Vicarage of the church of football
That workforce housing is both a policy goal and a local political imperative is due to a simple inequality:
Pay < Living Cost
Communities need some essential local professions that pay too little to enable the providers to live in the town they work. Key to that, in turn, is a community’s definition of what constitutes ‘an essential local profession.’ Once upon a time, that might have been a doctor, but rapid transport and specialist hospitals regionalized that profession, leaving the field solely to EMT’s.
More clearly local are those professions that have a purely local value. Either they serve only the locals – as in police, and fire – or they represent a source of local competitive advantage, as in teachers (school systems), and the ultimate in religion. Where once we had the parish house or the vicarage, today’s upscale communities genuflect at the high priests of the church of football: its coaches. As spotlighted in this little story from The New York Times:
When Scott Shafer came to Stanford to interview for the defensive coordinator’s job last winter, he became more excited as the day went on. He enjoyed Coach Jim Harbaugh’s energy, meeting his potential co-workers and seeing the vision for the program.
Shafer sees the vision?
All employers sell the job, leaving the housing cost for another day. Some employers recognize that shifting family means paying moving costs; some (particularly large entities whose executives transfer frequently) supplement salary with a housing allowance. (Housing and relocation stipends are essential perquisites of foreign service jobs, for example.)
That excitement quickly dwindled when he saw the look on the face of his wife, Missy, who had spent the morning looking at local real estate.
”I came back in tears,” Missy Shafer said. ”I was literally crying.”
Thirty years ago, a capable property manager I worked with told me that you sell apartments by getting the wife into the bathroom and the kitchen. “Once you have them in the model apartment, just get out of the way. The husband is no longer relevant.”
A crying wife, in short, is an employer’s problem.
Missy’s tears came from the sticker shock. She realized that buying a four-bedroom home similar to the $240,000 one they had just built in Kalamazoo, Mich., where Scott served as the defensive coordinator at Western Michigan, would cost about $1.5 million more.
”What was I going to do?” she asked. ”Go home and tell my children that their dad has a great opportunity, and we’re going to move into a matchbox?”
What, it’s not big enough for you?
But thanks to a new way to lure coaches to the most expensive college town in America, the Shafers have happily settled into a four-bedroom house about three miles from campus in Menlo Park. [Not
For Stanford and other extremely high-cost locales, providing this boutique workforce housing represents a problem in ongoing affordability. If Stanford simply gave the coach a grant to allow the coach to buy the house, the grant element represents a permanent wealth transfer to the coach. Should the coach leave, he could reap a significant profit on resale, and worse from Stanford’s perspective, they’d have to go find another very expensive house to buy.
Hence the football vicarage: housing that is bought by the university (or its benefactor), reserved for the assistant coach, occupied cheaply for a period contemporaneous with his tenure, and then recycled for the next incoming coach. The coach is a renter with assured tenancy, as one might say in
Stanford purchased a home for them to live in that cost nearly $2 million. The university also purchased a similar home for the new offensive coordinator, David Shaw, and his wife, Kori, and their two children.
Thus Stanford buys housing for its top football brass.
It is all part of a new effort to lure top coaches in all sports to campus. The plan is being spearheaded by Bob Bowlsby, the athletic director, and backed in part financially by John Arrillaga, a billionaire Stanford booster.
Blurry Bowlsby brought boffo Harbaugh
Another natural component: raising capital from an interested benefactor.
Bowlsby said the university had already purchased six residences and could end up owning 20 to 40 homes and apartments, all to help the coaches live near campus. Bowlsby said the university considers the real estate to be a good investment.
The rest of the Stanford football coaching staff receives a $3,000-a-month housing allowance.
Observe the real estate distinction. The university has concluded that for some staff, paying $36,000 a year in extra salary enables them to solve their housing requirements in the local economy. For more senior staff, scarcity of supply and premium pricing off that supply make it more cost-effective for the university to buy and own the housing, as ‘company dwellings,’ eliminating a problem that prospective new employees would be unaware of and enabling Stanford’s salaries to be comparable to, not embarrassingly greater than, its competitors.
Bowlsby said coordinators at Stanford made a nationally competitive salary of about $200,000 a year.
Because labor is mobile where property is immobile, salaries and coaches compete across a big geographic domain.
There’s also a governance-and-optics issue. It’s one thing for a benefactor to donate money so the university can buy a house; it would be quite another for the university to pay a mere football coach so much more than it pays faculty. Providing housing cheaply reduces the optical discomfort.
I’m trying to make my housing cost look smaller
The
A study by Coldwell Banker of the 117 towns that have football programs in the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision found that Palo Alto was the most expensive college town in America. The average 4-bedroom, 2,200-square-foot home here costs an average of $1.68 million.
Note that Coach Shafer will not be living in
Susan Nevins, a real estate agent with Cooper & Gamble in
[$1.68 million] is nearly $300,000 more than the second-most expensive, Chestnut Hill, MA, the home of
And nearby exclusive
Harbaugh knows the struggles of assistant coaches living in
”People all talk about the academics at Stanford and the problems that they create,” said Jack Harbaugh, referring to the difficulty in finding athletes with the grades to get into Stanford. ”But I don’t think that’s near the problem that housing has created for them to have a successful Pac-10 and BCS program out there. People don’t realize how much money it costs if you want to spend a little time with your family.”
We all know coaches are famous for keeping insane hours.
Just dreaming up this week’s game plan
”We found that people that came here didn’t stay,” Bowlsby said. ”And more often than not, they didn’t come at all once they looked at housing and thought about what it would do to their lifestyle.”
Bowlsby came to Stanford from the
Nice to see that not only coaches but athletic directors are considered ‘essential football personnel.’
”Suffice to say, it was a shock to our system,” Bowlsby said of when he and his wife went house hunting in
Launched the initiative, by the way, translates into, Raised the money for.
So poorly paid he has to wear hand-me-down sweatshirts
Solving the housing-cost problem turns what would be a minus – Stanford’s exclusivity – into a plus – Stanford’s proximity. That’s an essential benefit of workforce housing in high-income areas.
Wolfgang Shafer, who is 13 and in seventh grade, is taking an elective course called the history of flight. An aspiring pilot, he was thrilled to find a World War II club at his school last year that met during lunch time. His youth football team, which plays for the championship this weekend, is coached by Greg Baty, who played nine years in the NFL and graduated from Stanford.
Elsa Shafer, who is 9 and in fourth grade, has a piano teacher that taught at an arts high school for gifted students in
Missy Shafer said the opportunities available for her children range from Japanese classes to Web page design to Olympic fencing.
”The resumes of the people that the kids have access to is such a great opportunity while we’re here,” Missy Shafer said.
There’s one final benefit of the employer (university) holding the property, and renting it to the employee (coach) – the optionality if the employee’s work is unsatisfactory.
Pray for a winning season, Coach Weis
Just remember, Charlie, I had a contract too
The coaching continuity will take some time to pay off. Stanford is 3-6 this season –
If Stanford wants to make a change of coach, there will be no shortage of applicants to replace him. Fortunately, Coach Harbaugh can put down one big positive on his performance review:
– with an upset of
Good for the performance review!
And Jim Harbaugh, who also gets a $3,000 housing stipend, is optimistic about the future in part because of Bowlsby’s arrangement.
”It’s a good deal,” he said.
If you win.
My housing allowance is in trouble
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