San Francisco Starts Construction on Its 2nd Teacher Housing Project

Teachers in San Francisco looking for affordable housing could have more options by the end of next year.

Construction began earlier this year on the city’s second subsidized housing development for teachers and school staff. The site, located at 750 Golden Gate Avenue in the Western Addition, will offer 75 apartments, with preference for employees of San Francisco’s Unified School District and Community College District. It’s slated to finish construction by the end of 2026.

“Today, we’re breaking ground on our future,” Mayor Daniel Lurie said Wednesday. “A future for our families and teachers, and a future where building housing in San Francisco is not the exception, it is the expectation.”

The event marked the early stages of construction for the educator workforce housing, as well as a second affordable housing development for families at 850 Turk Street.

For years, city and state leaders have proposed solutions to the state’s housing shortage and the impact of high rents and home prices on educators, many of whom are forced to commute from outside of San Francisco. According to a survey released in January by the California Teachers Association, more than 80% of the nearly 2,000 public school educators statewide said their salaries could not keep up with the rising cost of living.

To meet the need in San Francisco, officials have passed streamlining bills and used state programs to bring new homes online faster. But the process has been slow going.

Last year, the developer MidPen Housing completed the city’s first affordable housing development for teachers at Shirley Chisholm Village in the Outer Sunset. It took almost seven years to get the project’s permits approved and construction completed. When applications opened last April, more than 900 people applied for a spot in the 135-unit building.

But in the years since construction started at Shirley Chisholm Village, a lot has changed for the city and the developer, said Lauren Fuhry, project manager for MidPen Housing, which is also developing the Golden Gate site. Fuhry said the nonprofit was able to secure financing in Aug. 2023 and started construction in January — a relatively short timeline compared to the previous project.

“One thing that really helped Golden Gate kind of streak forward is there were some changes at the state level in laws around permit timelines,” Fuhry said. “Golden Gate directly benefited from permit submissions having explicit deadlines for how long the city has to respond.”

The project is also being built on state-owned excess land. It replaces a parking lot for the Employment Development Department.

The city took advantage of the governor’s Surplus Land Act, which aims to repurpose underused public land for affordable housing by offering it to developers at a low cost.

“When you think about projects like this, land cost is often a really significant cost,” Tomiquia Moss, secretary of the state’s Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency, told KQED. “When we’re able to offer state land at a deeply discounted rate, it allows the developers to focus on the other parts of the financing stack that they have to put together.”

Though the Shirley Chisholm Village took years to complete, officials are seeing success in what was built. Today, the apartments are 100% occupied, according to Anne Stanley, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development.

About 90% of the 135 units are occupied by SFUSD educators and employees, with the remaining set aside for members of the general public with mobility, hearing or visual impairments, Stanley said.

One more project is in the city’s teacher housing pipeline, but awaits funding: 2205 Mission Street. It’s the third teacher housing project San Francisco officials have vowed to build.

According to Mission Local, that project, developed by the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), received about $12 million in funding from Proposition I in 2023 but has failed to get other financing needed to start construction.

“MEDA remains committed to this project, which will bring much-needed housing for our educators,” Juan Mesa, the nonprofit’s spokesperson, said in a statement. “We continue to work with public and private partners to secure funding for 2205 Mission Street, exploring solutions to make this vision a reality.”