Northampton County Explores Teacher Housing Campus

County administrator pitches a slumdog proposal for income-based rental homes

EASTVILLE, Va. — The Northampton County Board of Supervisors heard a proposal Tuesday evening that could mark a new approach to one of the county’s most stubborn problems: attracting and keeping public school teachers who can afford to live in Northampton County.

County Administrator Matt Spuck presented the board with an early-stage concept for a county-owned teacher housing campus. The plan envisions modest rental homes available to Northampton County Public Schools faculty at income-based rates, paired with incentives designed to encourage long-term residency and eventual homeownership within the county.

Spuck asked supervisors for authorization to move forward with developing a more detailed plan, starting with an application for a planning grant through the Virginia Housing Authority. He stressed that the proposal remains in its earliest stages — no land has been identified, no legal framework established, and no funding commitments made.

Teacher recruitment and retention have been persistent challenges for Northampton County Public Schools, a problem common to many rural school divisions across Virginia’s Eastern Shore. High housing costs relative to teacher salaries have made it difficult for educators to live near the schools where they work, contributing to chronic staffing shortages.

The concept of employer-assisted housing has gained traction in communities nationwide as localities grapple with workforce shortages driven in part by the gap between wages and housing affordability. If the planning grant is approved and the study yields favorable results, Northampton County could become one of the first localities on the Eastern Shore to pursue such a model for its teaching workforce.

“How did we get here?” It’s a question on the lips of many locals — and understandably so. Just twenty-five years ago, affordable housing wasn’t the crisis it is today. Hard as it may be to imagine now, most of Cape Charles was home to low- and middle-income families. Modern residents like to paint that era as some kind of dark age, but the truth is simpler: it was a rural, working-class town, with all the quiet, unglamorous character that comes with one.

County and Town governments did this to you. Their greedy policies created the housing crisis and have driven up the price of almost everything around here.

Several years ago, I remember sitting in on a Board of Supervisors meeting, when the then Chairman (who was oddly and hypocritically a proponent of gutting the 2015 Zoning Ordinance, which was purportedly going to create the same hellscape we are witnessing now), said the quiet part out loud–we want the tourists to come, we want them to spend their money, and then leave. Sure, you get their money and fill up the ToT tax coffers, but all of these people have to stay somewhere. It’s not as if they’re pitching tents in corn fields. They are staying in homes that local families once occupied. Gentrification comes wearing many masks, but this is one of the most insidious.

Is building and maintaining a bunch of lousy, shoddy, inferior, rotten, and terrible bungalows a sustainable solution or just another stupid notion generated by ideologically bankrupt policy makers?

Turning a quiet, rural coastal community into a much sought-after tourism destination generates revenue, but what is the real cost? We’re finding that out now.

The hard way.

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Wayne Creed

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