Returning to the old frontier practice of building a house for the town school teacher, San Francisco plans to construct federally subsidized housing for its teachers.
The project is believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, and it illustrates a huge headache that local officials here and in nearby Silicon Valley confront because of prosperity: Life has gotten too expensive for a growing pool of professionals vital to the region’s long-term health.
With the median price of Bay Area housing approaching $500,000, teachers simply can’t afford to live in — or even near — the communities where they work.
Their salaries start at $31,000, qualifying them for public-housing assistance here.
“High-tech has done some wonderful things, but if you aren’t making the big bucks, you’re in trouble,” says Paul Perotti, superintendent of Santa Clara County schools in the epicenter of Silicon Valley.
Under the housing proposal, the San Francisco Unified School District will join with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to build a $15 million, 43-unit rental apartment house on surplus land adjacent to a new elementary school in the Sunset District on the west side. When it’s done, teachers will pay $700 a month for one-bedroom apartments, compared with a market rate of $1,900.
Of course, it isn’t just teachers who are struggling to find affordable housing around here. Firefighters, police officers and registered nurses have barely kept up with inflation since the economic expansion began in 1991, statistics show.
In Atherton, Calif., home to some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest tech tycoons, members of the police force live hours away.
“If a major disaster happened at night or on the weekend, we would not have any reinforcement for days because our average cop has a 30-mile commute,” says town manager Nan Chapman.
And Atherton isn’t unique. Communities between San Francisco and San Jose have begun home-loan programs and other forms of relief targeted at emergency personnel.
But nowhere has the issue raised more worries than in schools. In San Jose, Mayor Ron Gonzales is already exploring various affordable housing options, including housing for municipal workers — half of them teachers. He is also encouraging landlords to give teachers breaks on security deposits and launched a $2 million first-time loan program for city teachers.
“One of the main reasons teachers leave is they are ready to buy their first home and they can’t do it here,” says Betsy Doss, the mayor’s education policy adviser.
Perotti and the Santa Clara district have also talked with HUD about subsidized housing for other teachers who work in the 16,000-student district. Their plan calls for 40 one- and two-bedroom apartments to be built near an old school at a cost of $5 million.
“What this says is, `We value teachers and believe they bring value and stability to neighborhoods,”‘ says Arthur Agnos, the former San Francisco mayor who is now the regional director for HUD. The program, he says, basically extends HUD’s long-established Federal Housing Authority program to a new customer base: school districts.
With statistics showing that teacher pay nationally has risen only an inflation-adjusted 2.6 percent since 1991, the housing problem is not confined to the Bay Area.
In Bellevue, Wash., home to another set of high-tech moguls, state legislators have proposed housing allowances for teachers modeled after the military’s, which are also pegged to regional housing markets.
In New Mexico, the Santa Fe school district has purchased rental housing at below market rates for school personnel and has asked the legislature for funds to build low-cost teacher housing.
Similar proposals are on the books in Alaska and Texas, where many rural districts use housing — dubbed “teacherages” — to lure educators to remote areas.
In San Francisco, Douglass Bates, 29, shares an apartment with a friend and drives 30 miles to Burlingame, Calif., to teach art in a public junior high school.
In exchange for rent, he does grocery shopping, errands, cooking and laundry for his Pacific Heights landlords.
“Otherwise we couldn’t manage,” he says. “Subsidized housing sounds good to me.”
But not everyone thinks such special treatment is a good idea. Veteran teachers in the Oak Grove school district near San Jose opposed the concept because it wasn’t expansive enough, says deputy superintendent Hardy Childers: “We were excited about the concept, but it’s been put on the back burner.”
Floyd Gonella, superintendent of the San Mateo, Calif., county school district, is concerned that school districts aren’t prepared to be developers.
“There are ingredients we as educators do not fully understand,” he says.
