Housing
Workforce and affordable housing at the Pangea Community, built with the local crews the Academy trains, and kept affordable by deed restriction and independent administration.
Economic & Planning Systems, presented to Taos Town Council, October 2025 · Academy intake records, 2025.
Workforce housing at the Pangea Community
The Pangea Community is the Academy's campus in Taos, and the workforce housing there is the centre of this work: homes for local families, essential workers and seniors, with Taos County residency priority. Homes are offered both to rent and to buy.
Innovation
Two costs, not one
Affordability is usually argued as a purchase price. A household lives with two numbers: what it costs to build the home, and what it costs to run it for thirty years. This work attacks both.
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Low cost to build
Walls go up two ways, chosen per building: 3D-printed concrete produced on site, and insulated concrete form. Timber is milled locally, which takes freight out of the framing package in a county where materials otherwise arrive from Albuquerque, Santa Fe or Denver.
No cost-per-home figure is published here. One will be, once it is measured across a completed phase rather than modelled.
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Low cost to live in
At the Pangea Community, the homes are designed to carry their own water, power and waste: catchment and on-site treatment, solar generation with storage, and passive solar design with thermal mass doing the work a furnace and an air conditioner would otherwise do. Chamisa Verde is built differently - passive house and all-electric, on town services - because it sits on a different site under different rules. The aim is the same: get the running cost out of the building rather than out of the household.
Eliminating the utility bill is a design goal, and it is stated as one. There is no measured performance data yet, and there will not be until buildings have been occupied through a full Taos winter and summer. For a household near an income limit, that monthly figure is the difference between a home it can buy and a home it can keep.
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Training built into production
Students learn on the same builds: the curriculum covers every system in these houses, field placement puts students on active sites, and the Certified Builder credential is the exit. Two Earthships on the campus - a two-bedroom and a one-bedroom, both ICF - are part of the teaching sequence.
That is a description of how the programme is designed. Counts of students enrolled, trained and placed will be published here when they exist and can be verified, and not before.
Impact on affordability
Second proof point: Chamisa Verde
Seven deed-restricted homes in Taos, some with 3D-printed concrete walls and some with insulated concrete form walls. Sale prices run from about $172,000 for a two-bedroom home of 900 square feet to about $190,000 for a three-bedroom home of 1,000 square feet, as reported by the Town of Taos in July 2025. Final sale prices are set by the Town of Taos.
Eligibility is households at or below 120% of area median income. For scale, a household needs roughly 260% of area median income to afford the average single-family home in Taos - that describes the market these homes sit in, not the households they serve.
More than 100 applications came in for the seven homes.
The deed restriction is what makes the affordability survive the first closing: a capped resale formula, buyer qualification, enforcement timelines, and no second homes or short-term rentals. It does not expire - it runs with the land in perpetuity, so every household that owns the home buys it at a restricted price, not only the first. Buyers are supported through it with a 5% soft second, an eight-hour HUD-certified homebuyer class and one-on-one counseling.
The Academy's role is the administration, not the construction: outreach, intake, a randomized and auditable lottery, and the role of deed-restriction Administrator, under a Memorandum of Understanding with the Town of Taos. Keeping the administrator independent of the build is the point - it is what makes the lottery worth trusting.
Scalability
Why this travels
Every component here is transferable on its own: the off-grid design, the two wall methods, the deed restriction and lottery process, and the curriculum that teaches all of it. None of them depends on this site, this county or one organisation's staff.
Training is what makes the capacity grow rather than the headcount. Each phase trains the crew for the next one, so production and the workforce expand together instead of competing for the same scarce trades.
Working with us
For partnership, funding or press enquiries about the housing work, write to info@pangeaacademy.org. We share the deed restriction framework, the lottery procedure and the curriculum outline with anyone trying to do this in their own county.
Pangea Academy · PO Box 495, Taos, NM 87571 · 501(c)(3), EIN 33-2155076