Upward Communities Research
Asked to choose, 76% of school employees across five Central Texas districts said a single-family home and 3% said an apartment. This report sets out what they chose, how large a home they need, and why the staff already living in apartments answered most decisively of all.
76% of the 1,298 staff respondents who stated a preference chose a single-family home. 3% chose an apartment, 5% chose a townhouse, and 15% said they had no preference as long as the rent was affordable.
The margin is wide enough that it did not depend on which district was asking. The single-family share ran 74% in District A, 73% in District B, 83% in District C, 67% in District D, and 78% in District E. The lowest of those five figures is 67%.
Two of the five districts asked their interest question in wording that named the product, inviting staff to learn more about affordable, maintenance free, single family homes. Those two districts posted the two highest single-family shares, 83% and 78%, so the 83% should be read as the top of the range rather than its centre. The three districts that asked a neutral question still returned 74%, 73% and 67%.
This matters because the building type most often proposed to a district as workforce housing is the one the fewest respondents chose. A garden-style apartment block is the default that arrives with most feasibility conversations. Three percent of the employees surveyed said that is what they would want.
Mostly not. Of the 296 staff respondents currently living in an apartment who stated a preference, 57% said they would prefer a single-family home and 7% said they would choose an apartment again.
This is the test that usually gets skipped. If current apartment residents were content, an apartment product would at least serve the population already in one. They are not content, and they are also the group under the most financial pressure: 80% of current apartment residents named the cost of rent or a mortgage as a challenge with their housing, against 59% of everyone else.
The size of that population matters too. 24% of the 1,251 staff respondents who described their current housing live in an apartment, and a further 6% live in a manufactured home. The rest are already in single-family homes or townhouses. So the pool of employees for whom an apartment would be an improvement is about a quarter of the sample, and most of the people inside it say they want out.
71% of the 1,245 respondents who gave a bedroom count wanted three or more. Three-bedroom was the most common single answer at 39%, four-bedroom followed at 32%, two-bedroom drew 21%, and one-bedroom and studio together drew 8%.
The interest-list registrations explain most of that. 56% of the 423 registered households included children, and 96% said they were not interested in a roommate. These are households rather than single early-career hires, and the household is the unit a bedroom count has to serve.
The practical consequence is a unit mix that does not match the one that pencils most easily on a per-door basis. A district weighing a proposal can ask a direct question of it: what share of the units are three-bedroom or larger, and how does that compare against the 71% here, or against the same question asked of its own staff.
A pool and fitness space ranked highest among the amenities every district asked about. Pickleball, coworking space and a resident lounge ranked lowest. These results are reported as an ordering rather than as percentages, for a reason worth stating plainly.
Two different rating scales were used. Three districts asked staff to sort each amenity into must have, nice to have, or do not need. Two used a five-point importance scale. The five-point scale runs consistently higher, so the ordering survives the difference but the individual percentages do not compare across districts, and none are quoted here.
Where they were asked, walking trails, a children's playground and a dog park all ranked at or near the top. That pattern is consistent with the household composition elsewhere in the data: outdoor space and somewhere for children to go, rather than the shared-building amenity package aimed at young professionals.
76% of the 1,298 staff respondents who stated a preference chose a single-family home. 3% chose an apartment, 5% chose a townhouse, and 15% said they had no preference as long as the rent was affordable. The single-family share ranged from 67% to 83% across the five districts surveyed.
Mostly not. Of the 296 staff respondents currently in an apartment who stated a preference, 57% said they would prefer a single-family home and 7% would choose an apartment again. They also reported cost as a challenge at a higher rate than everyone else, 80% against 59%.
71% of the 1,245 respondents who gave a bedroom count wanted three or more. Three-bedroom was the most common answer at 39% and four-bedroom followed at 32%. One-bedroom and studio together drew 8%. On the interest list, 56% of households included children and 96% said they were not interested in a roommate.
Five public school districts in Central Texas, identified here as District A through District E. The districts are not named because the surveys were run internally with their own staff and the results are published in aggregate. District-level figures are reported by letter where the differences are informative.
No. Respondents chose to take the survey, so this is a self-selected group rather than a random sample. That matters most for the figures on cost burden, which should be read as rates among people who chose to respond. It bears less on building-type preference, since there is no obvious reason a person content with their housing would systematically prefer a different building type.
Method and sources
Five Central Texas school districts surveyed their employees between February 2025 and August 2026. Two instruments were used: a staff needs assessment covering current housing, cost, commute, preferences and amenities, and a shorter interest-list registration covering household composition, home size and move-in timing. Both were fielded in English, and two districts fielded in Spanish as well.
The eight source files hold 1,948 response rows. Repeat submissions were matched by email address, or by full name where no email was given, within each district and instrument, keeping the most recent. Removing 172 repeats leaves 1,776 distinct submissions: 1,342 staff assessments and 434 interest-list registrations. 152 rows carry no usable identifier and are retained because they cannot be matched to a duplicate. Every figure on this page excludes repeats.
Coverage differs by question, so every figure here is published with the number of responses it was calculated from. Whether a respondent rents or owns was asked directly in three of the five districts. A form variant given to about 36 respondents in one district asked for an affordable rent band in place of home size, so those responses are absent from the bedroom counts rather than estimated. Eighteen interest-list registrants indicated they do not work for the district.
An anonymized version of the harmonized dataset, with a codebook documenting the mapping for every question whose wording differed between districts, is available to public employers and researchers on request. Personally identifying information is removed and free-text comments are screened before release.
Upward Communities develops single-family workforce housing for public sector employers, so a finding that public employees want single-family homes is a finding that suits us. We would rather say that here than have a reader discover it later. What we can offer against it is the method above, the base count on every figure, and the places where we have said the data does not support a stronger claim.
The findings here come from five districts in one metro. The only way to know what your employees want is to ask them. We design and field employee housing surveys for public employers, in English and Spanish, and hand back the analysis whichever way the numbers fall.
Get in touch →Upward Communities develops workforce housing for public sector employees. We have a commercial interest in this subject and would rather say so here than have you find out later. Every figure on this page carries the number of responses behind it so you can weigh it yourself.
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