SAN DIEGO — The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) is the latest to consider constructing affordable housing units for its employees as the U.S. continues to experience an affordable housing crisis.
The San Diego Unified Board of Education is mulling over a proposal to build more than 1,000 affordable housing units to reduce educator turnover, the Sun reports. Studies consistently show high teacher turnover significantly affects students. They regularly lose established relationships with trusted adults, and staff shortages often result in larger class sizes, which can increase behavioral issues and therefore impact student safety.
Results from a survey of 2,372 SDUSD employees determined nearly 70% fall under the low to moderate household income bracket. District officials defined lower income as up to 80% of the Area Median Income (AMI) and moderate income from 80-120% of the AMI, which is currently $119,500 in San Diego County. School officials said the majority of staff respondents are burdened by housing costs and are interested in district-provided housing.
Data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that across the country, the home vacancy rate is 0.8%, less than half of what it was a few years ago. Due in part to the housing crisis, the Census Bureau says more than 800,000 Californians left the state between 2021 and 2022. When new apartment complexes are being constructed, developers are increasingly building for higher-income renters, leaving middle and working-class tenants unable to compete, according to San Diego magazine.
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A 2023 analysis from the National Council on Teacher Quality found that in many major metropolitan areas, teachers are priced out of the housing market. The analysis found the average cost to rent a one-bedroom home in San Diego is equal to 41% of a “beginning” local teacher’s salary.
“We know that for teachers, housing is one of [their] primary financial concerns,” said Dana Cuff, the director of cityLAB, an architecture and urban research think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Teachers need affordable housing.”
SDUSD currently provides some income-restricted housing options for families of district employees. Fifty-three people currently reside in the development which is roughly 16 miles from the district’s headquarters. One of the tenants, Carolina Sanchez Garcia, is a preschool teacher at SDUSD. She pays $1,300 a month for a three-bedroom apartment — roughly half the market rate, Cal Matters reports. Due to the high cost of living in San Diego, she had been commuting from Tijuana, Mexico for more than a decade.
The district is the second-largest in the state with more than 13,500 employees. Under the proposed plan, 1,006 affordable housing units would be built across five SDUSD-owned properties, all of which are within a 10-mile radius of the headquarters. The goal is to make affordable housing options available to 10% of employees within 10 years, which the district hopes will improve academic performance and strengthen employee recruitment and retention.
California is Leading Affordable Teacher Housing Initiatives
SDUSD isn’t the first district in the state to consider building affordable teacher housing. For some time now, the California School Boards Association (CSBA) has been working with CityLAB and the Center for Cities + Schools, a research center at UC Berkeley, to offer resources and technical assistance to school districts interested in affordable housing for employees, EdWeek reports.
The groups released a report in Feb. 2022 that determined every county in California has one acre or more of land that is owned by a local education agency and is potentially developable. Of the more than 7,000 properties with potentially developable land, 61% are located where beginning teachers struggle to afford housing.
“It’s really beautifully distributed throughout the state,” Cuff said. “In rural districts, there’s not very much housing available within a reasonable distance. Urban districts are having deep problems with affordability.”
Three other California school districts — Los Angeles, Santa Clara, and Jefferson Union — have recently built affordable housing units for its employees. At least 80 other districts in the state have said they want to learn more about the process and about a dozen districts have enrolled in workshops offered by the organizations.
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Jefferson Union, a high school district, opened its 122-unit housing complex in 2022. A one-bedroom apartment rents for about $1,450 a month, about half the market rate. Since the complex opened, the district has had near zero turnover.
“Students now start off the school year with a teacher in their classroom, instead of a long-term substitute,” said district spokesperson Denise Shreve. “You have to look at the long-term benefits. We now have teacher retention and students are better off because of it.”
Lisa Raskin, a social science teacher and instructional coach for the district, told Cal Matters that although she’s struggled with housing during her 20-year career, she’s never considered leaving, instead opting to live with roommates. When she moved into the affordable housing complex, it was her first time living on her own.
“I can be with community if I want, or I can be alone. I love that,” she said. “We call it ‘adult dorms.’ I feel safe here.”
“There’s momentum growing around this idea, and it’s definitely becoming normalized as a mainstream approach,” Troy Flint, the chief communications officer for the CSBA, told EdWeek in 2023. “That’s not to say most districts are doing this, but people understand the need and potential in a much more vivid way than they did even two years ago.”
Other U.S. School Districts Building Affordable Teacher Housing
According to a survey conducted by EdWeek in the fall of 2023, 6% of district leaders and principals across the U.S. said they provide teacher housing or a housing supplement. Another 2% said they’ve introduced or improved those benefits in the past two years in response to staffing challenges.
Although there isn’t much additional data on how well these incentives work in recruiting and retaining teachers, another EdWeek survey, conducted in July 2022, found 11% of teachers said free or subsidized housing would make them more likely to stay in the teaching profession long-term.
In February, Harrison School District 2 in Colorado Springs, Colo., announced it is in the planning stages of building an affordable duplex complex on an acre parcel of land at the district’s Mountain Vista Community School, the Denver Gazette reports. Wendy’s Village, named after Superintendent Wendy Birhanzel, who won Colorado’s 2023 Superintendent of the Year award, will feature twenty 325-square-foot duplexes.
Mike Claudio, assistant superintendent of personnel support services for D-2, said new teachers, who have a starting salary of $47,545, often ask about housing.
“They ask, ‘Can I live in Colorado Springs?’ And I say you can, but you have to have a roommate or two or three in order to make a paycheck go as far as possible,” he said.
Claudio said the units will be “dignified” net-zero electrically powered homes and rent for $825 a month. Comparatively, the average rent in Colorado Springs is $1,720 a month and the average home price is $523,456, according to Forbes Advisor.
How U.S. School Are Addressing Teacher Shortage
As much of the U.S. is dealing with a housing shortage, they are also dealing with a teacher shortage. Prior to the pandemic, around one in six teachers expressed they would likely leave their job pre-pandemic. This increased to one in four by the 2020-21 school year. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are currently 567,000 fewer educators in America’s public schools today than there were before the pandemic.
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In Sept. 2024, the Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education’s research wing, announced a newly-funded five-year initiative intended to find more effective teacher recruitment and retention strategies for American schools.
As part of the initiative, researchers from 10 institution will study various recruitment and retention policies, including:
- Licensure reforms that provide temporary licensure and/or change the cut scores required to pass licensure tests
- Financial incentives such as salary floor policies and pay-for-performance policies
- Teacher working conditions, including the 4-day school week
The participating states include Arkansas, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington.
In Aug. 2022, the Biden Administration unveiled a three-point plan to address teacher shortages. The plan includes:
- Partnering with recruitment firms to find new potential applicants
- Subsidizing prospective teachers’ training
- Paying teachers higher salaries
