Teacher housing on school property?

Miami-Dade seeks to build homes faculty can afford

Amid a wide gap between modest teacher salaries and Miami’s high housing prices, the county has a new plan: build apartments on school property and let faculty live there.

A preliminary proposal includes constructing a new mid-rise middle school in the luxe Brickell area for Southside Elementary, with a floor devoted to residential units, and several more reserved for parking and the classrooms on top. If that goes well, Miami-Dade wants a fullfledged housing complex next to Phillis Wheatley Elementary, with as many as 300 apartments going up on the campus just north of downtown.

“It’s an exciting idea,” said Michael Liu, Miami-Dade’s housing director. “Land is at a premium in Miami-Dade County. It’s difficult to come by, especially in the urban core.”

Though preliminary, the joint effort by Miami-Dade’s school system and housing department has momentum.

Miami-Dade is already in talks with Housing and Urban Development, the federal agency that oversees some of the county’s affordable-housing projects. JPMorgan Chase gave a $215,000 grant to the nonprofit Miami Homes For All to help develop the Wheatley plan, according to a March 22 company release.

Miami’s Omni Community Redevelopment Area, a downtown tax district with a budget of more than $50 million a year, in January voted to back a complex development agreement that would send dollars to the Wheatley project.

County teachers would get priority for the apartments, but the school system doesn’t plan to reserve units for faculty at the schools involved. Still, the apartments would likely be most in demand for those teachers, given the nonexistent commute.

“You basically just walk around the corner, and you’re there,” said Jaime Torrens, the school system’s chief facilities officer.

He said that while the residential and educational facilities could share some recreational facilities after hours — such as playing fields or community rooms — the buildings would be designed so that residents and the school populations couldn’t mix during the school day. At the new Southside building, students and residents would enter in different ground-floor lobbies and use different elevators. At Phillis Wheatley, the school would be in one building and the apartments in another.

The concept would add Miami to a scattering of cities across the country where schools are using their own real estate to provide more affordable housing to their workforces. As the largest employer in Miami-Dade, the school system has long cited housing prices as a top recruiting hurdle.

When Apartment List last year matched teacher salaries with rents in 50 of the country’s largest real estate markets, Miami ranked 47th; only New York, Seattle and San Francisco had larger gaps. With a first-year teacher earning about $42,000 and raises coming slowly, Apartment List found even established teachers could expect to spend as much as two-thirds of their incomes on a two-bedroom apartment in Miami.

“When you look at teacher salaries, it’s just impossible for them to get into the housing market,” said Ned Murray, associate director of Florida International University’s Metropolitan Center, which studies the gap between income and housing in Miami. Using school property to create housing for the school system’s workforce “is a good idea, because land is such a difficult piece of the puzzle.”

By helping create housing units for its employees, the school system would attempt to chip away at the gap. MiamiDade’s housing arm, an agency that is part of the county government headed by Mayor Carlos Gimenez, would steer federal, state and local funding and tax breaks to the projects. The school system would build the Southside complex, with funding for the housing component from Miami-Dade. A private developer would bid on the Wheatley complex, using the government incentives in exchange for keeping rents below the standard market rates.

Details haven’t been announced, but county programs typically use federal guidelines that match “workforce” rents to a family’s income.