Four international teachers crammed together in a two-bedroom house. A first-year teacher relying on financial support from her parents. A veteran educator pumping more than 40% of his salary into his rent.
Affordable housing continues to hover out of reach for teachers across Colorado in rural, suburban and urban districts alike, forcing many to allocate an unsustainable share of their pay to housing and resort to other drastic measures to secure a place to live.
A report published Wednesday by the nonprofit Keystone Policy Center highlights the hardship educators face in finding affordable housing — a factor that heavily influences whether teachers can work in a district and stay in the field altogether — with input from more than 3,200 educators surveyed in 10 Colorado districts earlier this year as part of their focus on staff housing initiatives.
The report, titled “We Can’t Live Where We Teach,” builds on findings from two previous reports the organization released in recent years on the scarcity of affordable apartments and homes for educators and district staff and how much districts’ ability to attract and keep teachers hinges on housing.
According to the report, which traces the individual struggles of teachers to secure adequate housing and the ways districts are stepping up to create more options, many Colorado teachers must devote an outsize amount of their income to housing. In four of the districts where teachers were surveyed, more than half of those who responded indicated they spend more than 40% of their pay on housing. Concerns around housing affordability and availability rank high for teachers across ages and experience in the classroom, with the report noting that a lack of housing would likely push educators to leave their district and pursue a position in another district that provided housing.
Meanwhile, most teachers who completed the survey said they would rent an apartment or house in which their district served as their landlord — a finding that surprised Van Schoales, a senior policy director of the Keystone Policy Center, who said that response conveys the sense of desperation among teachers to land in a spot that won’t stretch their budget.
“Teachers want to live somewhere and the closer that they live to the place that they work, the bigger the impact that can have on their ability to be an effective teacher,” Schoales told The Colorado Sun. “They can better know their community. They waste less time coming and going, and they’re happier people because they have a place to stay.”
The issue of housing has climbed higher and higher in the list of urgent priorities district leaders must address, Schoales said, with broader recognition that if they stay on the sidelines of the housing game, they risk losing quality teachers.
Lack of housing has escalated to a crisis in recent years, particularly for educators earning low salaries, he said. That crisis looks different from district to district, with mountain communities, resort towns and parts of the Front Range strapped by high housing prices and many rural parts of the state simply limited in their housing stock.
☀️ READ MORE
Among the Colorado districts being proactive in expanding housing accommodations for teachers, staff and even community members is Byers School District 32-J, 50 miles east of Denver. The district, which serves about 500 students, has a longer history of offering housing to staff than many of its peer districts. Teachers have had access to 10 apartments ranging from one-bedroom to three-bedroom units for a few decades, said Superintendent Tom Turrell.
And those units run much cheaper than other apartments in the area, with a one-bedroom apartment costing a teacher $250 a month plus electricity costs. The district increases rent by $40 a month each year, Turrell said, but that still keeps the price reasonable for educators in the district, where a first-year teacher earns an annual salary of $50,218.
Byers School District, which Turrell has led for 21 years, also owns two houses set aside for staff, including one home the district recently bought with about $500,000 from its general fund. The home sits on one side of a 2.5-acre plot of land, where Turrell has a bigger vision to develop an agriculture hub and construct pens so that students can raise their own sheep or goat.
He also knows there’s more work to be done to extend housing to teachers and other district employees, keeping an open lot owned by the district in mind for six potential townhomes.
All but one of the district’s existing units are full, with a waitling list of three district employees in line for the one available unit that the district is in the middle of renovating.
Turrell told The Sun that opening up housing for staff has created ripples of benefits, strengthening a sense of community among teachers who gather together in their neighborhood to barbeque and watch Friday night football games from their front yards. It has also reeled teachers into the five-day district who might otherwise opt to teach in a nearby district operating on four-day weeks or seek a position in a bigger metro district where they could make at least $10,000 more per year but would have to shoulder much higher housing costs.
The superintendent said he has accepted that being a landlord is just another part of his job as it has helped him plant qualified teachers in his classrooms who now have a better shot at financial stability.
“I just want to be that person who gets these people over that hump and they can look back and say … ‘now we aren’t living paycheck to paycheck. We actually do have a little savings account for emergencies.’”
An equal focus on increasing housing options and teacher pay
For Nathan Van Arsdale, who has worked for Durango School District for close to three years, multiple rounds of luck have put a roof over his head since he moved to Durango in 2021. Before taking a job as the district’s audio-visual technician in 2023, he filled a variety of roles, including working as a videographer and photographer, a handyman and a wilderness guide. He scored a townhouse for rent before its owner put it on the market and found a roommate to help ease expenses.
But Van Arsdale’s luck came with setbacks and sacrifices. He had to move after the owner raised rent and terminated his lease. He found a mother-in-law apartment in the back yard of a local house but a month later was laid off.
At one point, Van Arsdale said he was spending more than a third of his income on rent and he scraped by, photographing real estate as a side hustle and even scoping out parts of town full of fruit trees where he could gather fruit to fill out his meals.
His most recent stroke of luck fell in the form of a $250,000 condo that Van Arsdale purchased with by borrowing some money from his retirement account and with help from a local nonprofit called HomesFund that offers downpayment assistance to prospective homeowners.
The 450-square-foot townhome is “a dream come true,” Van Arsdale wrote in an email to The Sun.
“I now feel confident that my investment will grow and that I will be able to scale up in the future,” said Van Arsdale, who now also serves as the facilitator of Durango School District’s Impact Career Innovation Center and aims to keep working for the district until retirement.
Like other districts, Durango School District is on the frontlines of connecting its employees with housing, using about $20 million to flesh out workforce housing from a $150 million bond measure approved by voters last November.
Those efforts are worth applauding, Van Arsdale said, but they shouldn’t fall in the purview of districts.
“It should not (be) the job of school districts to be landlords,” he said. “It is the job of school districts to ensure every student gets the education (access to learning and career training) that empowers them to live a life where they can identify what they’re good at, what they enjoy doing, what the world needs and what they can be paid for. I think the onus is on the state and local governments, not school districts.”
That’s in line with one of the recommendations the Keystone Policy Center outlines in its latest report, advocating for outside organizations, consultants and government agencies to assist districts in pinpointing solutions for teacher housing.
The report notes that the state and nonprofits can best help by convening districts and people to exchange ideas and leverage resources about how to scale up housing and draw the interest of developers, who are more likely to flock to regional projects that will produce more housing units.
And districts must prioritize listening to teachers through interviews, surveys and work groups to clearly understand the kind of housing they need — while also continuing to keep making progress on boosting teacher pay.
Schoales, of the Keystone Policy Center, said tackling the root of the issue of unaffordable housing requires equal focus on increasing both housing options and salaries.
“If the focus was only on increasing salary, it wouldn’t make a dent in the housing issue because the cost of housing is so much higher in a lot of places and it’s growing faster than salaries have,” Schoales said. “So in a lot of places, let’s say in the Front Range, you’d have to double the salaries. That’s not going to happen.”