Fear of losing teachers propels housing plan

Fearing an exodus of teachers headed for less expensive homes, a Santa Barbara schools committee is moving forward on a plan to use district-owned land to build affordable housing for faculty.

The 11 member advisory committee, formed seven months ago to investigate how to generate money from unused school property, recently submitted its proposal. School board members are likely to begin discussing it soon.

The site the committee has in mind is 23 acres in the unincorporated Goleta valley, west of San Marcos High School and just east of El Camino Junior High School. Under one scenario, school faculty would be able to purchase market-rate homes at half price with no down payment.

If the idea succeeds, the school district would be one of the first in the state to provide subsidized housing for teachers.

Such a plan would have been a dream come true for Harding School teacher Raquel Frausto. The single mother had longed for a home on the South Coast, but with the median cost now past $1 million, her $50,000 salary doesn't come close.

So after eight years of renting studio apartments in Santa Barbara the last one with no freezer and no oven the 10 year teacher recently settled for a condo in Ventura and a long commute.

"I really like my job," said Ms. Frausto, 36. "But if I were offered a job in Ventura that paid the same, I would take it"

Ms. Frausto's story signals an approaching trend, officials say: As retirement starts claiming large numbers of veteran teachers who purchased homes when they were affordable, the Santa Barbara elementary and secondary schools will start to fill up with teachers who can't afford to live here.

"There's going to be a bubble in the next four or five years of us leaving," said Pam Kinsley, a veteran teacher and head negotiator of the teachers' union, who purchased a home in the 1970s.

Building affordable housing would help stem the flow of teachers to more affordable areas such as Santa Barbara's North County and Ventura County.

"The vision, I think, is an incredible prospect," school board President Nancy Harter said. But she added: "I feel like the whole idea of trying to create housing that is affordable to teachers is like motherhood and apple pie, who would be against it? (But) the devil's in the details."

Committee members, developers, appraisers, teachers, and former city planners among them know of just one other similar effort in California: a well-publicized project at Santa Clara Unified School District in the Silicon Valley, where 40 reduced-priced rental apartment units were built in 2002 for teachers. At that time, the school district was the first in the nation to try this approach.

That project was a joint venture between the school district and Intel Corp..

Here, however, the housing units could include detached homes. Though the committee hasn't asked for any bids, it did listen to presentations from interested developers.

One well-received proposal came from a self-described unconventional developer named UniDev of Washington, D.C., which has built affordable housing for faculty on college campuses such as UC Irvine and Cal State University Channel Islands, but never a public school system.

UniDev officials said the company could not only offer good houses at a low rate, but also generate $1 million a year for Santa Barbara school. This is partly because the land would be leased to the buyers, not sold, and the districts would receive a chunk of the profit whenever the homes are sold. A nonprofit group would be set up by the district to manage the property.

UniDev's project would include about 200 units of any combination of small houses, condos and apartments.

"So much about the cost of the housing is tied to the cost of the land," said planning consultant Pat Saley, who advises the committee but does not have a vote. "(Owning land) really helps to bring the cost of the housing down."

Teachers in Santa Barbara earn between $37,400 and $67,000 annually. While the median income is about $64,000 in the city, according to the Housing Authority of Santa Barbara, a family of four needs to earn $200,000 annually to afford a median-priced home here, Ms. Saley said.

The specter of losing large numbers of good teachers to more affordable places to live is an example of how local housing costs are starting to affect even the people who have homes, she added.

"A lot of people still don't quite understand that," she said. "But this (committee) really gets it."

The staff housing plan sounds like a "great idea" to Tamara Benzor, a teacher at Community Academy elementary who has hopped from apartment to apartment during her nearly 10 years in the district.

Even her rent in Carpinteria is a "pinch," she said.

"It's doable," said Ms. Benzor, 34. "But not enough where you can save for down a payment. In order to do that I'd have to move back with my parents, which I don't really want to do."