Tiny Homes for Middle Buyers

The Vail Unified School District in Vail, Ariz. is offering school district-owned land as a site for a tiny home community for teachers and middle-class buyers.

The average teacher salary in Vail runs between $33,000 and $41,000, while the median home price is $266,700, unaffordable for many local teachers. Associate superintendent John Carruth says the program was inspired by a 2017 meeting about hiring and retaining teachers, telling NextAvenue, “There are no apartments within our school boundaries, which is 425 square miles, and our teachers who rent apartments must drive 20 to 25 minutes and pay $700 to $800 in rent,” says Carruth. “Our teachers also expressed an interest to be a part of the community in which they teach.”

The housing market in the United States may have bounced back since the Great Recession. But fairly stagnant wages, higher home prices and steep rents have made it harder to afford buying a home. The State of the Nation’s Housing Report 2018, from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, said “nearly one third of U.S. households paid more than 30 percent of their incomes for housing in 2016.” The squeeze explains why purchasing a tiny home in a tiny-house community has become more attractive for some buyers.

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