The San Geronimo Valley Housing Association opened a conversation with the Lagunitas School District last Thursday about the possibility of building onsite housing for teachers. The presentation by the association, which owns and operates three affordable housing sites in the valley, included troubling data about population trends and housing availability.
“Of the areas zoned for residential housing in the valley, most of it is already being used,” Suzanne Sadowsky, a valley resident and member of the association’s board, told the board of trustees. “So we have to be creative and look at all the possibilities. This is the reason we came to the school board.”
Ms. Sadowsky said that, based on census bureau data, 43 percent of renters in the San Geronimo Valley use more than a third of their monthly household income to pay rent. Reflecting minimal new development, 89 percent of the houses in the valley were built before 1990. And, showing the hit to young families, the number of children age of five and under has dropped by one-third in the last two decades. Meanwhile, the population of adults 65 years and older has quadrupled.
Ms. Sadowsky’s proposal that the school board consider creating employee housing on the school’s 23-acre property was generally met with interest, though one longtime trustee raised building and funding concerns.
“Looking around the property and knowing what it takes to build new housing, I just don’t see any place where it would be a realistic undertaking, with consideration to the necessary septic system, access and utilities,” Richard Sloan, who has sat on the board for over 40 years, said at the meeting.
But the association has undertaken daunting projects before, Ms. Sadowsky said. The 19-unit mobile home park in Forest Knolls involved a huge renovation, including new sewer and electrical systems. Even so, with funding from the county, the Marin Community Foundation and others, the association was able to keep the housing affordable.
Other board members chastised Mr. Sloan for worrying about specifics so early on, emphasizing the importance of “beginning a conversation.”
Leelee Thomas, the planning manager for the county’s housing program and a valley resident herself, did not attend the meeting but, reached afterwards, said there were no instances of teacher housing in the county. Still, if done right, she said, such a project could access funds from the county’s $5 million housing trust.
“If there was a project in which housing was set aside not only for teachers and for staff, [but also] for the general public, I think the county could be part of the funding effort,” Ms. Thomas said. “But if the proposal was just for employees, we would have to explore further whether we could use public funds.”
She emphasized the importance of including staff, not just teachers, given their lower rates of pay, and drew attention to a 2016 state law that permits school districts to establish programs that leverage state and federal dollars and create public-private partnerships specifically to finance affordable housing for school employees on district-owned land.
Lagunitas superintendent John Carroll said that although finding affordable housing may be a concern for teachers, it was “not one that gets expressed very much during the hiring process from prospective applicants. It doesn’t turn people away, as far as I know.”
Of the 14 certified teachers in the district, five live in the San Geronimo Valley, four live in Fairfax, one lives in Inverness and four reside in Sonoma County.