AISD Teacher Housing Crisis
Why Can’t Austin Build More Housing For Teachers?
By Nina Hernandez
Austin's real estate market is a nightmare whatever the position you find yourself in. The median price of a home surpassed $600,000 this year -- with no relief in sight. Average monthly rent hit $1,500 late last year. Evictions are up since the pandemic moratoriums stopping them expired. That’s as the rental relief programs helping many stay in their homes have dried up.
For Austin Independent School District teachers, these factors are stacking alongside already long-standing problems they’ve had with a district that pays its teachers too little and a city that does too little to relieve systemic burdens. In the 2021-22 academic year, AISD teachers with five years of experience earned about $52,000. That adds up to about $3,600 per month after taxes. A $1,500 rent payment would be about 40% of those teachers’ incomes.
Realistically, this means living near to the school where they work is out of reach for many AISD teachers. As traffic congestion worsens and cost of living continues to go up, commuting is increasingly impractical. That’s led to an exodus of teachers, who can find better pay and conditions outside the city center, to nearby suburban districts. It’s been a problem for AISD for years, alongside declining enrollment and the state of Texas’ recapture system that loots hundreds of millions of dollars from district coffers each year.
It’s a problem easy to identify but difficult to fix. An Urban Land Institute study from 2016 made the case for AISD to use existing facilities to build housing expressly for teachers. But that would require an extensive public engagement and relations campaign to satisfy a labyrinth of conflicting opinions and interests from parents to developers. Those discussions have gone nowhere fast.
Ultimately, without a fix to the overall land development code, it’s hard to see how the city might make any real dent in the problem. The City Council has made overtures in the past several years that haven’t produced significant results. Meanwhile, Austin is currently producing about 20-40% of the housing units that it would without our antiquated zoning code in place. That bottleneck means that even market rate units come on the market in a slow trickle. Specialized affordable units and ones specifically earmarked for teachers are even more rare.
Even if AISD didn’t have its current constraints of leadership and finances, the city’s unworkable code would still be killing most efforts to try innovative development ideas to boost teacher housing. The bad news is that it will take fixing the latter to really begin working on the former. As an AISD spokesperson told the Hyde Parker: “If we don't make spaces in our neighborhoods for teachers, why should we expect them to continue to teach in our neighborhood schools?”
City Council member Natasha Harper-Madison, who has been an advocate for land use reform, echoed the sentiment. “Right now, our outdated land development basically makes million-dollar mansions the default housing type in most neighborhoods in Austin.”
She continued: “If we don’t fix that and make it easier, cheaper, and faster to build more types of housing for more types of people in more parts of town, the doors to Austin will be locked not just for teachers but also for firefighters, nurses, bus drivers, musicians, baristas, journalists, and just about every other working-class Austinite who doesn’t make a six-figure salary.”
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