‘Living on pennies’
High housing costs mean some teachers can’t afford to live in Santa Fe, exacerbating staff shortage
Second grade teacher Zoe Gierman, 28, spent the final weeks of January cleaning, packing and unpacking while working full time at Wood Gormley Elementary School. The casita she had rented for seven years had been sold to a new landlord. Gierman braced for a rent hike but instead received a shortened lease and had to leave. A combination of high housing prices, tight apartment vacancy rates and low pay prompted her to shift from living on her own to sharing expenses with a roommate in a two-bedroom triplex.
“I can no longer afford to live by myself in Santa Fe, which feels really frustrating to me,” she said. “I feel like I’ve regressed. Not because of me, personally, but because of the position I’ve been put in.”
Despite the difficulty, she said, she loves her job and wants to continue living in the city.
Santa Fe school board members and other local officials fear, however, housing struggles like Gierman’s could be contributing to dismal staffing levels in public schools. Santa Fe Public Schools now has about 65 positions available for teachers and hundreds of other vacant jobs. A new staffing crisis task force is exploring the problem and options for resolving it, such as a down payment assistance program for teachers who buy homes and construction of housing on school property for new teachers.
The task force was created through a community Staffing Crisis Resolution, first passed by the school board in November and later approved by the Santa Fe City Council and the Santa Fe County Commission.
It includes members from all three local governments, as well as advocates of affordable housing from the Santa Fe Housing Action Coalition, a group made up of employers, businesses, nonprofits and other residents.
In August, the National Education Association published a survey of about
400 school staff members. An overwhelming majority said they wouldn’t be able to buy a home in Santa Fe on their salary. With the median home sales price in Santa Fe surpassing $500,000 and rental units still in short supply — and rising in cost — more than half of the survey participants said they were concerned about being able to keep their jobs in the city.
“Teachers, cops and nurses” — key workers who struggle to live in Santa Fe — is a mantra Santa Fe school board President Kate Noble said she likely picked up from former Gov. Bill Richardson.
“These are people we need and are the glue of communities,” Noble said.
But keeping those jobs filled — in Santa Fe and across the state — has been a challenge.
School board members and district administrators support initiatives in New Mexico’s current legislative session that would give teachers statewide significant salary increases.
Gierman, who sits on a housing committee for NEA-Santa Fe, and other local educators have raised concerns about whether the pay hikes — certainly a boon for New Mexico teachers — will make a dent for those who face Santa Fe’s heightened housing affordability problem.
When she landed in Santa Fe at 22, Gierman pulled in $775 per twice-monthly paycheck as an entry-level teacher. Things got better when she attained a higher-tier teaching license, but before that, she had spent more than half her monthly income — $900 — on rent for the small home.
“I was eating ramen. I was living on pennies at that point,” she recalled.
Now that she’s more qualified, she said, her higher salary might go a long way in Hobbs, where rental platform Zumper shows the average one-bedroom apartment costs $860 a month. But in the last six years, her income has increased at a lower rate than apartment costs in Santa Fe, where market-level rental rates for a one-bedroom unit are around $1,400 to $1,700 monthly.
Owning a home seems even more out of reach for teachers as sale prices surge. But the staffing crisis task force hopes a new down payment assistance program will allow several educators to become homebuyers. It has teamed up with the nonprofit Homewise to offer up to $40,000 for a down payment through a program funded with an anonymous $400,000 donation.
At least one teacher in the program is about to close on a house, Homewise CEO Mike Loftin said.
Loftin predicted the money would run out quickly and said he hopes to secure a more permanent funding source for the program.
Part of the solution to keeping teachers and other school staff in Santa Fe will be reaching out to them more aggressively about affordable housing options and down payment assistance in the future, he added.
“There are times when you have to prioritize your outreach,” he said. “We’re trying to help the whole community, but right now we have a teacher crisis.”
The task force also is exploring the possibility of building housing on school district property for incoming teachers.
This is not the first time such an effort has been considered in Santa Fe.
In 2018, then-school board President Steven Carrillo introduced a resolution calling for a study on affordable teacher housing. It would have examined the feasibility of putting a 12-unit facility on district property, possibly adjacent to a school.
Noble, who abstained from voting on Carrillo’s measure and introduced the more sweeping Staffing Crisis Resolution in November, said in a recent interview she had felt the 2018 site study proposal was too “prescriptive” and narrow.
In 2022, nothing is off the table.
When Carrillo introduced the idea for on-site teacher housing, his resolution noted a shortage of 5,000 rental units in the area. A recent report from the Santa Fe Association of Realtors now puts that figure at more than 7,000, with a 3 percent vacancy rate for units.
Noble said the district could use land it owns near the B.F. Young Building on Camino Sierra Vista for a pilot project. She added the process could be years in the making, and district administrators could ultimately shoot the idea down.
Funding would need to come from a developer, and property would be the district’s main contribution to the project, Noble said.
“We don’t want to create an office of affordable housing,” she added. “Our business is teaching and learning and schools. We need to keep some proper boundaries around this.”
If Santa Fe Public Schools were to move forward with a housing development for teachers, it wouldn’t be the first district to do so.
New Mexico hosts hundreds of “teacherages” from Moriarty to Artesia, with the highest numbers on tribal lands, including at the Central Consolidated School District.
The rural district based in Shiprock has more than 100 units and is building 30 more.
Superintendent Daniel Benavidez said the housing is typically reserved for people from outside the area who have a hard time owning a home or renting on tribal land. Other employees already live on the reservation or make the hourlong commute from Farmington or Kirtland.
Benavidez, who previously directed Tierra Encantada Charter School in Santa Fe, said it can be complicated for a school district to also be a landlord, but it makes “the difference between one year and five years” when it comes to retaining new teachers.
“I think the biggest issue I would see with Santa Fe Public Schools is, who qualifies? Who is eligible?” he said, noting a lot of teachers may live in more affordable areas already, like Glorieta and Pecos.
Santa Fe County Commissioner and school board Vice President Rudy Garcia, who voted against Carrillo’s proposal in 2018, now sits on the staffing crisis task force and said he’s “willing to listen and learn” about the possibility of creating housing for teachers.
“I feel like what the county has to offer is how we work with developers,” Garcia said.
Michael Barrio, another task force member and executive director the Santa Fe Housing Action Coalition, said county and city officials have to be careful about helping specific groups of people with housing initiatives. But he understands the dire effects of school staffing gaps on children.
“A sub here, a sub there, a new teacher for a couple months. … That really disrupts the educational process and certain outcomes for a child,” he said.
Barrio, Loftin and County Commissioner Hank Hughes noted a need for more subsidized and affordable housing for a broad swath of the Santa Fe-area population.
The coalition has long advocated for city officials to get a more permanent funding source for its Affordable Housing Trust and to make zoning changes that would allow for more multifamily housing. In recent years, the city has used gross receipt taxes to boost the trust fund to $3 million.
Hughes and Loftin also are watching the progress in the Legislature of Senate Bill 134, which would allocate millions of dollars in recurring state funds to the New Mexico Housing Trust Fund.
“The state has never committed an annual amount to affordable housing,” Hughes said.
“We’ve got all the necessary components to make something happen,” Barrio said. “Let’s see if our leadership has the political will to get something done. Let’s see if our community has the ability to really come out in force and show leadership what needs to be done.”