Andy Hayes, a 7th-grade science teacher at Traverse City West Middle School and vice president of the Traverse City teachers union, spent more than a year looking to buy a house for himself and his three sons. He gave up when he realized it’d be impossible to afford the monthly payments on a home close enough to his school.
He rents now, something he says he’s able to do as a senior teacher. “Fortunately I have a place that I can afford,” he said. But he’s worried about the younger generation. “For people to be able to move up here and start a career, it’s really difficult, because there’s not a lot of housing that’s affordable for people beginning their career to actually have a place to live.”
School administrators have noticed this too. A consortium of four educational institutions in the area – Traverse City Area Public Schools (TCAPS), Grand Traverse Area Catholic Schools, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and Northwest Education Services – has been working for two years on a project to build affordable housing units for school staff, and recently secured $5 million from the state’s Labor and Economic Opportunity budget specifically for their project.
Once Governor Whitmer signs the budget legislation, they’ll have a large portion of the $23 million dollars they need to build Phase 1 of their development, which would create 72 affordable rental units designated for school employees.
Nick Ceglarek, superintendent of the region’s intermediate school district, Northwest Education Services, said he’s hopeful this will help them recruit teachers early in their careers. “We envision that an educator would be in those apartments for a year, maybe two, as they're transitioning and trying to save for permanent housing within the region.”
The units would be set aside, at first, for staff from the four educational institutions that worked on the proposal – that includes teachers, bus drivers, food service workers, and anyone else who works in a K-12 setting.
School administrators in the region worked with Cinnaire, a real estate development agency that specializes in affordable housing. The project manager from Cinnaire, Edward Potas, said he was surprised by the statistics he saw in housing studies about this area. “It’s shocking how quickly things have risen, and how quickly this has disrupted this system,” and added that this state investment shows regional leaders were convinced of the dire need.
Andy Hayes says he doesn’t see so many younger teachers teaching at his school these days, and that many of his colleagues are on the verge of retirement. He wants to see incentives like this to bring younger teachers to the region.
“With the housing market and the rental market the way it is now, this is something in my early career that I would have really looked forward to,” he said – “just basically to have a place to live that wouldn’t bankrupt me.”