affordable housing in mountain regions also raises questions around teacher pay at a time many educators are struggling to make ends meet.
Roaring Fork passed a mill levy in 2021 to increase teacher pay, but the boost didn’t dramatically help teachers, Cole said.
“With inflation and cost of living, it almost felt like it didn’t go anywhere,” she said. “It really didn’t have the impacts we had hoped.”
Bohmfalk pointed out that home and rent prices have jumped so much that the district simply can’t keep up with its employee pay. In Basalt, for instance, the median price of a home increased 135% to $2.1 million between 2020 and the first half of 2023, the report notes, citing information from Roaring Fork Realty. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Basalt is $3,500 per month, according to the report, which cites Rent.com.
“There’s no way for us to increase pay enough for people to afford market housing,” Bohmfalk said.
Meanwhile, Colorado lawmakers and voters have ramped up their efforts to ease the financial burden of many Colorado homeowners and renters, including during a special legislative session earlier this month, when the legislature cut property taxes by $434 million and approved $30 million in rental assistance.
And last November, voters passed Proposition 123, which earmarks 0.1% of the state’s taxable income — currently about $300 million per year — for affordable housing initiatives.
One component of the measure that could benefit educator housing projects is an equity program that would allow the state to invest in an affordable housing project instead of by lending money or arranging loan packages, the report notes. The state would own a portion of that project, and when a building partially owned by the state is sold or refinanced, the state would get a portion of the funds. The state would retain the dollar amount of its original investment but would share any profits with tenants.
That pool of money would be funneled back to tenants, allowing them “to build up equity in their units over time,” the report states.
“If the renters are the ones who are creating the value in that property, they should also be gaining a share of the value of that property,” said Zach Martinez, a policy advisor at Gary Community Ventures, which helped fund Keystone Policy Center’s report and backed Proposition 123.
Another part of Proposition 123 that would help school districts increase the footprint of affordable teacher housing involves the land banking program, which would enable school districts to sell land or unused buildings to other local government entities or nonprofits that have succeeded before in developing affordable housing. That land would be preserved for affordable housing, Martinez said, and a school district could strike a deal with whoever buys their land or buildings to segment part of that housing for educators.
Bohmfalk, of Roaring Fork School District, said he looks every day for new housing opportunities, but with momentum behind expanding teacher housing, he is optimistic that the district “can build our way out of the problem eventually.”
“I think in the next decade or two we’ll keep chipping away at it,” he said. “And I think we’ll get to a point where it’s fairly stable, you can move here and you can find housing. But we’re just not there yet.”