A Lawrence school board member said Tuesday the district should find ways to subsidize teacher housing.

Helping teachers find quality, affordable housing would improve the district’s effort to recruit and retain teachers, Rich Minder said.

Minder, who joined the board in July, said salary and benefits paid to teachers made it difficult for them to buy a home in Lawrence.

“Housing is really expensive here,” he said. “Affordable housing is really bad.”

The idea was floated during a board policy retreat at the Dole Institute of Politics at Kansas University. Minder is co-founder of Delaware Street Commons, a proposed Lawrence residential development with self-contained homes connected by shared communal facilities.

It appears legal for the district to own property, pay rent and “do a lot of things around housing,” Minder said.

Board member Leonard Ortiz said housing help for teachers has been tried in California.

Under a program approved in October, teachers in the San Mateo Union High School district can borrow as much as $50,000 from the district for the down payment on a home. The program allows tenured teachers to apply for a loan of as much as $50,000 — or 40 percent of a home’s purchase price — over five years at 2 percent interest. The homes must be a primary residence within a 45 minute commute of the district.

“It seemed very workable,” Ortiz said.

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A big hurdle for that kind of program in Lawrence, said Supt. Randy Weseman, would be integrating it into master agreements negotiated by the union for all 900 certified teachers in the district.

The idea of subsidized housing had never come up in discussions with teachers about compensation, he said.

Wayne Kruse, president of Lawrence Education Assn., the teachers’ union, said he recently has had several emotional meetings with teachers facing financial problems. One was distraught because her income qualified her for only a $65,000 bank loan for a home purchase, he said.

That essentially blocked her entry into the real estate market because there are few suitable homes for sale in Lawrence that fall within that price range, he said. According to the Douglas County Appraiser’s Office, the average price of homes sold in Douglas County through late October was $159,200.

No action was taken on Minder’s suggestion during the policy retreat, but several board members encouraged him to do more research on the idea.

“It is intriguing if we can think out of the box,” said Cindy Yulich, a board member and a senior vice president at Emprise Bank.