When teacher recruitment became a problem, Paul Perotti found the solution: cheap housing

Sam Whiting:

Ground will be broken this fall on a two-story 20-unit apartment community to go with the 40 units already standing on a surplus school property in Santa Clara. The groundbreaker is Paul Perotti, 58, former superintendent, and the housing is for teachers.

"I was superintendent of the Santa Clara Unified School District here from 1994 to 2005. I had this idea in about 1999.

At first my thought was 'well, everybody is talking about the high cost of living in this valley and there was an exodus of teachers migrating to the Central Valley. You could afford to live there. A lot of teachers were getting hired by us, getting trained and then leaving.

I wasted six months meeting with federal agencies in housing, local people in government, state people. If I played totally by their rules I didn't feel I could do what I needed to do. There were tons of restrictions. I decided to forget all that. Let's start thinking as if we're Intel and we're going to build a big new facility in Santa Clara, and we have no restrictions. The first thing was 'what's it going to cost us?' It was about $5.6 million. The land is free. The deal was it wouldn't cost the school district $1. We're going to pay for it with rent money.

I didn't want to do it unless we could charge 50 percent or less of the current market rate . Otherwise it wasn't significant. We did the numbers, checked them 100 times. We came up with $635 a month for a one-bedroom, when the going rate was $1,800. Our two-bedroom started out at $990 when they were going for $2,500.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 24, 2007 12:00 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas