When Teachers Can’t Afford to Live in the Bay Area, Districts Get Into the Housing Game

This story is part of How We Get By, a KQED series exploring how people are coping with rising costs in the Bay Area and California. Find the full series here.

Last year, Ms. Hernandez’s son began to ask her where he would attend high school.

His curiosity brought forward a bigger question looming in her mind: Was their family going to be able to stay in San Francisco at all?

“I’m sorry, baby, but I don’t know,” she told her middle-schooler. “I don’t know if we’re going to continue to be living in the city; things are going to be too expensive here.”

At the time, the San Francisco Unified School District paraeducator and her husband had lived in the Bay Area for two decades, mostly in the city. For the last 10 years, they’d shared a two-bedroom apartment in the Outer Mission, paying about $3,000 a month in rent.

The building was aging, the family was growing tired of struggles with their landlord, and they wanted to be in a neighborhood that felt safer. For years, though, finding another apartment in their price range seemed impossible.

“At one point we even wondered if we wanted to stay here or move even across the country,” Hernandez, who asked to be identified by only her last name because of ongoing litigation with a previous landlord, told KQED.

Multiple affordable housing applications had gotten her no further than long waiting lists and only a few calls back to apply. Then, in May, MidPen Housing called to say her family had been selected for a unit in a new affordable housing development that gives priority to school district staff.

“I felt like I was dreaming,” she said.

Hernandez remembers picking her son up from school after they got the keys, ordering pizza and bringing him to the building near Ocean Beach as a surprise. “This is going to be your new house,” she told him, hopeful that he’d attend high school in their new neighborhood.

The new, five-story apartment building, nestled between the Sunset District’s signature two-story single-family homes and a burgeoning number of neighborhood restaurants, bookstores and coffee shops, is now home to more than 100 SFUSD employees.

The Shirley Chisholm Village development sprang from a partnership between the school district and the city’s affordable housing program that was announced in 2015. It’s part of a growing number of teacher housing projects cropping up throughout the Bay Area as the cost of living in the region continues to climb, often outpacing the salaries of essential education workers.

According to Sarah Karlinsky, the director of research and policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, the trend follows many universities and public sector employers, who have provided housing options for decades — both because of sky-high costs and a shortage of units in urban areas.

“Many of us are familiar with this idea of the ‘company town,’” she said. “When there’s a large-scale employer and they want to make sure they can attract talent and workers … they need to ensure their workers have housing. Even if you think about building the railroads, large infrastructure projects involve thinking about where workers might live.”

In recent years, even companies in higher-paying sectors like tech have sought to help house their employees because of the lack of housing stock.

School districts are among the latest to pursue the model as they find themselves with vacant properties and employees who say they can’t afford to live near work or, in some cases, stay in the profession.

Sarita Lavin, an ethnic studies teacher at George Washington High School, has worked in SFUSD for five years and lived in San Francisco for more than 10, but she said that before she moved into Shirley Chisholm Village, she was considering leaving both.

She’d lived with roommates for a decade, navigating the usual co-habitating strifes like dirty dishes in the sink and uninvited guests, as well as some less common circumstances — like a pet reptile on the loose.

“There’s nothing like opening a cabinet and having a six-foot African king snake looking at you,” Lavin said. “That was the big moment where I was like, ‘Maybe it’s time for me to really start thinking about independent living.’”

Lavin said the Sunset District apartment, which is considered affordable, still costs more than half of her monthly take-home income at about $2,500 a month. But it’s a far cry from the rates she saw on Craigslist and Zillow when she started looking at studios and one-bedrooms. Those, which she said could top $3,000, are “totally out of the price range for teachers.”

She makes the cost work in part because it was important to her to stay in the city.

“It just felt like a place where my family had roots in the U.S.,” said Lavin, whose mother immigrated from Guatemala to Pacifica.

Lavin grew up in Oakland but moved to the Inland Empire at 11, after her family was priced out. She said they spent a lot of their time in San Francisco, though, so she felt drawn to move here more than a decade ago to attend college.

In her last apartment, Lavin paid $1,100 a month, plus about $200 to $300 in utilities, for a room with two roommates — a low outlier among city rents, because the three tenants split the cost of their space equitably based on their salaries.

But as she got older, it became increasingly important to have her own space.

“I was really thinking, if I can’t get this place, then I might want to start looking outside of San Francisco, move maybe out to the East Bay and leave SFUSD, because it’s just too unaffordable to live here,” Lavin said.

“Now I kind of feel like maybe I don’t need an exit strategy,” she continued.

Seeing results, but challenges remain

Throughout the 2010s, Jefferson Union High School District was losing and replacing about 25% of its employees every year across its five campuses in Daly City and Pacifica.

“When we surveyed our staff, we found that the number one reason that they were leaving our district was long commutes and housing affordability,” said Denise Shreve, the district’s director of housing.

Jefferson Union, the lowest-funded high school district in San Mateo County, “had to be creative” to retain teachers and recruit new ones, Shreve said. That led to a plan to build affordable housing.

In 2018, the district was one of the first in the nation to pass a bond measure to fund affordable teacher housing, generating about $33 million. Shreve said it borrowed an additional $40 million or so through certificates of participation, a form of municipal financing often used as an alternative to traditional voter-approved bonds.

The district broke ground in 2020 on a 122-unit development at its Serramonte Del Rey campus in Daly City, which opened in 2022 with all of its one- to three-bedroom units filled.

Just two years later, the district began the school year without any job openings. “We were completely, fully staffed. Before we had staff housing, that was unheard of,” Shreve said.

Other districts across the Bay Area have also pursued similar projects in recent years. Neighboring Jefferson Elementary School District opened 56 apartments for staff in 2024. Santa Clara Unified School District was one of the first in the state to provide housing for teachers, constructing 40 units in 2001 and 30 more in 2008.

Earlier this month, an Oakland nonprofit announced it had purchased an apartment complex that it would turn into housing for Oakland Unified School District employees, pricing units at 30% of their household income. The 33-unit building in the Temescal District is the first that the Oakland Fund for Public Innovation’s Rooted program has acquired as part of its effort to purchase 150 residential units in the next three years.

When SFUSD began work on the Shirley Chisholm development, it cited many of the same challenges.

At the time, more than 64% of district teachers surveyed said they spent more than 30% of their income on rent, and about 15% spent 50% or more.

In a resolution committing to pursue workforce housing that was passed the previous year, the San Francisco school board said “high housing costs are a significant contributing factor to SFUSD educators’ ability to remain in San Francisco and remain employed with SFUSD, risking dire and unpredictable negative effects on the quality of SFUSD education when educators can no longer afford to live here.”

Still, workforce housing has not completely solved the problem for teachers in areas with a high cost of living. For those like Lavin, even an affordable housing unit can take up a large chunk of their take-home salary. And in San Francisco, many teachers, especially those with more experience, make too much to qualify for some of the units in Shirley Chisholm Village.

The building has units designated for various income levels between 40% to 120% of the area median income. For a single person, that equates to an annual salary between $41,130 and $130,900.

This year, fully credentialed teacher salaries ranged from $81,350 to $134,762, meaning that even entry-level teachers are ineligible for 34 of the affordable apartments. And as educators — especially those with more post-college credits — gain seniority, they surpass the income threshold for more units.

While SFUSD educators have priority for the building, about 10% of its units are occupied by non-SFUSD renters, most of whom have priority for specially designed ADA units. Of the 115 units that house SFUSD employees, many are occupied by support staffers who make lower salaries, such as paraeducators.

Because the district’s housing is operated in partnership with the city, residents have to go through San Francisco’s affordable housing lottery to apply for a unit.

Lavin and Hernandez said that process took months, and they had to provide a lot of information that the district already knows, like income.

Some of these issues are less pervasive in districts like Jefferson Union, which operates its housing independently, with the help of a property manager. It designates about two-thirds of its units for certificated teachers, while the rest are available to paraeducators and other staff.

As a smaller district, it’s also able to have a bigger impact. While about a quarter of staff lives in Jefferson Union’s workforce housing, only about 115 of more than 6,000 SFUSD employees live in its apartment complex.

In 2018, SFUSD set a goal of developing more than 500 housing units by 2030, and the district says it is exploring additional sites and partnerships to expand. It’s already broken ground on a second subsidized housing development in the Western Addition, which will add 75 more apartment units. And it’s identified multiple other district-owned properties throughout the city for future projects.

Before pursuing future projects, the district said it will conduct a “thorough analysis — including surveying staff — to understand the needs and preferences” of educators.

But the demand is clear. Nearly 15% of SFUSD’s workforce applied for the Shirley Chisholm Village complex, and about 395 district employees are on the waitlist.

Shayla Putnam, who teaches ceramics at George Washington High School, said securing a spot there felt like “hard work paid off.”

Putnam is the main earner for her and her partner, who have bounced around to one-bedroom apartments in the city for five years. Even at the below-market rates at Shirley Chisholm Village, they could only afford a one-bedroom unit, but she said amenities like a dishwasher and in-building laundry, as well as a measurably larger living space, have made a huge difference.

“Having the extra space does bring a quality of life that I haven’t necessarily experienced in the city,” she said.

Her partner, who is an artist, has a dedicated workspace, and they were able to get a kitchen table for the first time. The bathroom is also big enough to move around comfortably — “you could spin in here with your arms out,” Putnam said.

Plus, they save about $300 a month compared to their last apartment, which was also in the Sunset.

“I have a little more leeway,” Putnam said. “It’s the difference [between] literally cooking food every night versus being like, ‘We can eat out at this locally-owned business, we can have this coffee shop’ — those little things that make life worth living rather than scraping by.”