The Decibel - Amid a housing crisis, students build tiny homes for teachers

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Aspen, Colorado is a picturesque mountain town often called a snowy “playground for the rich”. Real estate is also one of the most expensive in the United States, and for the teachers that live there, that means they’ve been priced out. Now, the local high school is trying to solve that problem with student-built tiny homes for their teachers.The Globe’s international correspondent, Nathan VanderKlippe recently spent time in Aspen to find out about this makeshift solution to the affordability crisis, the other cities doing similar projects and what this all says about the effects housing has on our social structures.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

This was like one of those really like trial and error bits because you got to get the fit in perfectly. Yeah. That was just a pain. How many times did you have to do that? I did that like three times. Eli Kissel is a student at Aspen High School in Aspen, Colorado. For his woodshop class, he's helping to build a tiny home. And then we did the roofing. I don't know if you've

been up here. I haven't, no. Yeah, I'd love to come up. Eli gave the Globe's Nathan Vanderklip a tour because this project is being built by students for one of their teachers to live in. And it's just one of many they plan on building. Aspen has one of the most expensive real estate markets in the United States, meaning housing is out of reach for most teachers. But this isn't just a problem there. It's happening in cities across the U.S. Today, Nathan tells us about Aspen's makeshift solution to the affordability crisis

and what other places, including Canada, can learn from it. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Nathan, thanks for being back on the podcast. Thanks for having me. What exactly is a tiny home? Like, just how tiny are we talking here? Well, when I, I mean, tiny home is one of these things that people are talking about now. It's one of the bywords, I think, of the housing crisis.

And I always kind of understood tiny home to be kind of cute you know like it sounds it sounds cute but it wasn't really until i stepped foot into this one tiny home that i realized just how really genuinely small it is so this will be living room here i guess well this will be kitchen this is the kitchen kitchen goes across like this okay the showers here shower here and uh toilet composting toilet sink closet which will house the gravity feed water okay okay and then basically that's it uh you know a couple of strides is all you need to get basically from the entrance to the back of the house. And what I found really staggering about this place was the bedroom is on a loft, but the loft is underneath a peaked roof. And if you can imagine the peak of that roof, its maximum height is about four feet. So you put a mattress in there and there's no way, unless you're a very, very short person indeed, that you are going to be standing up in that loft. And depending on the

thickness of the mattress, you might even have trouble sitting up in bed. And that just really sort of underscored to me just how small this is. It's a very, very small space. We're talking 200 or just a little bit less than 200 square feet. Wow. And we're going to come back to talking about this tiny home in a minute. But Nathan, let's touch on the big picture here, because the reason why they're building these tiny homes for teachers is because real estate is very expensive in Aspen. So just for some context, a teacher's starting salary there is about $62,000 US, which is higher than the starting salary in Denver, the capital of Colorado. That's only $55,000. But still, home prices in Aspen are really kind of out of reach for teachers.

Nathan, how much does a house cost in Aspen? Well, if you have any interest, I recommend going on Zillow.com and typing in Aspen. I did that just to get a look because it's quite extraordinary. But, you know, there's currently a 263 square foot studio condo for sale, 1.2 million U.S. dollars. The cheapest house I could find, and this is a few kilometers outside of town, is four million dollars. But I mean, really, the sky is the limit. There's a 1600 square foot townhouse for sale for eight million million, a whole bunch of properties for sale between $30 million all the way up to $80 million. So it's a very, very expensive place to be.

Do we know how this compares, though, to an average house in the U.S. in terms of cost? A lot more. I mean, you know, you look at a medium home price for across the U.S. being like something like $420,000. So Aspen is much, much more expensive. You know, you look at a medium home price for across the U.S. being like something like four hundred twenty thousand dollars. So Aspen is much, much more expensive. And that was part of the reason I was interested in going there, because a lot of the issues that Aspen is dealing with are issues that are creeping up in many other parts of the United States. But they are much more acute in Aspen. And so this is the environment then in which these tiny homes are being built now.

How did this tiny home project start? Well, this is something that has been worked on for a couple of years now. And it's not just the Aspen School District. There's a few school districts, four in total, in sort of the Mountain Valley area around Aspen that are doing this. But for Aspen, it's part of, they've had some form of housing for teachers for a couple of decades. But in 2020, they put forward a bond for local rate payer approval, $114 million to fund both school upgrades and a major expansion for school housing. So they're now looking at housing for about a third of the employees of the school district, but they're looking to build a lot more.

I talked to David Baugh, who's the superintendent for Aspen Schools. He says he's now spending about a third of his time looking for homes that can be used for staff housing. It says, you know, if we can't figure out housing, we won't be able to figure out schooling. And that's just how important it is. And so how much do these tiny homes actually cost to build? So this first one is going to cost the district about $65,000. Yeah. And of course, when we're talking about that $65,000, it's materials and tools and stuff. But I guess the labor is the students in their shop class, right? So this is like free labor,

essentially? Essentially, exactly right. And I should point out the tiny home itself is not being looked at as sort of the be all and end all of housing solutions for teacher. In fact, the superintendent called it a point of entry at any point in the storm. And they've got lots of other options that they're looking to for housing. They have units of different sizes from smaller to multi-bedroom for families of different sizes. But I think just the very existence of this tiny home and the ones that are likely to come in following years just makes it very tangible how serious the problem is. Even the superintendent is in district provided housing. Do we know how much this project is actually expected to reduce the cost of living

for teachers, Nathan? I guess I'm wondering, like, how much of a difference this is going to make for them? Well, immense. And it's the bigger project, I think, that seeks to make that change for teachers. I mean, the school district is working towards, in the next 10 or 15 years, having housing for all of its employees, all the people who work for the school district. And their goal is to keep the rent to about 20 percent of salary. So if they can pull that off, then they will have created a fairly affordable housing situation. There are other issues with regard to what it means for the ability for teachers to gain personal wealth and this sort of thing, which we talk about later. But that's that's the aim. Okay. So you talked to some of the students doing the actual building here.

How do students feel about this project? They are doing the entire thing. You know, they are framing, they are reading blueprints, they are drywalling, they are doing electrical wiring and plumbing and the whole thing. They're building an entire house. So it's an extraordinary experience. But I was kind of curious about whether, you know, the little piece of housing, which is literally they're building something that one of their own teachers might live in, whether it might also provide other sorts of teaching and things like social inequality and that sort of thing. And I spoke with a few people at Aspen High School about the construction of this project. One of them was Eli Kissel, who is a grade 12 student. There is 18 years old.

And he responded by talking a little bit about some of his work as a server at a local restaurant and with co-workers talking about the troubles that they had found in getting a place to live. He was like, you know, if you have something like tiny home, yes, it can meet that need. But even he kind of struggled to understand how a space that small could be a full time place to live. He was like, you know, surely they're going to use this if somebody's apartment floods or there's a fire or something like that. And we'll see how it's used. This one's not finished yet. They haven't when I was there, they hadn't even decided exactly where to put it. But, you know, if they're putting out one of these a year, I think the expectation is that some of them will be used as full time residences. We'll be back after this message.

What about the teachers, Nathan? How did how do they feel about all of this? This is I mean, it's really something that is that is, I think, very mixed for everyone. I don't think I spoke with anyone who had a sort of a perfectly clear opinion on how this is fabulous or this is terrible. You know, there's there's been issues in some cases, local neighbors haven't wanted district housing in the area. One of the teachers I spoke with described a school housing in kind of a rural area that was accessed by one of the roads to access. It was actually a private road. One of the neighbors initially chained off that road to keep

teachers from coming through and going to their own home. That has changed. There's been more support since then, but there's been issues that sort of date to the many, many years ago in Aspen, where the high school was meant to be initially surrounded by homes. And there were local neighborhood complaints about that. And some of that land has now been turned into sports fields. You know, I spoke with the president of the Aspen School Board, Krista Giesel, and she was remarkably open about her thoughts on this, saying, you know, it's been a struggle with the notion of providing these homes at all by the district, because what it means is that housing is connected to employment. And the person who is control of your professional life is in many ways also in control of your personal life.

And out of the current policies, you know, a teacher has to leave within a month of their employment finishing. So if you lose your job, you're also losing your house then? If you lose your job, you're also losing your house. And they've also had policies that limit the number of years somebody can live in some of these district provided housing. And what does that mean as far as having teachers as part of a community? If anyone who comes in looks at this only as a short term option. I spoke with one former Aspen High School teacher, a woman named Diana Dame, and she'd had some pretty serious medical issues while she was there and had to leave. And she's now living elsewhere in Colorado. But she did the math.

She's been doing the math. I'm looking like, where can I go with my family to live and work as a teacher? And she said she had looked at Georgia. She'd looked at New York. She'd looked at Illinois. She looked elsewhere in Colorado. She looked at Maine. And in none of these places could she make the math work very well on affording a house and being a teacher. And so she's looking very seriously at going back to Aspen. She wants to go back to Aspen in many ways. She understands like if they go back, they're effectively giving up on home ownership. And that's got really important implications for a person's, a family's sense of security and personal wealth and that sort of thing. On the other hand, Aspen's a pretty amazing place. I mean, the high school there is kind of extraordinary. The parking lot backs on to a ski lift. You know, when this district provided housing works for teachers, it provides a really Nathan, where you have these really big houses, you have access to all these amenities, but then you have people, you know, living in district housing because they can't afford to live in any other way. It must cause a very unique dynamic to this place. Yeah, absolutely. And you see that even in the makeup of the student body. I mean, this is a school that serves and has served over the years, both literally the children of the families that own massive hotel chains, as well as the children of the families whose parents are perhaps employed as cleaning staff at those hotels.

So it's kind of a it's a very, very interesting place from that perspective. So, Nathan, this isn't only a it's a very, very interesting place from that perspective. So, Nathan, this isn't only a problem in Aspen, though. Where else are we seeing projects like this happening where teachers need housing in order to be able to afford these places? All over the place. California earlier this year, a law went into effect that makes it easier for school districts to use their own land to build housing for teachers and other staff. This, of course, is one of the things that school districts have as an advantage in the sense, which is that many school districts have long ago zoning that provides them access to considerable amounts of land. There's places that have looked at reconstituting old schools into housing and that sort of thing. You know, unsurprisingly, San Francisco, a very expensive place, you know, they're adding hundreds of homes for teachers

there saying they'll offer those at below market rates. But it's elsewhere, too, in Texas. You know, you've got Austin working with a developer to add 500 units for teachers. Atlanta looking at building a teacher village, which would have something like 200 units. In Miami, they're looking at a new school with teacher housing built in. Indianapolis has added teacher housing. So it's across different parts of the United States. What's in it for the school district to provide housing for teachers? Is it just like this dynamic where a school district can possess advantages in securing housing that an everyday person just doesn't have access to. So, you know, a school district is a form of government, so they don't pay property tax on on the land they own. They can do things like provide charitable receipts to landowners who sell them at below market rates.

So let's say you've got a $10 million piece of property. You sell it to the school district for $2 million, but then you get a charitable receipt for $8 million in very rough math terms. And what that means is that you can use that to displace a tax burden elsewhere. And that effectively means that other levels of government end up through that sort of foregone tax revenue, helping to subsidize this. And we've been talking about schools and teachers here, but the U.S. does have a broader history, too, of providing housing for low paid employees. Can we talk a little bit about that, Nathan? In some places, yeah. Well, with teachers even, you know, dating back to the 70s,

there's some places on the coast, for example, the Atlantic Coast that have created teachers villages and that sort of thing. I mean, there's always been histories of, for example, mining towns providing housing. And but you're also seeing other sectors looking at similar things, even in Aspen. There is an element of both competition and cooperation between the school board and the local hospital. Both of these entities are looking to find ways to house their workers, nurses, teachers, that sort of thing. And so in a sense, they're competing because they're looking for the kind of land and housing that they can use, but they're also trying to cooperate. And if they can find a big enough suitable plot of land to acquire, perhaps they can build the kind of housing that can house both sort of district staff as well as hospital staff.

It sounds like it's becoming more common for teachers and maybe other staff like hospital workers to really not be able to afford where they live. I guess the really obvious question here, Nathan, is like, why not just pay teachers more so they can afford a place? Yeah. And that's when I called up the Colorado Education Association, which is the teachers union in the state. It's the biggest union in the state. You know, that was the first thing they say, you know, what we really need to do is we need to pay teachers more. There's reasons why that has proven difficult. One of them in Colorado, which is unique to Colorado, but there's other places that have

similar issues, is they have a taxpayer bill of rights. And what that means that any tax that exceeds sort of annual increases in inflation or population has to be approved by a referendum, which means that if you wanted to raise teachers' salaries, you'd have to persuade people to vote to increase their own taxes to do that. And of course, people don't generally love to vote for higher taxes. But, you know, this is part of a bigger issues for teachers in particular across the United States where salaries just haven't kept up. I mean, there's been some looks at, you know, where teachers' salaries rank relative to other professions with similar levels of education. If you look back at, you know, 1996, there was about a 6% gap between teachers and other similar

professionals. That's now, by 2022, it had now blown out to more than 26%. So it's a big shift. And, you know, you can imagine that that has made teaching less attractive as a profession, which is borne out in some of the numbers of teachers enrolled in teachers college, other preparatory programs in the U.S. That's down 37 percent from 15 years ago. I mean, yeah, this must be something that people think about before they decide to go into this profession, right, before they decide to become a teacher. So this must be a big part of the problem, too, is it's just not an attractive profession, or at least as it once was. Right. And I think what this is, is one of the examples or really tangible examples of how housing is having really profound effects on our social structure. You know, when teachers and other professionals no longer have a clear path to home ownership, you know, there's questions about the fate of the middle class. And it just feels like often I think we've seen those as perhaps voiced in the hypothetical. And I don't I think we can sort of be more declarative when you look at these kind of situations that there's a growing list of places today where we're teaching really is no longer a middle class profession.

When I spoke with the president of the Colorado Education Association, she said, you know, they have many educators that report having to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet. And they have educators who tell them that their own children qualify for free and reduced lunches in the schools where those teachers work. We've focused on teachers here, Nathan, but I guess what does this say about the affordability crisis more broadly these days and what people can afford or can't afford. Yeah, I think it just goes to that bigger structure of what kind of society is being created by some of these inequities, which I think are really obvious when it comes to housing. And of course, it's not just a U.S. concern. I was focused on the U.S. in this article, but in B.C., for example, even last month, we heard Premier David Eby talking about the need for more housing, provincial support for more housing. And he talked about nurses, firefighters, police officers, civic employees, construction workers, and of course, teachers as people and professionals that are having difficulties finding affordable places to

live. And he said the same thing. He said, we know the middle class is struggling in our province. And I think that is the core of the problem. Nathan, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. Thanks again. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our intern is Manjot Singh.

Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.