Colorado Springs school district plans teacher housing on district property

A Colorado School district said that it is planning to build affordable homes for its employees Saturday.

Harrison School District 2 in Colorado Springs is in the planning stages of building 20, 352-square-feet duplexes on an acre parcel at the district's Mountain Vista Community School, according to the Denver Gazette.

The $6 million dollar project will offer electrically powered homes at a rent of $825 a month. The average rent in Colorado Springs is $1,720 per month and the average home price is $523,456, according to Forbes Advisor.

The salary for new teachers in the district is $47,545, according to the Gazette.

"(New teachers) ask, ‘Can I live in Colorado Springs?’ And I say you can, but you have to have a roommate or two or three in order to make a paycheck go as far as possible," Mike Claudio, assistant superintendent of personnel support services, told the Gazette.

The construction timeline will depend on fundraising.

School districts provide avenues for affordable housing

A 2022 EdWeek Research Center survey found that 11% of teachers said that subsidized housing would make them more likely to stay in the teaching profession.

The Harrison School District-2 project is the first school district in the area to put forward a housing project, according to the Gazette, though it is not the first district in the nation to build housing for their employees.

Los Angeles Unified School District, Santa Clara Unified School District and Jefferson High School District have each built employee housing, according to EdWeek.

The California School Boards Association, cityLAB and the Center for Cities + Schools, a research center at the University of California, Berkeley released research in 2022 that found that every county in California had an acre of developable land owned by an educational agency.