Just before the end of the school year back in 2022, Chandra Fles, an elementary school teacher in Traverse City, faced an abrupt eviction notice.
The house she was renting had been bought.
“I was faced with being dislocated and the hard decision of whether I could continue to be an educator in Traverse City, where my own kids were enrolled as students and I had worked for over a decade,” she said at an event at Blair Elementary School on Tuesday.
Though she said she was lucky enough to find another rental, “the overall cost of living continues to be a struggle on educators’ and staff salaries.”
The event was in celebration of a new housing development specifically for school employees, the first of its kind in Michigan. It received $5 million in Michigan’s 2025 budget.
Fles was there to introduce Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who came up north to promote the project with local officials and school administrators.
The idea for this housing development came from a collaboration between four different educational institutions in Grand Traverse County, and the state funding that will kick-start the project had bipartisan support in Lansing.
Whitmer spoke on the playground of Blair Elementary, just across the street from the planned development site, which is on land already owned by TCAPS — the Traverse City Area Public Schools.
In her speech, she said that though the region is a popular tourist destination, locals keep Traverse City vibrant and alive.
“You make this place what it is, and you deserve to live here without breaking the bank,” she said.
And Whitmer told reporters there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to build affordable housing.
“We’re trying to move fast, and we're being creative,” she said.
The state funding will contribute to the first phase of the project, which will build 72 affordable, income-restricted units with tenant priority for K-12 school employees. Some of the funding came from the budget of the Office of Rural Prosperity, established by Whitmer in 2022.
State Rep. Betsy Coffia (D-Traverse City) was the strongest advocate for the project in the state legislature.
In an interview at the event, she said this project is just one way to help alleviate teacher shortages.
“It's a much larger puzzle,” she said. “This is all hands on deck, our private sector, our local units of government, and us as state partners.”
Republican state Sen. John Damoose (R-Harbor Springs) is also a big fan of this project – he advocated for it among Republicans in Lansing.
“I wish I could take even more credit for this,” he said. “I was a big advocate for it in the Senate, but this was Betsy's [Coffia’s] baby. There's no question it was her top priority.”
This project could be a test case for whether workforce housing developments like this could work in other parts of the state.
Damoose said he has his eye on two places – Beaver Island and Petoskey – that could use a project like this since school administrators are also struggling to recruit teachers due to housing shortages.
And Damoose said local groups are also a key factor in the housing crisis.
Local governments “have to get serious about how they’re going to regulate short term rentals, they have to get serious about zoning,” he said. “Businesses who can't find workers, some of them are going to have to invest in workforce housing.”
But overall, Damoose was excited to see this project coming to life.
“This is how it’s supposed to work,” he said. “You hear so many good ideas, you wonder, are they ever going to actually happen? And this is one that's going to actually happen.”
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