State Superintendent Tony Thurmond Sponsors Legislation to Accelerate Housing Development for Educators and School Staff

Published in California Department of Education
February 20, 2025

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond is sponsoring legislation, Senate Bill (SB) 502, introduced on February 19 by State Senator Jesse Arreguín (D-07), to help local educational agencies (LEAs) across California address the housing affordability crisis. SB 502 would establish a fund to support predevelopment costs of housing for educators and school employees, a common barrier for LEAs seeking to establish workforce housing.

“California’s housing crisis is driving talented educators and school staff away from the communities that need them most,” said Superintendent Thurmond. “This bill will create a real pathway to accelerate the opportunities for districts to build over 2 million units of affordable housing over the next decade. We applaud Senator Arreguín for his efforts to support school employees.”

“The scarcity of housing is making it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain educators,” said Senator Arreguín. “Educators and all workers deserve to live in the communities they serve. That is why I am excited to partner with Superintendent of Public Instruction Thurmond to secure funding to kick-start workforce housing projects for educators and school employees, repurposing school land for needed homes.”

SB 502 would allow more than 125 school districts and LEAs each year to use state homebuilding funds to cover predevelopment costs—such as architectural planning and permit applications—needed to construct affordable housing for school employees. Many school districts have available land to build housing but lack the necessary funding to cover these initial costs.

A key component of the bill is the creation of a zero-interest revolving loan fund, which would be funded by setting aside 5 percent of the annual revenue generated by the Building Homes and Jobs Trust Fund—a state fund that generates over $250 million per year from a $75 transaction fee on real estate documents. Under existing law, these funds support affordable housing projects, but school districts currently lack clear access to these resources. SB 502 would change that, helping school districts overcome financial barriers to developing workforce housing.

California’s housing crisis has disproportionately impacted educators, with housing costs far outpacing salaries. In 2016, only 17.4 percent of homes were affordable to the average teacher, and most school employees are considered “housing cost burdened,” spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Meanwhile, school districts and county offices of education collectively own more than 75,000 acres of land that could be developed for workforce housing. Notably, 40 percent of this land is in areas with high teacher turnover rates, where the loss of educators disrupts student learning and school stability.

Employee housing has shown to be a highly effective strategy for addressing the school staffing crisis. Jefferson Union High School District in Daly City, an area hard-hit by the high cost of housing, recently opened a 122-unit housing development for staff. Following the opening of these housing units, Jefferson Union High School District opened the school year with zero vacancies, which board member Andy Lie called “unheard of in public education."

Superintendent Thurmond introduced a housing initiative last year to develop these 75,000 acres of surplus school property into affordable housing for educators and the workforce. This total amount of surplus school property has the potential to support 2.3 million units of new housing, nearly meeting the 2.5 million units needed to fully address California’s housing crisis.

Superintendent Thurmond has been instrumental in making state tax credits available for affordable housing, with $500 million approved for this purpose as part of the 2020 state budget and in subsequent years, including 2024. He has also pledged to secure future funding to provide state incentives when local school districts pass bond measures to build housing.

More School District Consider Affordable Teacher Housing to Reduce Educator Turnover

Published in Campus Safety Magazine
By Amy Rock December 13, 2024

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.

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.

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.

Breaking ground on 70 affordable housing units for Pacifica teachers

KTVU FOX 2
By Amanda Quintana November 18, 2024

Teachers in Pacifica will soon have access to brand-new housing at the site of a former elementary school.

There’s a groundbreaking scheduled on Monday to highlight the project: 70 affordable housing units for faculty and staff in the Pacifica School District.

The hope is that this helps attract and retain teachers in an area where housing is expensive. 

This is a problem many Bay Area school districts are facing.

The city of Pacifica unanimously approved this project last year, but this project is at least eight years in the making. 

Mockups of the development show apartments with up to three bedrooms. 

The complex will also have a management office, residents a commons building, a public amenities building with changing rooms and a snack bar for the sports fields.  

The developer – Brookwood Partners – specializes in using school district properties that are underutilized and turning them into housing. 

They’re also working on more than 1,000 units of housing on school district-owned land in the Serramonte del Rey neighborhood in Daly City and have projects all over the Peninsula. 

This location used to be Oddstand Elementary School until it closed in 2004.

Both Bay Area bond measures to build teacher housing appear headed to victory

Published on KQED
By Adhiti Bandlamudi November 5, 2024

School districts in the Peninsula and the South Bay look likely get funding to build teacher housing, according to early returns.

San José Unified School District’s Measure R is leading with 62% of voters approving the measure so far. As one of the biggest bond measures across the region, it would raise $1.15 billion for the school district, out of which about $283 million would fund affordable housing for educators and staff.

In San Mateo county, Measure K in Cabrillo Unified School District has slightly more than 60% of voters favoring it. The $153 million bond would primarily focus on funding repairs and renovations to classrooms, but some of the money could be used to build housing for staff.

The districts could also get additional funding through California’s Proposition 2, a $10 billion bond to repair schools across the state. That proposition is leading with just over 56% of voters so far approving the measure.

Novato schools opt into new Marin workforce housing coalition

Published in Marin Independent Journal
By Keri Brenner August 21, 2024

In its fifth try since 2008 to develop educator workforce housing, the Novato Unified School District is joining a regional initiative to create more housing.

The district has joined College of Marin and Marin County Office of Education to form the Marin County Housing Coalition, said Derek Knell, district director of staff housing.

“The Novato Unified School District is leading the way for other districts interested in developing surplus school property,” said Ken Lippi, senior deputy superintendent at the county education office.

“Their model of careful planning and study is laying a strong foundation for future decisions about their surplus school sites,” Lippi said. “They are taking the idea of workforce housing for school staff beyond discussion and elevating it to something tangible and real.”

Lippi is a point person on the 135-unit, $123 million Oak Hills Apartment workforce housing project underway near San Quentin.

“We know from past surveys that there are at least 1,400 school employees who would be interested in affordable housing options,” Lippi said. “That is why the Oak Hills Apartments project is so important to Marin. It will be the first project of its type in Marin in over 50 years, and hopefully it will be the catalyst for more projects in the future.”

At Tuesday’s Novato school board meeting, trustees voted unanimously to accept a feasibility study prepared by their consultant on the use of five district surplus sites for staff housing. The consultant, Chris White of Brookwood Partners, outlined possibilities for sites, along with suggestions for financing.

“This ends the stage of the feasibility study and moves us into the third stage, development,” Knell said of Tuesday’s actions by trustees.  “We’re hoping to do the development stage in one year, but it could take up to three years, with all the permits and entitlements.”

The sites being explored are: Meadow Annex, a 3.7-acre site at 5520 Nave Drive in southern Novato; Hill Education, a 5.6-acre site at 720 Diablo Ave.; Hamilton, an 8.8-acre at 1125 C. St. and 930-940 C St.

Also, San Andreas, a 26-acre site at 5 San Andreas Drive in the San Marin area in northern Novato; and the NUSD district office, two parcels of 1.5 acres and 0.4 acres at 1015 Seventh St. The larger parcel is district-owned; the smaller one is city-owned.

“For the development stage, we’re going to come back with a recommendation on which properties to develop and how to finance them,” Knell said. He said he expects to have a recommendation to present to Novato trustees in the first quarter of 2025.

Knell said the state Department of Education is also looking into a plan to develop education workforce housing at school districts across the state. Tony Thurmond, state superintendent of public instruction, said last week there could be up to 75,000 acres of unused surplus properties available for housing at school districts statewide.

Knell said the state is seeing the value of the Novato approach in hiring a full-time director of staff housing to manage the use of surplus properties. The approach works better than having an education administrator trying to navigate the intense complexities of housing development, as the Novato district did in the past unsuccessful four attempts, Knell said.

“The primary focus of educators is on education, not land use,” Knell said. Also, community members tend to trust that officials working for their local schools have the intention to serve the community and the schools, rather than making a profit.

“The community gets to negotiate with the school district — we’re not going to over-develop any site, for example,” Knell said. The schools are interested in housing for the purpose of attracting and retaining staff, he said.

“This effort isn’t just about building housing,” he said. “It’s about improving the consistency and quality of our community’s public education.”

At College of Marin, trustees were presented this week with a staff report on the new housing coalition from college President Jonathan Eldridge.

Eldridge, who is leading the formation of the coalition, told trustees he expects to send out a survey to all Marin school districts to see if others are interested in getting involved.

“Broadly speaking, College of Marin believes this is a more collective approach to what is a collective problem, and that we can be more effective in attempting to solve it if we join forces,” Nicole Cruz, COM’s communications director, said in an email.

“The thought is that by bringing a group together as a coalition we can better leverage properties across the county that are currently unused or underutilized to create educator housing,” she said.

A handful of local leaders voiced appreciation for Novato’s efforts at the meeting Tuesday.

“We are so excited to see that Novato Unified School District — the leadership, the board, the community — is rallying around,” said Mo de Nieva-Marsh, a San Rafael City Schools trustee.

“It’s really exciting to witness the momentum with the Novato schools workforce housing development and the Marin County Office of Education’s Oak Hills project,” she added.

“Hopefully the momentum and witnessing it will build momentum for other school districts,” de Nieva-Marsh said. “All eyes are on Novato.”

California is giving schools more homework: Build housing for teachers

Published in CalMatters
By Carolyn Jones August 13, 2024

In a flurry of recent legislation and initiatives, California officials are pushing school districts to convert their surplus property into housing for teachers, school staff and even students and families. Some districts have already started; now the state wants every district to become a landlord.

“I believe that California has enough resources and ingenuity to solve (the housing shortage), and the data shows that California’s schools have the land to make this happen,” State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said at a press conference in July. “As school leaders, we can get this done for our communities and restore the California Dream.”

But some superintendents and education analysts are skeptical, saying the idea won’t work everywhere and school districts might be better off focusing on education, not real estate development.

“I’m grateful someone’s paying attention to this, but I feel like educators are being asked to solve so many problems,” said Mendocino County Superintendent Nicole Glentzer. “Student performance, attendance, behavior … and now the housing crisis? It’s too much.”

Last month, Thurmond pledged financial incentives for districts that pass bonds to build staff housing, and the Department of Education is sponsoring a workshop for district officials to learn the ins-and-outs of real estate development. 

His move comes on the heels of a report from UC Berkeley and UCLA that found school districts in California own 75,000 acres of developable land, enough to build 2.3 million housing units — which could wipe out the state’s housing shortage.

It also follows the Teacher Housing Act of 2016, which allows school districts to pursue funding sources for housing projects, including state and federal tax credits. Other pieces of legislation, including a 2022 law that went into effect in January, further streamlined the development and funding process. Other laws allow teachers to live in affordable housing even though their income might exceed the qualifying limits.

If Proposition 2, a $10 billion school facilities bond, passes this fall, schools could use that money to not only repair classrooms and other structures, but build teacher housing. 

‘It’s changed my life’

A handful of districts have already embarked on projects. 

Los Angeles Unified owns several buildings, including a 90-unit building that opened in April and a 26-unit building reserved for low-income families. San Francisco Unified plans to open a 135-unit building this fall. Santa Clara Unified has owned a 70-unit complex for more than two decades.

In San Mateo County, the Office of Education is working with a public-private housing nonprofit to buy an existing apartment building for local teachers. In Marin, the Office of Education joined with the county and state to build teacher housing on state-owned land near San Quentin Prison. 

In San Diego, preschool teacher Carolina Sanchez Garcia said she cried when she learned she won a spot at the 264-unit Scripps Ranch apartment complex, built through a partnership between San Diego Unified and an affordable housing developer.

Due to the high cost of housing in San Diego, she had been commuting from Tijuana, Mexico for more than a decade. To get to work on time, she’d get up at 2 a.m., move her five kids into the car where they’d go back to sleep, and make the trek across the border to work. Her kids would brush their teeth and get ready for school at a Starbucks.

Now, her commute is only 15 minutes.

“It’s changed my life,” Garcia said. “My kids are sleeping more. I’m sleeping more. It’s made me a better mother and a better teacher. Now, I start my day feeling positive and energized.”

Garcia pays $1,300 a month for a three-bedroom apartment, roughly half of market rate. The rent is similar to what she paid in Tijuana, but now she has time to cook dinner for her family, prepare for class and help her children with homework. Her kids can participate in after-school activities and spend time with friends. Her gas bill is also lower.

“I am so grateful,” Garcia said. “I think all districts should do this. Teachers need help.”

Kyle Weinberg, a special education teacher who’s head of the San Diego Unified teachers union, said the district’s housing endeavors have been successful because teachers share in the planning process, ensuring that the units’ location, size and rents meet teachers’ needs. The district paid for the Scripps Ranch development through an agreement with a private developer, and plans to pay for the next development with money from Measure U, a $3.2 billion school facilities bond that passed in 2022.

Subsidized housing is necessary, Weinberg said, because of the high cost of living in San Diego. To live in a 1-bedroom apartment in San Diego, starting teachers, who earn about $60,000, would have to pay roughly 63% of their take-home pay on rent. Teachers have long commutes and suffer from burnout, he said. 

The union’s goal is to have 700 units available, serving at least 10% of the teaching staff. 

“We have a staffing crisis in our district,” Weinberg said. “We need to explore all possible solutions. Along with salaries and benefits, expanding workforce housing is one of those options.”

Almost zero teacher turnover

The model state officials often point to is 705 Serramonte in Daly City. The Jefferson Union High School District opened the 122-unit apartment complex in 2022, and it now houses a quarter of the district staff. A 1-bedroom apartment rents for $1,450 a month, about half the market rate.

The district paid for the $75 million project by passing a $33 million bond specifically for teacher housing, and borrowed the rest. The rents generated by the project cover the bond payments. The district hired a property management company to handle maintenance and other issues.

Daly City is sandwiched between Silicon Valley and San Francisco, which have some of the  highest rents in the country. Teachers commute from the East Bay and beyond, and the district grappled with a persistent 25% staff turnover rate annually, said district spokesperson Denise Shreve.

Since 705 Serramonte 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,” Shreve said. “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, said she’s struggled with housing over her 20-year career but never considered leaving. A San Francisco native, she’s committed to staying in the area — which has meant that she’s always had roommates.

When she moved into 705 Serramonte, it was her first time living in her own apartment.

“I can be with community if I want, or I can be alone. I love that,” Raskin said, noting that her neighbors and colleagues often host barbecues, game nights and other gatherings. “We call it ‘adult dorms.’ I feel safe here.”

Superintendents already overworked

But not every district can pass a bond for teacher housing. Many can’t even pass bonds to repair school campuses. And some superintendents say they’re already so overworked that undertaking a complicated project like real estate development is a near impossibility. California had a superintendent turnover rate of more than 18% last year, according to research from the Superintendent Lab, in part due to workload.

Glentzer, the Mendocino County superintendent, said housing development would be a challenge for smaller, rural and lower-income districts. Those districts face teacher and housing shortages like their wealthier, urban counterparts, but lack the ability to raise the money and hire the staff to oversee projects.

Besides, the housing shortage affects lots of people in the community — not just teachers. Mendocino County has been scarred by numerous wildfires over the past few years, plus a boom in vacation rentals that have decimated the local housing market, leaving some people to live in trailers or even their cars. 

A better solution, she said, would be for housing to be left to regional authorities and for the state to fund school districts sufficiently to pay their teachers more.

Still, she understands the need. She herself lived in a district-owned home when she was superintendent of Potter Valley Community Unified School district northeast of Ukiah. The  two-bedroom bungalow was next to the football field, and she enjoyed the reduced rent and proximity to work.

“There’s no question we need housing,” Glentzer said. “But when you’re the superintendent and the principal and head of maintenance and you’re teaching Spanish, how are you supposed to find the bandwidth for this? I have a degree in education. I never took a real estate course.”

Marguerite Roza, director of the policy research center Georgetown Edunomics Lab, agreed. School districts might be better off paying teachers more or targeting raises for teachers who are in high demand, such as those who work in special education, math or science. 

She also noted that except in those three fields, the teacher shortage is ebbing. With federal Covid relief money expiring and student enrollment declining, many districts may be laying off teachers — not hiring, she said. EdJoin, a teacher hiring board, this month showed nearly 2,000 openings for special education teachers in California, for example, but fewer than 100 for third grade teachers.

“By building housing, districts might be addressing a crisis that no longer exists.” Roza said. “School districts’ expertise and focus is to provide education. To assume school districts could take on the responsibility of being landlords efficiently is concerning.”

Growing interest in teacher housing

To help school districts learn the basics of real estate development, the California School Boards Association has been hosting workshops and providing resources for the past two years. So far, 152 of the state’s 1,000 school districts have signed up to study the idea, and the numbers have been growing, said spokesperson Troy Flint.

He acknowledged that smaller districts may not have the staff to get projects off the ground, but some are working on projects together or collaborating with their local county offices of education, he said.

“Districts see the immense value workforce housing can offer their staff, students, and communities,” Flint said. “There is widespread interest in education workforce housing as an elegant way to address the housing affordability crisis. Workforce housing also brings quality-of-life, community, and environmental benefits — and may even help address declining enrollment as district staff can afford to live with their families in the communities they serve.”

Rivercrest Partners’ Innovative Solutions for School Districts Maximize Educational Funding

Accesswire
August 8, 2024

Brookwood Partners (now Rivercrest Partners), a leading real estate development advisory firm, is re-envisioning the way school districts approach land use and funding. With a focus on school districts throughout California, Brookwood Partners leverages its private sector experience to bring innovative solutions to the public sector.

Most recently, Brookwood Partners, working with Jefferson Union High School District ("JUHSD"), received project approvals to provide 1,113 new multifamily residential units, including 150 affordable units, 14,000 square feet of neighborhood-serving retail, and community parks and trails on 22 acres of surplus school property. The urban infill redevelopment project located in Daly City known as the Serramonte Del Rey Neighborhood also includes a 122-unit JUHSD faculty and staff housing project that Brookwood Partners completed in 2022.

Brookwood Partners brings a fresh approach and decades of experience to lead the way in transforming underutilized and surplus property into thriving communities. The firm specializes in urban design, development, and finance, enabling it to efficiently analyze project issues, communicate key considerations to district leaders, and maximize the potential of surplus property and underutilized real estate assets for educational institutions.

The chronic housing shortage throughout California has put immense pressure on school districts to maximize the value held in their real estate assets. As trusted advisors, Brookwood Partners guides school districts through the process of design, entitlements, and redevelopment to unlock the full potential of surplus and underutilized real estate assets.

Chris White, principal of Brookwood Partners, emphasizes the importance of its solutions stating, "Districts throughout the state are realizing the necessity of this type of solution and demand is growing. Our expertise in this area sets us apart as one of the few companies with a proven track record of success."

Brookwood Partners' collaboration with Jefferson Union High School District has been fully supported by both the certificated and classified staff, and highlights Brookwood's commitment to creating sustainable communities that support education.

Alan Katz, principal of Brookwood Partners, emphasizes the specific obstacles that school districts encounter and the importance of partnering with an experienced and knowledgeable firm. He states, "Many school districts face challenges when it comes to addressing how best to utilize their non-academic real estate assets. They may not be fully aware of the available resources, current state housing legislation or specialized experts at Brookwood Partners that can provide professional support. However, our experienced team and innovative solutions can empower these districts to navigate their challenges and find effective strategies to overcome them."

California Schools Keep Losing Teachers. The State Wants to Help Build Homes for Them

Published on KQED
Erin Baldassari July 30, 2024

To stem an outflow of teachers from schools across the state, California’s Department of Education encourages districts to venture into a different business: housing.

Superintendent Tony Thurmond on Tuesday announced an initiative that aims to establish the department as a go-to resource for districts looking to build homes for teachers on their property. The move comes as the state faces a housing affordability crisis and a shortage of some 2.5 million homes. School districts lose, on average, 12% of their staff each year to retirements and turnover.

“This is a strategy to help allow us to keep our workforce,” Thurmond said. “This is part of a larger plan to make sure that people can afford to live where they work, that they can afford the American dream and to buy a home, and that they have earnings that support them.”

The nearly 11,000 school districts across the state control more than 151,000 acres of total property. A 2021 analysis by UC Berkeley and UCLA found that of that land, there are enough developable parcels to support 2.3 million new homes or more than 90% of the state’s estimated shortage.

Districts have shown recent success in overcoming opposition to affordable housing for teachers. In Menlo Park, voters in 2022 defeated an attempt to block a teacher housing project in a single-family neighborhood. And in San Jose, school district leaders voted last week to place a $1.2 billion bond on the November ballot, part of which would fund new teacher housing.

Thurmond plans to convene a housing summit on Aug. 14, bringing together members of the construction and building trades, labor unions, school districts and others to identify barriers to housing development and ensure the Department of Education can make it easier for districts to build.

“The school districts have one of the most important parts of being able to create educator housing: They own land,” Thurmond said. “So there’s no need to make a purchase, to acquire land to develop that land.”

Districts can use local bonds and state tax credits, some $500 million of which were approved for educator housing as part of the 2020 state budget. And in 2022, the Legislature approved AB 2295, which essentially rezoned school properties to allow housing.

However, despite the additional tax credit funding and legislation, only a handful of districts across the state have completed educator housing projects, though dozens more have expressed interest or are in various stages of the development process, according to the California School Boards Association. Andrew Keller, a senior director with the association, said one big reason is that not enough districts know how to go about building housing.

“Chief among those roadblocks, actually, is the fact that schools aren’t in the housing business,” Keller said. “This is something that’s new to them.”

The school board association leads workshops for district staff on approaching and constructing housing on their properties, including connecting them with developers and financial institutions. But uptake has been slow.

Thurmond said he was hoping to accelerate that with the new initiative, which will include creating a “scalable blueprint” for districts to use to develop housing and exploring potential legislation that may include allowing school bond funds to go toward housing for families in the district, not just teachers and staff members.

Andy Lie, a trustee of the Jefferson Union High School District in San Mateo County, said he’s seen the impact of educator housing firsthand. The district faced a 25% staff turnover before completing a 122-unit apartment complex in May 2022. Since then, the district has had no vacancies, he said.

“The staff morale is up,” Lie said. “But most importantly, we can’t give our best to our students if our educators are struggling with housing insecurity.”

In Palo Alto, the local educators association is supporting two housing projects that association president Teri Baldwin said would go a long way toward enabling teachers and other school staff to live in the districts where they teach.

“Our teachers, especially our newer teachers who are lower on the salary scale, they can’t afford to live close by,” Baldwin said. “As a teacher, you want to be part of your community.”

Novato schools pursue workforce housing to offset staff woes

Published in Marin Independent Journal
Keri Brenner April 16, 2024

Novato school officials are looking to lower-cost workforce housing to help fill future staff vacancies.

Members of the district’s workforce housing advisory committee meeting met Monday to discuss local and regional school district workforce housing efforts.

Chris White, principal of Oakland-based consulting firm Brookwood Partners, told the advisory committee that a 2022 workforce housing project at the Jefferson Union High School District in Daly City eliminated staff vacancies.

“We leased up the property in a couple months,” White said. “The school district had no job vacancies for the 2022-23 school year.”

Committee members toured the project, at 705 Serramonte Blvd. in Daly City, on March 21. It occupies 4.5 acres of a 22-acre former district high school site.

Brookwood Partners received approval from Daly City to develop the remaining 17.5 acres with market-rate and affordable housing for the public, White said.

While the Jefferson Union workforce housing project was financed by a district general obligation bond and a loan, the new market-rate and affordable housing developments would be done with long-term ground leases, providing ongoing revenue to the Jefferson Union district, he said.

“This is the new creative way that school districts are looking at handling their under-utilized and surplus properties,” White said.

“It’s often by necessity, given the difficulty that districts are having in retaining teachers and staff to meet their educational missions, as well as the housing crisis all over California,” he said.

White and Brookwood Partners principal Alan Katz are on a not-to-exceed $135,000 contract with Novato Unified to produce a feasibility study to determine which district-owned properties have the potential for workforce housing development.

The study is expected to be presented to the board of trustees on June 25. The trustees could vote to approve the feasibility study at their Aug. 6 meeting.

If the district moves forward on a site this fall, the actual project could take five to eight years to complete, said Derek Knell, staff housing development director for the Novato Unified School District.

Knell said the district has nearly completed a new staff survey asking employees about their housing needs, income restrictions and commuting situations to gauge their interest in a potential workforce housing project.

“We have close to 30% of our workforce expected to retire in the next five years,” said Knell. “It’s going to be very difficult to bring in young people to come to work for us, given the cost of living here.”

The survey, which closes April 30, is scheduled for review at the next advisory committee meeting at 5:30 p.m. May 13.

Eric Lucan, who represents Novato on the Marin Board of Supervisors, said he stopped by the committee to listen and learn about the project.

”We know that we’re in a housing crisis in Marin and throughout the state,” Lucan said after the meeting. “I think this is a really innovative option of looking at how do we help to address the housing crisis, but specifically for our teachers, right here in Novato.”

Lucan added he wanted “to be part of the process” in the event some funds became available for Novato in the future.

A regional housing bond measure is on the ballot in November through the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority, for example, he said. Or a future allocation from the Marin County Housing Trust Fund might become a possibility.

“Being in on the early ground floor and hearing and learning would help me make good policy when it comes to distributing either our county housing trust fund or BAFHA dollars, or other money that might be available to partner with housing projects in the county,” Lucan said.

The Novato Unified workforce housing plan is the second major education-based project to be announced in Marin.

Oak HIll Apartments near San Quentin State Prison is moving forward after an environmental impact report was certified at the end of last year, said Ken Lippi, senior deputy superintendent at the Marin County Office of Education.

“Currently, pre-construction decisions are being readied for contractor and engineering services,” Lippi said this week.

Lippi said construction on the 135-unit, $123 million project was set to begin in early 2025.

Novato school district picks workforce housing consultant

Marin Independent Journal
Keri Brenner
March 16, 2024

The Novato Unified School District has selected an Oakland real estate development firm as a consultant for its workforce housing program.

A district committee chose Brookwood Partners, which has completed similar projects at other Bay Area school districts, from a group of potential candidates. The committee was composed of Derek Knell, the staff housing development director; Tracy Smith, the superintendent; Joshua Braff, the chief financial officer; attorney James Traber; and Leslie Benjamin, the communications director.

“Brookwood Partners demonstrated extensive practical development experience on various projects, including the workforce housing project recently completed by Jefferson Union High School District,” Knell told trustees at a board meeting on March 5. “After careful consideration, the district staff believes Brookwood Partners would be the best fit for the district.”

Brookwood Partners’ proposed contract, including financial terms and scope of work, is pending approval by the trustees. It will be presented at a board meeting on March 19, Knell said.

Chris White, a principal of Brookwood Partners, told trustees his firm would plan to develop a feasibility study for a below-market or subsidized housing development in Novato to attract and retain teachers and other staff who could not otherwise afford to live in Marin.

White said he and his colleagues would produce the feasibility study over three months. Their work would include a site analysis of all available surplus or underutilized district-owned land, a survey of employees who might be interested in such a housing opportunity and a review of Novato’s pending housing plans.

“All those elements will give us an idea of the cost of the project and some budget projections,” White told trustees.

If the contract is approved, the company would arrange a tour of its latest project, in Daly City, for members of Novato’s workforce housing advisory committee. The 122-residence development in the Jefferson Union High School District was completed last year, White said.

“It was fully leased in three months and now has a waitlist,” he said. He said the project was “more dense” than what might be envisioned for Novato, but the goal of attracting and retaining staff was the same.

“The district had no new job openings at the beginning of the school year,” White said. “All signs point to the teachers and staff who are living there all being very happy.”

Other recent projects by the firm include a 60-residence development in Half Moon Bay for the Cabrillo Unified School District, and a 70-residence project for the Pacifica School District.

Trustees said they wanted to make sure that Brookwood Partners had access to all relevant resources in Novato, such as the Rotary Club of Novato, which runs its own affordable home program. Also, the firm needed to be steeped in the Novato culture, trustees said.

“Novato is very close-knit,” trustee Ross Millerick said. “We’re like a small town.”

The school district “depends on the support of our community,” Millerick said. “You need to be very careful to be in step with the community.”

The next meeting of the district’s workforce housing advisory committee is April 15.

Featured Stories

‘Lesson Planning in the Laundry Room': What Housing for Teachers Looks Like

Published in Education Week
Madeline Will December 4, 2023

To respond to both soaring housing costs and staffing shortages, more school districts across the country are getting into the property management business.

District leaders say that renting housing units to educators at below-market rates has become an effective recruitment and retention strategy. While overseeing housing complexes can be complicated, it can also be cost-effective: School districts can tap outside sources of funds to build the units, instead of dipping into their own coffers. Some districts even already own the land.

Six percent of district leaders and principals said they provide teacher housing or a housing supplement, according to a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey conducted this fall. Two percent said they’ve introduced or improved those benefits in the past two years, in response to staffing challenges.

The exact details vary from place to place. Education Week spoke to officials from four districts with workforce housing projects. Here’s how districts devised solutions in their communities.

In Miami, teachers could live and work in the same building

Florida’s Miami-Dade county and its school system are including workforce housing in a multi-million-dollar expansion of Southside Preparatory Academy, a pre-K-8 magnet school that needed additional seats for its middle school grades.

The seven-story building in the downtown Brickell neighborhood of the city will add capacity for 630 new students and include 10 housing units for educators in the district. The teachers who live in the building can—but do not have to—work at Southside.

Raul Perez, the chief facilities, design, and construction officer for the school district, said he saw some comments on social media from teachers who were concerned about the implications of living on the same site as a school. For example: “If I call out sick, they can come to my apartment to check on me.”

“The way that we envision it is not that at all,” Perez said.

The building is designed so that there is no overlap between the residential and the educational sides. If a teacher wanted to go from the school to their home, they’d have to leave the building and walk around the corner to a separate restricted-access entrance for residents only.

The district hopes to have the housing units available by the start of next school year. The county will determine the exact rental prices based on tenants’ income, but it’ll be significantly less than Miami’s typical market, Perez said.

“This is a way of having new teachers come on board and having an opportunity to start off with reasonable rental [prices]—and move on from there as their careers start to grow,” he said.

The district wants to replicate this project elsewhere, Perez said. Some schools are being underutilized due to recent enrollment declines, so renovating the school building and adding a residential component would be a “win-win,” he said.

In San Francisco, workforce housing has led to more teacher collaboration

The Jefferson Union high school district, located just south of San Francisco, opened an educator housing development a year and a half ago. District staff can live in one of the 122 units—which range in size from one to three bedrooms—for below market-rate rent.

The district has just started collecting data on the effects of the program, but Austin Worden, the district’s director of communication and staff housing, said early signs are promising. The district started this school year fully staffed with certified teachers.

It aims to keep the housing development approximately 60 percent certified staff and 40 percent classified staff, he said.

“A lot of teachers who live in the building, they love it,” Worden said. “They’re still able to maintain a sense of privacy ... [but] they’ve really embraced the sense of community living there.”

The building is designed with several community spaces, and Worden said the district staff and their families will often come together for karaoke nights or game-watching parties. Some of the teachers who live there will use the common areas for collaboration—he’s even noticed “lesson planning in the laundry room.”

The district is now exploring building another apartment complex on the same site that would generate money through market-rate rents.

A 100 percent goal for workforce housing in Aspen, Colorado

The Aspen school district is in a Colorado ski town, where property values are “through the roof,” said Superintendent Dave Baugh.

“Nobody can afford to buy a house,” Baugh said, adding that affordable housing is 60 to 70 miles away from the district’s schools. “As a superintendent, I can’t afford to live here.”

Baugh lives in district-owned housing—along with about 37 percent of the system’s 271 full-time employees. The district’s 15-year goal is to have the capacity for all its employees to live in workforce housing.

More Districts Are Building Housing for Teachers. Here’s What to Know.

Published in Education Week
By Madeline Will Nov 22, 2023

School districts have a lot of responsibilities to manage. Some are adding housing to the list.

More and more districts across the country are building housing complexes to rent to teachers and other school employees—often at below-market rates and on district-owned land. It’s a recruitment and retention strategy that has been fueled by both rising housing costs and staffing shortages.

“There’s momentum growing around this idea, and it’s definitely becoming normalized as a mainstream approach,” said Troy Flint, the chief communications officer for the California School Boards Association, which has been working with school districts in the state that are considering the idea. “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.”

Six percent of district leaders and principals said they provide teacher housing or a housing supplement, according to a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey conducted this fall. Two percent said they’ve introduced or improved those benefits in the past two years, in response to staffing challenges.

There is not yet much substantive research on how well these incentives work at recruiting and retaining teachers or on their broader place in affordable housing policy. But anecdotally, district leaders say that there’s high demand from their staff.

A separate EdWeek Research Center survey, conducted in July 2022, found that 11 percent of teachers said free or subsidized housing for educators would make them more likely to stay in the teaching profession long-term.

And an analysis earlier this year from the National Council on Teacher Quality found that in many major metropolitan areas, teachers are priced out of the housing market.

“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.”

Workforce housing would also appeal to support staff, Flint said, adding that those classified employees are typically less well compensated than teachers and are more likely to live within the immediate community in which they work.

An effort taking root in California

California’s statewide approach to teacher housing is among the most robust.

The CSBA is working with cityLAB and the Center for Cities + Schools, a research center at the University of California, Berkeley, to offer resources and technical assistance to interested school districts. (The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is supporting their work. CZI also supports Education Week, but the media organization retains full editorial control over its articles.)

The groups released a report last February that found that every county in California has land of one acre or more that’s owned by a local education agency and is potentially developable, meaning it is underused or completely unutilized. Of the more than 7,000 properties with potentially developable land, 61 percent 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.”

Right now, at least three school districts in the state—Los Angeles, Santa Clara, and Jefferson Union, a high school district—have educator workforce housing developments. Many more are interested.

At least 80 school districts in the state have expressed interest in learning more about the process, although only about a dozen districts have enrolled in a series of workshops offered by the organizations so far. The workshops help districts explore the logistics of the process and put together a school board resolution to endorse the idea. A second phase of the training will walk districts that are further along through the process of preparing a request for proposal, Cuff said.

The factors districts have to consider

There’s a lot of work districts need to do before they can even consider breaking ground on educator workforce housing, Flint said.

He recommends that districts start the process by surveying their staff and doing some research: How many employees would be interested in workforce housing? Does workforce housing make sense, given the dynamics of the real estate market where educators currently live?

Districts should also look at demographic trends in the short- and long-term, Flint said. And they should consider their available land and how a housing development would fit into the surrounding neighborhood from a logistical and aesthetic perspective. How welcoming would the neighborhood be to this development?

Districts must also think through all the logistics of how educator workforce housing will work.

Jeff Vincent, the director of public infrastructure initiatives at the Center for Cities + Schools, said it’s typically more cost-effective for districts to build multi-family housing, such as an apartment complex or townhouses, than single-family homes. But the staffing survey will help bring clarity about the type of housing that’s needed, as well as the number and size of units.

How a Parking Lot Became a Panacea for This School District’s Housing Crisis

Published in EdSurge
By Emily Tate Sullivan September 18, 2023

Shirley Cruz used to pass an old parking lot on her way to and from work.

Adjacent to a former high school, the lot was wasted space back then, she says. Uber and Lyft drivers would congregate there, waiting to get assigned to their next rides, Cruz recalls. Otherwise, it sat empty.

In Daly City, California, just south of San Francisco city limits, that’s prime real estate. The owners of the abandoned parking lot and the land beneath it — the local school district — realized as much, and they hatched a plan.

Now, Cruz doesn’t drive past it. She lives on it — in a district-owned, newly constructed apartment complex occupied exclusively by the teachers and staff of Jefferson Union High School District.

It’s an approach that is gaining momentum among public school districts nationwide. Many are dealing with vacancies and educator attrition rates at levels that are not only inconvenient but actually harmful to the staff, students and families in their communities. In a number of places, including the San Francisco Bay Area, exorbitant housing costs are responsible for high teacher turnover rates. So districts, often sitting on vast swaths of underused and undeveloped land, are getting creative.

Jefferson Union High School District is among the first school districts in the country to see its affordable housing project through to completion — staff began moving in over a year ago, and today, the 122-unit complex is fully occupied — but scores of others are not far behind.

In California alone, at least 46 school districts were pursuing workforce housing projects on 83 sites statewide as of March 2022, according to research from the Center for Cities + Schools at the University of California, Berkeley. Projects in North Carolina, Texas, Missouri, Colorado, Illinois and elsewhere are also underway.

As more districts seek to address the housing crisis in their communities — an issue EdSurge explored in depth in a recent story — we wanted to look at the school district in Daly City that, at least for now, has solved its housing woes.

Drawing Up Plans

Before its employee housing program launched in 2022, JUHSD was losing between 20 and 25 percent of its staff every year.

“We kept hearing, ‘It’s not because we don’t want to work here. It’s because we can’t live here,’” says Austin Worden, director of communication and staff housing for the district.

Housing in the Bay Area is notoriously pricey, notes Worden, “but in recent years, the spike is just unreal — just through the roof,” he says. The average rent for apartments in Daly City in 2023 ranges between $2,344 and $3,692 a month, according to Rent.com. “What we’re giving in salary raises doesn’t even compete,” Worden adds.

JUHSD is the lowest-funded high school district in San Mateo County, California, which is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States. Teacher salaries in Jefferson Union range from around $62,000 to $107,000 a year, compared to nearby San Mateo Union High School District, where teachers can earn between $79,000 and $148,000 a year.

School districts sometimes raise money by selling bonds, but Jefferson Union leaders knew they wouldn’t be able to use bond funds to increase staff salaries. What they could do with a bond was build. The district had plenty of land and property ripe for development. If housing was the main driver of high turnover rates and district leaders couldn’t adjust salaries in line with housing costs, they thought, why not just build staff housing?

A $33 million voter-approved bond passed in June 2018. The remainder of the $75.5 million housing project was financed through a Certificate of Participation (COP).

The goal, says Worden, was for about a quarter of the district’s 530 staff members to live in the eventual apartment complex, and to price rent for the units about 50 percent below market rates.

In practice, the rental units are around 60 percent of market rates — between $1,350 and $1,580 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in the district-owned building, compared to about $2,400 a month elsewhere, Worden says — so a considerable discount.

By May 2022, staff were moving into the building, which has a mix of one-, two- and three-bedroom units and includes modern appliances and amenities such as a fitness center, common rooms with workspaces, playgrounds, community centers and parking.

“It’s stunning,” Worden says of the building. “The goal was to create a product that was on par with at-market rate [alternatives]. It rivals buildings I’ve seen in San Francisco.”

He remembers giving tours to interested staff and reveling in their “oohs” and “ahhs” as they walked into individual units. Many hadn’t known what to expect of the district’s development, but once in the building, he says, they were impressed.

Colleagues as Neighbors

Cruz was one of the employees who found herself pleasantly surprised by the finished product.

The 67-year-old remembers hearing about the plan to develop educator workforce housing a few years ago and says she started angling for a unit in the new complex “the minute they started building.”

“Housing is extremely difficult here,” says Cruz, who was born and raised in San Francisco. “None of us is getting paid what we’re worth.”

She and her husband had been paying more in rent than they felt comfortable with to live in an apartment building in Daly City that she describes as rundown. On their modest salaries — she is an administrative assistant to a high school principal at JUHSD, and her husband drives a mail truck for the San Francisco Unified School District — they were maxed out.

“We were paying more and more each year for less and less,” Cruz says, explaining that their rent would always go up even as the conditions of the building deteriorated.

So when Cruz learned she and her husband would get to move into a two-bedroom unit in the complex last spring — and pay $1,000 less per month than their previous rent — she was thrilled.

“This was a godsend,” she says.

The building is beautiful, and the amenities match those of luxury buildings, Cruz says. But most importantly, it’s affordable.

“This housing project has really afforded people like myself to continue living and working in this area, and it’s also afforded teachers who have never had a place of their own to have a place and not have to work two and three jobs to support themselves,” she explains. “It’s been a pretty remarkable situation.”

For a relatively small school district with about 25 percent of its entire staff housed in one building, residents are bound to see familiar faces in the elevators and along the hallways. Cruz lives in between a colleague she knew from her old job in the district and a counselor at the high school where she currently works.

She regularly runs into her counselor-neighbor at the fitness center, she says. She sees other colleagues in the shared laundry room.

“I had to get used to, ‘OK, you guys are going to see me in my sloppy clothes,’” Cruz shares. But she actually relishes living in a community with her district coworkers.

“There’s a certain amount of pride in taking care of the place we’re all living and supporting each other,” Cruz says. “I like parking next to people where I know I don’t want to hit their car and they don’t want to hit mine. It’s familiar without being intrusive.”

Problem Solved?

One year into living in district housing, Cruz has noticed that turnover seems to have slowed, at least at her school.

“This year was the first time we haven’t had to replace 10 teachers at the end of the school year,” she says.

District leaders say it’s too soon to make sweeping assessments about the turnover. They don’t expect to have “solid data” until December, says Tina Van Raaphorst, JUHSD’s deputy superintendent of business services. But what she does have is anecdotal evidence, and that looks promising.

JUHSD started the 2022-23 school year — the first full year since opening the apartment building — with all teaching positions filled, “at a time when some other districts in our area and statewide were not able to find enough teachers,” Van Raaphorst shared in an email. She’s heard from at least two teachers who say they stayed in the district because of the employee housing and from others who say they have been able to take on coaching opportunities and other extracurriculars for the district because their commute is shorter or they don’t have to work a second job in the evenings.

Worden, the director of staff housing, shares that the housing benefit has helped with recruitment, too. The district hired a teacher who came up from Los Angeles after hearing about the staff housing. Another teacher from North Carolina who’d always wanted to teach and live in the Bay Area decided to make the cross-country move after learning she could live in the district’s subsidized housing.

“We’re already seeing the positive benefits of it,” Worden says.

So, is that it? Is the problem solved at JUHSD?

In the short term, yes, Worden says.

The one hang-up is that, at present, residents have been told they can live in the district-owned apartment for five years. The idea is to “encourage residents to financially save for their future home,” Worden says, “along with this giving space to future employees wanting the opportunity to live in the educational housing building.”

Cruz is skeptical that anyone in the district — a teacher, or a school support staff member like her — will be able to save enough money in five years to buy a home in the area. The rent is a major improvement over what many residents were paying, but in many places, those prices would still be eye-popping.

That five-year limit is not locked in, though, Worden notes. It has the potential to be extended, depending on demand for the district housing. (There is currently a waitlist for the units.)

So far, the project has been such a success that Worden hopes to see more school districts using their land assets for educator housing. Based on how many have inquired about the project and asked to tour the complex, it seems likely he soon will.

He often tells other district leaders to get creative. Do they have an old athletic field they could build on? Or maybe, as in the case of JUHSD, an empty parking lot?

As for Cruz, she is staying put for as long as she’s allowed.

“The rent is so affordable that I’m afraid to stop working,” she says. “I really don’t think I’m going to have the opportunity to retire anytime soon, so I feel like I’m winging it right now. I’ll just keep working as long as I can, and we’ll keep living here.”

And once her time is up? Well, luckily, her husband’s school district has broken ground on its own affordable housing project for educators. Maybe next, the couple will call that community home.

California removes hurdles to building teacher housing

Published in EdSource
By Diana Lambert October 24, 2022

Gov. Newsom signs bill aimed at allowing teachers to live where they teach

Newly signed legislation loosening zoning requirements will soon make it easier for California school districts to build affordable housing for their teachers and other staff.

It is the latest in a series of bills passed by lawmakers over the last seven years to remove hurdles around building teacher housing. The new legislation, part of a suite of 41 housing bills signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last week, will allow staff housing to be built on any property owned by a school district without requiring the district to request zoning changes from city or county officials.

It will be in effect from Jan. 1, 2024 to Jan. 1, 2033.

“Teachers and staff are leaving because the skyrocketing cost of living and stagnant salaries make it almost impossible to afford living in the communities where they teach,” said Assemblyman Richard Bloom, the author of the legislation. “We are hemorrhaging talented teachers, which ultimately negatively impacts the quality of a public education for our kids. We can do better. AB 2295 gives school districts an essential tool in addressing staffing challenges by utilizing properties they already own."

A 2021 joint study by the Center for Cities and Schools and the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, and CityLab at UCLA found that the state’s school districts own more than 150,000 acres of land and that 75,000 acres could be developed into affordable housing. At 30 units per acre there could be 2.3 million units of housing, according to the report.

There are workforce housing developments in Santa Clara, Los Angeles and Daly City, but more than 40 other districts are considering similar projects, according to the report.

The added flexibility comes with restrictions. The project must have at least 10 housing units and be on a vacant parcel in an area that is already largely developed. It also must be adjacent to a parcel zoned residential.

These housing projects also will be exempt from some federal and state requirements governing the construction and sale of school property, although local building requirements and design standards will still apply as long as they don’t conflict with the housing density and 30-foot height permitted by the bill.

The law is meant to keep city and county governments from putting up roadblocks to new projects by adding restrictions over and above the standard zoning, said Troy Flint, spokesman for the California School Boards Association, which co-sponsored the legislation. The bill was signed by Newsom Wednesday.

“I am thrilled that Gov. Newsom has signed AB 2295 and demonstrated his support for education workforce housing,” said Vernon M. Billy, executive director of CSBA. “Our members across the state have expressed a strong and growing interest in creative efforts to address the teacher shortage.”

High rent and house prices have long made it difficult for teachers, especially those at the bottom of the pay scale, to find affordable homes. Even teachers earning average or the highest salaries faced struggles paying the rent, especially in the high-cost coastal and metro areas, according to a 2019 EdSource analysis of the issue.

To address this problem, the bill requires that a majority of the units on the property be affordable to tenants with moderate incomes and at least 30 percent be affordable to lower-income households. Unrented units can be made available to employees of adjacent school districts and then to public employees living within district boundaries.

An Assembly analysis of the bill says moderate incomes are generally no more than 120 percent of the area median income and lower incomes are less than 80 percent of the area median income.

Assembly Bill 2295 is the latest legislation to make it more affordable for teachers to live in California. The Teacher Housing Act of 2016 paved the way for district-provided teacher housing by allowing school districts to provide affordable housing specifically for district employees and their families. Previous state law required that homes or apartments be open to anyone who meets the low-income requirement if they used state and federal low-income housing funds or tax credits.

Assembly Bill 1157, approved by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2017, exempted school districts from some requirements related to the sale or lease of property if it will be used for employee housing. Districts no longer have had to convene an advisory committee when they want to sell, lease or rent surplus property because of this piece of legislation. The bill also exempts the district from property tax on the complex.

In recent years eight school districts have attempted to pass school bonds or other local propositions to fund housing for school employees. Six passed, according to the Assembly analysis of the bill.

Districts see offering housing as a way to give them a competitive edge when competing for teachers and other staff.

“School districts are eager to address these issues by converting unused or underutilized property to affordable housing for school staff but are slowed or stymied by current regulations,” according to a statement from the California School Boards Association. “Under existing law, development of surplus school property into education workforce housing can often take seven years to complete. By removing administrative barriers, while still allowing for a robust community engagement process, AB 2295 would shorten that timeline in most cases, making it easier for local educational agencies to build housing on their property.”

Interest in district-subsidized teacher housing in California intensifies

Published in EdSource
By John Fensterwald February 23, 2022

Comprehensive report identifies potential sites, provides a how-to

Next month, 122 teachers and other employees in the Jefferson Union High School District in Daly City will learn if they won a drawing that will allow them to move into a new housing project with below-market rents that their district is building. Nicole Ann Polo hopes to be one of them.

A math teacher at her alma mater, Westmoor High, Polo has been living with her parents, which makes her better off, she said, than colleagues who moonlight delivering DoorDash or commute 90 minutes each way from the East Bay. But her grandparents also have moved in, and she needs a place of her own — impossible to find when, even as a fifth-year teacher and a department head, she makes in the upper $50,000s.

The rents that she and the other tenants will pay — an average of $1,462 for a one-bedroom apartment, $1,896 for two bedrooms and $2,413 for three — while not cheap in some locales -- will be about 60% of market rates in the area. So, lottery willing, Polo won’t have to switch to a better-paying district or move to more affordable Poway in San Diego County, where other relatives live.

“I'm really looking forward to staying with a district that means so much to me,” she said.

When the U-shaped three- and four-story 705 Serramonte apartment complex opens in mid-May, with a gym, two outdoor play areas, a community room, and lounges on each floor, Jefferson Union will join an exclusive list. Los Angeles Unified and Santa Clara Unified are the only other K-12 districts in the state with subsidized housing for staff. And it’s been 20 years since Santa Clara pioneered the concept with its 70-unit Casa del Maestro, which, by most metrics — data on teacher retention and waiting lists for a unit — has been a success.

But the pipeline of projects is growing now, particularly in the Bay Area, where many teachers are struggling to pay for housing. Construction has begun on employee housing in the Mountain View Whisman district in Mountain View and Jefferson Elementary district in Daly City. Santa Clara County supervisors have given the green light to start construction later this year on housing for several districts on county property in Palo Alto. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is chipping in a quarter of the $103 million cost of that project.

Five other California districts earmarked employee housing in school bonds that voters passed in the last three years. Forty-six districts are in various states of moving forward with a staff housing project, according to a 150-page report, commissioned by the California School Boards Association, that was released last week. “Education Workforce Housing in California: Developing the 21st Century Campus” compiled information for the first time on every school property in California and rated them based on teachers’ and other school employees’ need for housing assistance and the sites’ suitability for providing it.

The report’s conclusion: Half of the 151,500 acres owned by California school districts are potentially developable; those sites are located on 7,068 properties; 61% are located where entry-level teachers face challenges affording housing. And 1 in 5 properties are particularly suited for housing, after weighing employee income and the sites’ zoning and other assets.

“Districts own a lot of land, and it takes only a small percentage to do something,” said David Garcia, policy director for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California Berkeley, a co-author of the report. “Employee housing isn’t a panacea, but it has potential.”

The report was a collaborative effort of UCLA’s cityLAB, the Terner Center, and the Center for Cities + Schools, also at UC Berkeley. Along with a database on potential housing, the report examines strategies for development and includes a 30-page, step-by-step, how-to handbook.

“We’re trying to provide more information that sparks ideas across the state and gives people a road map to do a project that might not have occurred to them,” said Troy Flint, chief information officer for the school boards association.

Big need for housing assistance

The data cited in the report underscore the need. Nationally, 35% of teachers are considered rent-burdened, defined as paying more than 30% of their income as rent, and the problem is pronounced in California, especially among Black and Latino teachers, according to the report.

A study in 2016 by the real estate firm Redfin found that in the Bay Area, only 1.2% of homes on the market in Alameda County were affordable for the average teacher; in San Francisco, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, it was less than 1%. Rising reprices suggest it’s only gotten worse since then.

According to data in the report, first- or second-year teachers make up 1 out of 8 teachers statewide, with salaries ranging from $37,000 to $84,476. Of those teachers, nearly half earn less than 80% of the area median income — a measure that qualifies them as “low income” and eligible for federal housing assistance. Location matters: $50,000 in the Central Valley might exceed low-income, while $50,000 definitely would not in the Bay Area.

High rents and high-priced homes are compounding staff shortages and high turnover rates in high-cost counties, Flint and others said. Districts like Jefferson Union have become revolving doors as new teachers tire from long commutes and head to wealthier districts, said Tina Van Raaphorst, Jefferson Union’s associate superintendent of business services.

“California’s deepening housing crisis threatens the quality of K-12 education,” the authors of the California School Boards Association report wrote. “Public school employees — especially teachers — struggle to live in the communities where they work, and school districts face growing challenges in recruiting and retaining staff, creating instability that exacerbates opportunity and achievement gaps.”

The California Department of Education projects that enrollment will decline in two-thirds of districts, and some could face financial instability from a loss of state revenue. That decline, which won’t be reversed in the short or medium term, said Flint, also creates an opportunity: converting underutilized properties to school housing can give schools a leg up on recruiting classified staff and teachers.

Jeff Vincent, co-founder and director of the Center for Cities + Schools, a co-author of the report, agreed. “There are schools with maintenance problems that may have been closed or are worn out.” One option is to mothball a school; another is workforce housing, he said.

Building on school district land alone can save as much as 20% of a project’s cost, Vincent said.  But building affordable housing is complicated — a point the report reiterated — and requires thinking differently.

“It hasn’t been the mindset of school boards to think about development for other than classrooms,” Vincent said.

Financing is tricky, and piecing together a package can require a half-dozen sources; there will be regulatory and zoning hurdles at the state and local levels. And selecting a site will require patience and, the report emphasizes, transparency. Boards must make compelling arguments and collaborate from the start with neighbors concerned about traffic and losing open space for dogs and soccer.

A confluence of factors that school districts have to navigate — local zoning, construction costs during a labor shortage, complexities of tax credits and multiple site reviews — “make it incredibly difficult in the best of circumstances to build affordable housing,” said Garcia. While other types of school construction customarily take three to five years to complete, the report advises districts to add two years to the timeline for staff housing projects.

Throughout that time, Van Raaphorst said, “it’s really important to have strong board members who are willing to be hands-on, dedicated and willing to go to bat for the project.”

Removing some of the obstacles

Last week, Assemblymember Richard Bloom, D-Santa Monica, introduced legislation intended to remove some of the big hurdles to developing housing. Adopting some of the recommendations in the CSBA report, Assembly Bill 2295 would eliminate the need for approval of plans by the Division of the State Architect, whose expertise is schools, not housing. And it would establish the right of districts to build housing up to three stories on a school property, assuming projects meet basic criteria. This wouldn’t eliminate local zoning review, but it could thwart not-in-my-backyard opposition. Dana Cuff, director of UCLA’s cityLAB, helped draft the bill.

“Teachers’ salaries are not keeping up with the rising cost of living in California. Coupled with our mounting housing crisis, school districts are hemorrhaging good teachers and quality staff members faster than we can recruit them,” Bloom said in a statement.

Jefferson Union didn’t face zoning hassles or community resistance, enabling it to move from voter funding to completion in four years. The project, near Interstate 280, is on a rundown property that houses the district office in a former high school. The district had designed the site for commercial use or housing years ago. In 2018, voters approved a $33 million bond as a taxpayer subsidy to underwrite about 45% of the $75 million project, covering the rest with loans secured by rents from the apartments. 705 Serramonte may be the first phase of a commercial and residential neighborhood, perhaps including more employee housing, that would generate revenue for the district. At least that’s the vision.

705 Serramonte was financed without federal low-income housing tax credits, the primary method of subsidizing affordable housing nationwide. With the passage of California’s Teacher Housing Act of 2016, authorizing their use by school districts, they’ll be integral to most projects, Garcia said. The tax credits are competitive and carry restrictions: Targeted to employees earning less than 80% of an area’s median income, the limit is why teachers no longer qualify to live in Los Angeles Unified’s employee housing complexes and why Jefferson Union didn’t pursue them.

But the report found the 80% limit would cover many lower-paid teachers in half the districts with developable school properties. Nearly two-thirds of those districts are in urban areas, where median salaries are high. And, Garcia said, the federal tax credits could be packaged with state programs that permit incomes above the 80% threshold.

While Jefferson Union is prioritizing employees under 80% of area median income, it will accept employees earning up to 120%. It is allocating 60% of the units to teachers and 40% to classified staff. 705 Serramonte will serve about a quarter of the district’s 500 staff, Van Raaphorst said.

The district didn’t heavily market 705 Serramonte, but Polo said that among her peers, teachers in their 20s and 30s, 90% are interested in it. With the most English learners in the district, Westmoor High is a special place, she said, where immigrant students from are Jordan, China, Brazil, the Philippines and El Salvador.

She and her colleagues face the same dilemma: “It’s expensive to stay but too good of a community to leave,” she said.

School district to consider workforce housing

Published in Coastside News
By Sarah Wright October 20, 2021

Cabrillo Unified School District is the latest to look into workforce housing as a way to make up funding gaps, targeting district properties in El Granada and Half Moon Bay as potential sites.

At last week’s board meeting, district leaders invited consulting firm Brookwood Group to give an overview of potential property uses and ultimately decided to sign a contract with the consultant.

Under consideration for housing are several sites along the Coastside that the district owns but isn’t currently using as part of its educational mandate. District Superintendent Sean McPhetridge said he’s willing to look at both staff housing and general workforce housing as an alternative funding stream for local schools.

“More districts are looking at it as an innovative approach because they have surplus property and may have declining enrollment,” McPhetridge said.

The first property under consideration is a 10-acre site in El Granada parallel to Bridgeport Drive. While Brookwood President Alan Katz said the lot would be ideal for generating revenue through housing, dense development is unlikely to be approved by the California Coastal Commission because the site is environmentally sensitive. Another property, also in El Granada south of Sevilla Avenue, is zoned for medium density residential housing, and may be a better fit for affordable faculty housing, Katz said.

An adjacent plot in El Granada could house relocated district offices, Katz said, to free up the central Half Moon Bay property for new residential use. Katz and Brookwood Vice President Chris White also explored the possibility of building housing in the open space next to Hatch Elementary School.

Brookwood is the same firm that worked with Pacifica and Jefferson Union High school districts on their workforce housing projects. Jefferson staff housing in Daly City is slated to open in spring 2022, while housing in Pacifica is still in the permitting stages.

McPhetridge said that, in later stages of the process, Cabrillo is likely to follow the other local districts’ models of setting up a nonprofit or separate board to govern district housing to keep housing policy separate from school policy. For district-owned parcels that can’t be developed, McPhetridge said he and the board will consider other best uses that help the district’s finances. He said with both affordable housing bills, SB 9 and SB 10, passed at the state level, it might create a political climate to make district-owned staff and workforce housing a reality.

“It's about thinking about how to turn a liability into an asset,” McPhetridge said.