SLO County’s Office of Education is building workforce housing for teachers. How will it work?
When Jacob Marshall and his wife moved from Massachusetts to San Luis Obispo County in 2016 to look after Marshall’s aging parents, the cost of living wasn’t too far off of their previous home in an affluent Boston-area neighborhood.
Landing in San Miguel, Marshall and his wife began looking for work up and down the Central Coast, eventually finding a place to put his 30 years of culinary experience to use through the San Luis Obispo County Office of Education, he said.
The following year, the Marshalls moved to a two-bedroom, $1,500-per-month apartment in Grover Beach, while Marshall started working at Loma Vista Community School as a career and technical education teacher in the culinary field.
Though the area proved to be a great fit and the pay was good, Marshall said long commutes to and from his job and rising rents in the area pushed him to try living at a place he never would have expected: a three-bedroom house on land owned by the district just behind Loma Vista on the outskirts of San Luis Obispo, all for less rent than what he was paying in Grover Beach, he said.
Now, the county Office of Education is looking to offer that kind of housing to more of its employees by building more housing on land owned by the school district.
Marshall is all for the expansion.
“If you’re new to the area and if you’re unsure about whether you want to put up roots, this is a definitely a great place to come and get the feel of SLO,” Marshall told The Tribune.
How does school district housing work?
Efforts to build school district housing at the county education department’s property off Highway 1 have been in progress since before the passage of Assembly Bill 2296 in 2022, superintendent James Brescia told The Tribune.
AB 2296 allows school districts to build housing on land owned by local educational agencies located in urban areas exclusively for school district employees.
In practice, the law cleared the way for the Office of Education to request a land use ordinance that would allow the district to start the permitting and planning process for six new homes for employees on district land in December.
“It was just coincidental that that legislation came along, because the legislation followed our movements on this,” Brescia said. “This has been probably a four-year effort now.”
Brescia said the district has been aware of the financial stress housing can place on its employees since the early 2000s, when acceleration in housing prices and rent started to outpace district salaries.
“Recruiting and retaining school employees continues to challenge all San Luis Obispo County school districts, affecting over 9,000 employees in San Luis Obispo County,” Brescia said in a letter to the San Luis Obispo County Planning Commission. “Educators serving in San Luis Obispo schools face the third least affordable housing market in California according to the California Association of Realtors.”
Because the proposed project falls outside of San Luis Obispo’s urban area, it needed a land use ordinance amendment to make that parcel viable for housing development, an idea that was supported by the Board of Supervisors at its Sept. 26 meeting.
The project would sit on a 205-acre parcel owned by the Office of Education, but would only take up 1.4 acres of that space with housing uses not far from the administrative buildings.
Marshall’s home — which he and his wife vacated earlier this year when they moved to Paso Robles — will also be maintained with the development of future school district housing, according to the staff report.
When could more school district housing become available?
Brescia said he’s hopeful that the new project can break ground sometime this year with the county Board of Supervisors’ approval.
Because the project will employ modular, prefabricated homes, installing them on the project site will be a relatively quick process, with water allocations and architectural plans already approved by the county, Brescia said.
With the full buildout of six homes projected to cost around $500,000 per unit, Brescia said the trade-off between putting those funds toward salaries and a one-time payment to get the homes up and running is an easy decision.
“We’re using existing assets and existing properties, so there’s not a huge cost in this,” Brescia said. “The cost recovery on the construction, let’s say, is going to be recovered by the rent — so we’re not really out dollars that we could have allocated to wages.”
Residents of the workforce housing will likely pay between 50% and 75% of market rate rent for properties of their size, he said.
If the homes are successful, Brescia said he hopes the Office of Education can create a “model for other jurisdictions to replicate.”
So far, the workforce housing project has been broadly supported by members of the county Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission.
“I’m really supportive of this, and I think this fits in with our general kind of activities of broadening allowances for housing in more zones,” San Luis Obispo County Planning Commission member Anne Wyatt said in December. “I hope we look at it as an opportunity, kind of to do that here and other sites.”
Marshall, who lived down the street from the Office of Education headquarters for around three years, said he’d enthusiastically encourage any of his fellow district employees looking to get cheaper housing to try living on district land.
“It gave us the opportunity to get focused on what we want to do, and again, we saved a lot of money,” Marshall said. “We have a little nest egg where we can make a decision, whatever it may come to.”
This story was originally published March 14, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
