Panelists discuss how to solve Austin’s workforce housing crisis

While discussing the housing affordability crisis and its impact on Austin’s essential workers, a local EMS leader captured attention Wednesday morning with her account of how emergency services staff are pushing themselves beyond reasonable limits because of their long commutes into the city.

With roughly 70 percent of Austin EMS Association members living outside the city limits, Selena Xie, who serves as president of AEA, said many of those workers are resisting a change from current staffing patterns that force workers into 24-hour shifts. Rather than move to less-strenuous 12-hour shifts, Xie said the message has been that more frequent longer commutes into Austin from cheaper suburban housing would be more of a burden than working 24 hours uninterrupted.

And because the majority of the city’s EMS workers live in other communities, Xie said there is inherently less connection and greater turnover for highly recruited professionals who would rather work close to where they live.

“Because 70 percent of the people can’t vote in our local elections, that means they can’t vote for the leaders that are making these huge decisions around public safety,” Xie said Wednesday during Urban Land Institute Austin’s breakfast panel that focused on how to produce more workforce housing in Austin. “A lot of these people are actually not committed to Austin. They don’t feel like they have a say in what happens, and they have lives in totally different communities and we see this thing that is kind of like brain drain.”

The panel addressed the dire lack of housing for a growing cohort of public workers and some professionals who earn 60 percent to 80 percent of the area’s median family income, and can make their dollars stretch further in other communities.

Jeremy Striffler, director of real estate for Austin Independent School District, said the housing crunch is making it so difficult to hire and retain teachers that the district now has two pending public-private partnership deals to use idle land to create affordable housing that will mostly be aimed at district employees. Portions of state law allow public bodies to enter into those deals free of property tax levies, which Striffler said can create favorable projects for developers like those in attendance.

“I do not personally have a team with the capacity, the expertise to be building housing. I don’t have the money to build housing. We don’t know how to be landlords and we have no expertise in this area, but the private sector does,” he said. “We’ve said very clearly we need family-sized units. Our teachers and staff have families and they are more likely than anyone to send their kids to AISD.”

In addition to creating new housing, panelists looked at how to preserve existing homes and apartment communities that workers can afford.

Monica Medina, president and CEO of Affordable Central Texas, said her group is continuing its work to buy workforce apartment complexes with investment from parties interested in longer, stable investments instead of riding the roller coaster of smaller real estate acquisitions.

Medina said her group plans to close more deals later this week, including its first outside of the Austin metro area.

“We are preserving these units for generations to come, not the seven- or 10-year exit that most private equity funds have,” she said. “And then by acquiring and preserving them for generations to come, it’s not just helping today, it’s helping our our grandchildren and our great grandchildren in the future.”

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