Sacramento-area school district to build affordable housing for teachers, employees
Twin Rivers Unified School District plans to build workforce housing for its employees who are struggling to find affordable, well-maintained rental units within the community they work, district leaders said Tuesday.
They made the announcement steps away from the South Natomas property near Chuckwagon Park where they plan to build single-family homes, townhomes, fourplexes and sixplexes.
“Today’s project is far more than just a housing project,” said Twin Rivers Superintendent Steve Martinez. “Today’s project is an opportunity for a school district to provide housing to our employees with the hope that they stay within Twin Rivers Unified School District.”
Rising home prices have forced teachers and school staff around the region, state and nation to rent or buy homes further and further outside the districts that employ them or to find roommates to share the cost of housing. That means a rising number of commuters on roads and highways.
Consequently, many districts are scrambling to find enough teachers and staff to fill teaching positions, and educators and their unions have pressed local and state leaders to increase the supply of affordable housing.
The average pay for Twin Rivers teachers was $90,713 in the 2022-23 school year, up 10% from the prior year but still slightly lower than the statewide average of $95,160 for public school teachers, according to records released in January by the California Department of Education.
It would take six years for a Twin Rivers Unified teacher earning average pay to buy a typically-priced Sacramento home if they put all their paycheck toward the purchase, according to an analysis.
By the third quarter of this year, however, the California Association of Realtors estimated the median home price in Sacramento at $560,000, and they noted that it would take a salary of $140,400 to qualify for a mortgage of that size. The monthly mortgage payment, the organization said, would be $3,510 with taxes and insurance included.
Burdensome housing costs can lead to homelessness
In two surveys of Twin Rivers Unified employees, 77% of 600-700 respondents stated that they spent more than 35% of their pay on housing. When people pay more than 30% of their income on housing, they are considered to be cost-burdened.
“Unaffordable housing costs can force families to spend less on other basic necessities like health care or food, to cut costs by seeking lower quality child care, and to under-invest in important long-term assets like education or retirement savings,” said researcher Sara Kimberlin in a 2019 report for the California Budget & Policy Center. “Unaffordable housing costs can also force families and individuals to accept substandard housing or live in neighborhoods that lack basic safety and offer limited opportunities. In the most serious cases, unaffordable housing can push households into homelessness.”
In an interview after the announcement, Martinez said that Twin Rivers Unified plans to maintain ownership of the property and that the board of trustees have not yet made decisions on the number of units, how to identify eligible employees or how rental agreements will be structured. He said they plan to learn from other districts around the state that already have workforce housing.
Twin Rivers Unified, which employs roughly 3,300 people, had purchased the site with plans to build an elementary school, Martinez said, but it no longer needed it for that purpose. A housing project, he said, would bring less traffic to the neighborhood.
Recently, California leaders began urging school districts to use some of the vacant land they have amassed to begin building affordable housing. Researchers at the University of California’s Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses recently reported that school districts around the state own 75,000 acres of developable land, enough to build 2.3 million housing units and end the housing shortage.
“This is about the size of five Manhattans,” they wrote. “More than half (61%) of these properties are located where beginning — and other lower salaried teachers — face housing affordability challenges.”
Districts have a number of ways to finance development of these projects, including the $10 billion bond fund that voters recently approved in Proposition 2.
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, whose term ended Tuesday, praised Martinez and the Twin Rivers Unified board for taking a bold step to ensure that educators and other school employees would have affordable housing, saying teacher retention is crucial for delivering quality education.
“I love, love, love, love when governmental bodies smartly step out of their lanes and say, ‘We are going to do things differently for the betterment of our community,’” said Steinberg, who noted this was his last public event as mayor.
