This is the third in a series of articles on how the lack of affordable housing in the Berkshires is undermining our local economy as well as other aspects of our local living. The first article, by Pier Boutin, M.D., was titled “Without more housing, you are going to lose your doctor.” The second, written by Robbi Hartt, was titled “How the Berkshire County housing crisis affects local restaurants.”
To help educate our community about the extent of the problem and possible solutions, “Business Monday!” at The Berkshire Edge has organized a free webinar open to all members of the Berkshire community. The webinar will take place live on Wednesday, March 12, 9:30 to 11 a.m., and will subsequently be available for streaming on The Berkshire Edge. Sign up by clicking here.
Our featured panelist is Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Livable Communities Ed Augustus. Other panel members are Jim Harwood, president of the Community Development Corporation of South Berkshire; Eileen Peltier, CEO/president of Hearthway Inc.; and Jane Ralph, executive director of Construct Inc. Doug Mishkin, a member of the Egremont Municipal Affordable Housing Trust, will serve as moderator. Members of the business community and other participants will be invited to ask questions.
In anticipation of this event, The Edge is asking representatives of the local business community to describe how the housing shortage is impacting their operations. As Eric Singer, founder of Magnetworks (a Berkshire-grown next-generation job-search platform), notes, “When people can’t afford to live where they work, businesses can’t afford to hire. An unaffordable housing market shrinks the talent pool, increases turnover, and makes every hire an uphill battle.”
Read below to hear a response by Peter Dillon, superintendent of schools for the Berkshire Hills Regional School District (BHRSD).
According to the Berkshire Benchmarks May 2022 Final Report “PK-12 School Staffing in Berkshire County: A study of current issues and their impact,” almost all Berkshire County school districts are experiencing staffing shortages to some degree, causing “varied but significant negative impacts on programs, staff morale, and student learning.” The list of challenges to recruiting and retaining educators includes teacher pay levels, housing challenges and low housing inventory, and limited childcare. If these concerns are not addressed, the report warns that the candidate pool for area schools will continue to dwindle.
Teacher pay, on average, is approximately $70,000 per year in Berkshire County—far lower than in the eastern two thirds of the state. Compounding the problem, average housing costs are at the highest level ever and available property inventory is at its lowest level ever. While other sectors of the economy sometimes offer relocation assistance or interim housing, schools (which are already struggling due to increasing costs and cuts in funding) are not equipped to do so.
“The Berkshire County Superintendents Roundtable has discussed the affordable housing shortage at length,” Peter Dillon explains. “While, on the one hand, figuring this out is a high priority, on the other hand, the challenges we face in serving our schools are so complex that we’re forced to focus on the things we can find solutions for.”
How much does housing affect teachers and staff working in our region’s schools? To answer, Dillon cites Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. “If you think of human needs as a pyramid, with the most basic needs (food, water, shelter) at the bottom and the more complex needs (job satisfaction, self-actualization) at the top, the need for secure housing is fundamental,” he explains. There are a variety of realities present in the Berkshires, ranging from homelessness, to home insecurity, to living paycheck to paycheck in a rental situation, to buying a home and living on the edge of foreclosure. All of those nuanced realities impact teachers’ abilities to do their jobs.
“When I first moved to the area 16 years ago, the average home cost fell between $390,000 and $420,000—now it’s close to $700,000,” Dillon notes, adding that the average teaching salary hasn’t doubled. “That makes housing expensive even for experienced teachers and prohibitively high for younger, less experienced hires or positions that are less well compensated, like custodians, food service, and paraprofessionals.” The recommended formula used to be spending a third of your after-tax income on housing, but that is increasingly hard for any school employee to do.
“I was recruited from New York, but most of our staff hiring is local—we have a large number of teachers and staff from the Berkshires,” Dillon notes. “Some grew up in the Berkshires and have family ties that help them meet the cost of living, and others rely on their salary to make it work.” He estimates that a third of his staff lives in Great Barrington, Stockbridge, and West Stockbridge while far more live in Pittsfield and Lee. “I appreciate every one of our faculty and staff, but there’s a lot to be said for being able to live and work in the same community, rather than having a 90-minute roundtrip commute each day.” That is especially true for teachers with added responsibilities (coaching, after-school programs, committee meetings) or with kids in another school system to get home to at the end of the day.
“As a superintendent, I’ve written countless letters for individuals to help them secure apartments or housing loans,” Dillon shares. Many teachers and paraprofessionals have explored different options like Section 8 vouchers, Habitat for Humanity, or Construct Inc, but the existing opportunities are very limited. Those lucky enough to buy a home are forced to pay higher taxes that make them house rich but cash poor because the Airbnb and second-home prices are driving house values up.
For the most part, Dillon has been able to fill his teaching positions, but he has a few paraprofessional positions and a part-time LPN position that he has not been able to fill. “We just finished salary negotiations for next year and were able to increase our contracts, but it was a huge challenge,” he says. “We like to pay staff in the top quarter in the county to keep up with our peers (Southern Berkshire Regional School District, Lenox, and Mount Greylock), but that’s been growing harder in recent years.”
Traveling Teachers and rotating positions are two resources that help some schools fill teacher and staff shortages, but they often require the school to cover or subsidize housing costs. “With our incredibly tight budget, many options just aren’t feasible, but we still need to help folks keep up with an exponentially growing housing market,” Dillon notes. In fact, several creative solutions that have been proposed involve funding or management by the schools. “A developer reached out to me about a nine-bedroom house just over the border in New York to ask if we would be interested in partnering on a project, but we don’t have the bandwidth to take on managing housing on top of running our schools,” he acknowledges.
There are some models that have attempted to address the housing situation with some success, he points out. Forest Row on Christian Hill Road in Great Barrington made 18 housing units available to first-time home buyers through The Fund for Affordable Housing (a pool created by members of the Community Land Trust and a group of Berkshire second-home owners to help with down payments) on leased land. And the former Thornewood Inn has been converted to short-term housing by Community Development Corporation of South Berkshire (CDCSB), which also built Wind Rush Commons on Route 7 in Great Barrington. Overall, CDCSB has created more than 120 units of affordable and workforce housing in Southern Berkshire County, but the shortage remains.
Sign up for The Berkshire Edge’s free business webinar here.
