A Supplemental Report to 2021’s How School Districts Can Create Attainable Housing Opportunities

In 2021, Vitalyst Health Foundation published How School Districts Can Create Attainable Housing Opportunities, which presented ways to create attainable housing solutions for school teachers and staff. The report highlighted different legal and financial pathways that school districts could explore to create housing solutions in their communities.

Some of these pathways include:

• Using school-owned land for housing. Considering how land costs are often a barrier to building attainable housing, one strategy is to repurpose public property for housing. Schools have underutilized land and while housing cannot be offered exclusively to employees, schools can offer staff priority access.
• Teacherages. Housing units for teachers and other school employees using school-owned property and land.
• Shared use agreements. Shared use or community use agreements allow public access to existing facilities by defining terms and conditions for sharing the costs and risks associated with expanding a property’s use.
• Financing options. Financing options to build attainable housing include the 9% Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC), the 4% Tax Credit Program, local government funding, and general obligation funds.

As a result of the How School Districts Can Create Attainable Housing report, seven school districts expressed interest in partnering with developers to create a proof of concept exploring the feasibility of creating attainable housing on their land. This report highlights the outcomes of those partnerships, which are also summarized in Table 1. Each of these cases can be used as a guide for other school districts that might be interested in creating housing solutions for teachers and staff.

Review the toolkit here.