Teaching has long been considered a noble profession due to the immense impact an educator can have on the lives of their students.
With that in mind, as Texas' teachers start to welcome children back into their classrooms, we thought we'd take a moment to highlight how the nationwide housing affordability issues are affecting our educators.
Even with rental prices beginning to return to pre-pandemic levels and wages rising a bit in the past several years, a recent Redfin report found that the average teacher in 2024 can afford 47.9% of the apartments for rent within commuting distance of their school. This is, on average, less affordable than in 2019 when the average teacher could afford 58% of apartments within commuting distance of their school.
Housing affordability is even lower for educators that are hoping to become homeowners. Redfin reported that the average teacher can afford only 14.3% of the available homes for sale within commuting distance of their school, down from 39.1% in 2019.
A recent article published by the National Education Association (NEA) states the issue bluntly: many teachers across the nation cannot afford to live in the communities where they teach. The article points out that while many school districts across the nation are raising wages for K-12 teachers, many of those salaries are still struggling to keep up with inflation.
In fact, the NEA found that the average teacher's salary for the 2022-2023 school year was $69,544. When adjusted for inflation, teachers that earn the national average salary are making 5% less than they would have 10 years ago.
As briefly covered above, many school districts in Texas (and across the nation) are working hard to increase wages for K-12 educators in an effort to attract and retain people in the profession. However, there are several school districts that are complementing their wage-raising efforts by also building affordable housing for their teachers.
As reported in Community Impact, several Central Texas school districts, including Lake Travis ISD, Eanes ISD, and Austin ISD have all moved forward with creating nonprofit public facility corporations (PFCs). PFCs are tools that allow their creators to build and incentivize high-quality affordable housing for low- to middle-income earning households.
With a PFC, government entities (like school districts) can purchase a plot of land and then lease it to a housing developer with the added benefit of giving the developer a 100% property tax exemption for the future development. In exchange for the property tax savings, the developer is then required to reserve a set number of units for low to moderate-income households.
As an added bonus, PFCs allow school districts to earn additional revenue, such as through the annual ground lease charged to the manager or developer of the housing units. Austin ISD, which plans to begin construction on a 600-unit apartment complex next summer, has stated that revenue generated through their PFC will be put towards building a new alternative learning center.
If you're interested in learning more about how various school districts across Texas are providing housing benefits to their teachers, we'd recommend reading this article from the Texas Association of School Boards.
If you're a teacher and you're hoping to accomplish the leap into homeownership, then have no fear -- there are programs out there to help. TSAHC's Homes for Texas Heroes program was created to help Texans working in some of the most heroic professions (e.g. K-12 education) purchase a home within the community they serve.
Our program offers several down payment assistance (DPA) levels that will help protect your savings as you make a down payment on a home. While it depends on the terms of each program, our DPA program can even be combined with other local assistance programs for even more savings.
If you're a first-time home buyer, you won't want to miss out on a Mortgage Credit Certificate or an MCC. An MCC is a mortgage interest tax credit that reduces your federal income taxes every year for the life of your mortgage loan by allowing you to get 15% of what you spent on mortgage interest back. To see how much you could save with an MCC, click here.
Wondering how to get started on using our programs to buy a home? Use our Eligibility Quiz to see if you qualify and to be linked to our list of approved lenders!
On the House blog posts are meant to provide general information on various housing-related issues, research and programs. We are not liable for any errors or inaccuracies in the information provided by blog sources. Furthermore, this blog is not legal advice and should not be used as a substitute for legal advice from a licensed professional attorney.
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