Somewhere in Colorado, a school community has decided that the only way to keep its teachers, bus drivers, and cafeteria workers is to help house them. A solicitation posted through the Rocky Mountain Bid System is seeking developers to build subsidized housing restricted to educators and school staff, a move that reflects how acute the displacement crisis has become across the state.
The sponsoring agency has not been publicly identified in the record, and key details including unit count, budget and site location are not yet available. What is clear is the framing: the project uses the term "attainable" rather than "affordable," a distinction that matters. Affordable housing in the federal sense is tied to HUD income formulas. Attainable housing, as Colorado resort and mountain communities have come to define it, is pegged directly to what local workers actually earn, including teachers making $40,000 to $55,000 a year in places where median home prices can reach $1 million or more.
The gap between those numbers has been widening for more than a decade. Colorado teacher pay has ranked in the bottom third nationally even as the state's cost of living has climbed among the highest in the country. Mountain districts in Eagle, Summit, Pitkin and Routt counties began losing staff to housing costs by the mid-2010s. By the 2022-2023 school year, districts were reporting teachers living in cars or RVs, or commuting more than 60 miles each way because they couldn't afford to live where they worked.
The problem has spread beyond classroom teachers. Paraprofessionals, food service workers and bus drivers, roles that pay less and carry fewer protections, have been pushed out first. This project explicitly covers "staffing" alongside educators, a signal that whoever is behind it understands that a school system depends on more than just the people at the whiteboard.
Colorado has responded at the state level with a series of measures, including Proposition 123 in 2022, which dedicated roughly $300 million a year of income tax revenue to affordable housing. Legislation in 2024 specifically enabled workforce and educator housing on public land. Several districts, including Eagle County Schools and Summit School District, have already opened or begun teacher housing projects, as NationGraph has previously reported.
The identity of the agency behind this solicitation remains unconfirmed. Anyone seeking to verify the sponsor can contact the Rocky Mountain E-Purchasing System directly using purchasing group ID 8409951. Additional project details are expected to become available as the solicitation process moves forward.
