This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Street Blocks to Alphabet Blocks: The Housing-Education Connection
Shannon Montague remembers how difficult it was to find housing in Baltimore after landing her first teaching job in the city.
It was 2016 and the recent University of Notre Dame graduate was participating in the Teach for America program, which offers short, intensive teacher training in exchange for a two-year commitment to work in a high-needs school system. Over the summer before the school year began, Montague found herself logging long, challenging days of training in Philadelphia—more than 100 miles away from Baltimore—while at the same time trying to find housing she could afford in a city she didn’t know.
“It was so stressful,” says Montague, a Cleveland native. “I had never had to figure all that out on my own before.”
Montague ended up joining a friend in an apartment outside the city, a 30-minute commute from her school and still too expensive on her starting salary. The following year, Montague moved into Baltimore City but she had to crowd in with four roommates to afford the rent.
Her experience is not uncommon for new teachers. In some major metro area school districts, the rent for a one-bedroom apartment costs well over 30 percent of a beginning teacher’s income, according to a report from the National Council on Teacher Quality. Teachers often end up enduring lengthy commutes for more affordable housing, a stressor that has been linked to higher teacher turnover.
In her third year teaching, Montague and a roommate landed an apartment at Miller’s Court, a 40-unit apartment complex that was specifically designed—and discounted—for teachers. There, Montague enjoyed a much shorter commute, less financial stress, and a supportive community of teacher neighbors. The complex even had a teacher resource center where residents could gather, develop lesson plans, and share resources.
Miller’s Court was such a positive living arrangement, Montague says, that it helped crystallize her desire to continue teaching in Baltimore long after her two-year Teach for America contract was fulfilled.
In places where rising housing costs have outpaced typical teacher salaries—a problem not only in cities like Baltimore, but in rural and suburban areas as well—school districts are struggling with significant teacher shortages and high turnover rates. To address these issues, a growing number of private developers, public/private partnerships, and even local school districts are offering, or working toward offering, affordable housing options for educators. Providing lower-cost housing, they hope, will help attract and retain teachers who might otherwise go elsewhere.
School Districts Are Developing Housing
In Texas, veteran English teacher Lisa Crenshaw moved 10 hours across the state last year to take a new job in Fort Stockton. The small West Texas school district was vigorously recruiting teachers with a two-pronged approach: boosting salaries for the most-needed types of teachers and offering deeply discounted housing that the district has either built or purchased. Crenshaw rents a room in a motel the district bought several years ago and renovated for school employees. She appreciates that the former motor inn complex includes a common building with space for socializing with teacher neighbors.
The rent starts at $250 per month and rises to $400 and then $600 in successive years. Stays are capped at five years, but it helps teachers gain a foothold in an area where high oil company salaries have inflated housing prices
“Prices are so high here because of the oil industry,” says Crenshaw, who is waiting for her husband to retire and join her in Fort Stockton in a few years so they can settle there for good. “There’s no way a beginning teacher could make it on their own without the help of this housing at a lower cost.” (Some starting teacher salaries in the area could be as low as $40,000 a year.)
With the area’s housing stock mostly single-family houses, attracting teachers to the small, rural town was challenging, says Gabriel Zamora, superintendent of the Fort Stockton Independent School District. In recent years, the district has gone all-in on developing housing. It first built a set of brick duplexes, then purchased and refurbished the motel, and it is currently considering the purchase of a 34-unit apartment complex.
Today, Zamora says, “We are attracting top talent.” He notes that other Texas districts, from Pecos to Austin and others, also are creating or subsidizing teacher housing. He advises, “If you need the teachers, and you have the means to do it, go for it.”
In other states, too, school districts are eyeing or making use of surplus land or disused buildings that they can sell or develop to provide housing options for their workforce. Examples can be found in Charlotte, North Carolina, rural West Virginia, Tucson, Arizona, and numerous areas of California.
For example, the Santa Clara Unified School District was an early adopter of the idea, constructing its first 40 housing units on a school site in 2001 and adding 30 more in 2008. The mix of studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments—financed with the help of $7 million in bonds—are offered at 80 percent of market rate to teachers in their first decade of district employment.
Monthly rents in these district-owned units range from $2,090 to $2,430, a significant discount when compared to the median rent in the area, which sits at around $3,200. The district’s goal is to have low-enough rents that teachers can “save for homeownership after seven years,” according to the district’s Teacher Housing Foundation. Saving for a downpayment is a major challenge for new teachers in the largest metro areas in the U.S. According to the National Council on Teacher Quality, it can take a new teacher almost 14 years—and in some cases more than 20—to save up a downpayment for a median-priced home in their area.
In Daly City, which borders San Francisco, the Jefferson Elementary School District this fall opened 56 units of newly built affordable housing for school teachers and staff. The project was made possible by the sale of a school site more than 10 years ago and a $30 million bond measure passed by voters. It offers rents at 60 percent of market rate, less than $3,000 per month for a 3-bedroom—a rare find in the Bay Area.
Teachers or staff can live in the units for up to seven years and then must move on, freeing up the affordable units for others. The area’s Jefferson Union High School District had already built 122 units of below-market-rent employee housing in 2022, also supported by voter-approved bond funding, a tool increasingly sought by school districts in the state.
[RELATED ARTICLE: States Are Using This Tool to Keep LIHTC Housing Affordable for Longer]
In Silicon Valley’s Menlo Park—the birthplace of Google and home to Meta’s headquarters—the local Ravenswood School District and private affordable housing developer Alliant Communities are advancing plans to build 88 affordable apartments on a former elementary school site with priority given to district teachers and staff. The district has leased the 2.5-acre plot to Alliant, which is proposing a trio of three-story buildings with a mix of one-, two-, and three-bedroom units. Eligibility will be restricted to those earning 30 to 80 percent of AMI—a range that makes 85 percent of the district’s teachers and staff eligible for the housing, according to a survey the district conducted. That survey also found that 43 percent of respondents said they were considering leaving the district because of lengthy commutes or high housing costs, and more than 70 percent were interested in workforce housing.
Alliant’s senior vice president of affordable housing, Steven Spielberg, says his firm plans to use federal and state low-income housing tax credits in addition to requesting funding from the city and county. Menlo Park’s designation as a “highest resource area” on a state opportunity map means a family-affordable project like the proposed teacher housing has a competitive edge in seeking state tax credits.
“There’s a real need here,” Spielberg says. “We’re really excited about it, what we’re developing and our partnership with the school district. It’s important for teachers and staff to be closer to their schools to keep high employment, and it gives the families of the teachers better opportunities, too.”
A Statewide Effort in California
California public schools had more than 10,000 teacher vacancies in the 2021-2022 school year. Reasons for that are numerous, but among them are the state’s high cost of living and the difficulty of attracting teachers to rural areas.
California’s state superintendent of public instruction, Tony Thurmond, in August announced a major push to make use of the state’s 75,000 acres of available school district land to add teacher housing. He also has pushed for state tax credits to go toward teacher housing, and about $500 million was approved in the 2020 state budget to do so, according to the California Department of Education. The Teacher Housing Act of 2016 allowed public school districts to build rental housing and restrict occupancy to district employees, and in 2022, AB 2295 loosened zoning barriers on district land, paving the way for easier and faster development.
The California School Boards Association is partnering with cityLAB and the Center for Cities + Schools, a research center at the University of California, Berkeley, to offer resources and technical assistance to school districts interested in developing education workforce housing, including a workshop series for school districts that covers financing, community engagement, and development design.
The district thought there would be about 80 staff interested. They ended up building 120 units and thought they could also house people from other districts. But it totally filled up with their own staff, and they have a long waitlist.’
The partnership also produced a major blueprint in 2022 for developing education workforce housing in California. That report calculated the 75,000-acre figure—“the size of five Manhattans”—for district-owned land in the state and estimated that 61 percent of that acreage lies in areas where teachers face housing affordability challenges.
“We are definitely seeing that teachers are leaving districts to find places that have lower housing costs, especially when they have families, or not taking positions because they can’t find housing close enough to the school,” says Sara Hinkley, California program manager for the Center for Cities+Schools. “Or they’re taking on unsustainable housing situations, like overcrowding or paying too much of their income on rent.”
At the time of the blueprint report, Los Angeles and Santa Clara were the only school districts in California with completed housing developments. Today, Hinkley says, the state has 6 completed projects, 4 under construction, and 19 in some stage of planning. Another 82 districts have announced they are pursuing workforce housing creation.
The demand is high, sometimes surprising even districts that had conducted surveys to determine need.
“In one project,” Hinkley says, “the district thought there would be about 80 staff interested. They ended up building 120 units, mainly for cost effectiveness, and thought they could also house people from other districts—but it totally filled up with their own staff, and they have a long waitlist. What we’ve heard from all the projects is, ‘We could have built more.’”
Discounted Rents and Teacher Amenities
There are several examples of private development companies building teacher-focused housing. Newark, New Jersey-based developer RBH Group, for instance, is harnessing public/private partnerships to develop a series of Teachers Village complexes. Starting in Newark with 203 units that opened incrementally from 2013 to 2017, and expanding to Hartford, Chicago, and Atlanta, the company is refining a model that combines teacher-prioritized housing with education-focused organizations and programming.
The Newark site includes three charter schools, a daycare facility, and retail space for local entrepreneurs. The Atlanta Teachers Village, which RBH Group CEO Ron Beit expects will break ground later this year, will include more onsite programming for teachers, from coding boot camps to financial literacy and continuing education courses.
Along the way, the model is evolving, Beit says, to both serve teachers better and make financing easier.
The Atlanta Teachers Village will be “intergenerational,” he says, with a portion of the apartments set aside for independent middle-income seniors. And RBH recently spun off a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arm, RBH Social Impact Inc., which can be issued tax-exempt bonds. That’s giving a boost to the financing prospects for the Atlanta project and will help to expand this teacher housing model across the country, Beit says.
“Not only does that streamline the execution in terms of timeline, but also obviates the need we usually have of multiple agencies pooling resources to be able to get such a project together,” Beit says.
Miller’s Court in Baltimore was developed by Seawall, an impact-focused development firm co-founded by Donald Manekin, a former Teach for America board member with a long-standing interest in supporting education while rehabilitating vacant and underutilized historic properties in Baltimore.The firm’s model is to create apartments in a convenient center-city location with discounted rent for local teachers and with teacher-focused amenities, alongside office space rented to local education-related nonprofits.
Miller’s Court, a transformation of a long-vacant former tin can factory, opened in 2009, and the model was repeated two years later in the nearby 55-unit Union Mill project. Together, the projects have housed 775 Baltimore teachers so far.
While market-rate rent in the two Baltimore complexes ranges from $1,400 to $1,999 per month for a one-bedroom unit, the teacher discount brings it down to $1,100 to $1,699 per month, according to Seawall.
To finance the projects, Seawall tapped federal and state historic preservation tax credits, state and city loan funding, and New Markets Tax Credit equity, made possible by the office component.
Other Models
Developers in at least one case aim to fund teacher housing with 100 percent private philanthropic dollars. The nonprofit RSI Dream Communities is planning to build moderate-density “human-scaled” housing in Southern California for teachers (and other “local heroes” like nurses and firefighters) with $100 million contributed by RSI founder Ron Simon.
Jim Palmer, RSI’s president and CEO, says they can build at a much lower cost without having to jump through the typical “tax credit hoops.”
“One thing that we decided to do on the onset is use no government funds. Government’s only participation is helping us identify land and the zoning that might be necessary and the permits to build,” Palmer says. “Our plan is to work with school districts that have surplus land that would make the land available [at low cost]. Then we, with our own money, would go in and build 200, 400 homes for school district employees, with a focus on teachers. The school district would refer over its candidates for housing based on its own criteria, and that housing would then be made available to teachers, for, let’s say, 30 percent below what the market rate is. That’s sort of the recipe that we’re looking at.”
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RSI Dream Communities is still in the startup phase, Palmer says, currently seeking its first land and district partnerships.
In Los Angeles, two longtime educators are developing a program to combine new affordable housing with a two-year teacher training fellowship targeted to new Black teachers. Peter and Didi Watts have located a 4,000-square-foot plot of land and are working to raise money for The Teacher Village Initiative, for which they’re running a small pilot now.
Not all teacher-focused solutions involve adding new housing. In some places, discounts or other leasing incentives are offered in existing market-rate buildings. In Baltimore, the company Teacher Props functions as a matchmaker of sorts, connecting incoming Baltimore teachers with ready landlords offering reasonable rents in some of the city’s classic rowhouses. Founder Pete DeCandia—a former Teach for America fellow who vividly recalls the stress of apartment-hunting during his own initial training—says Teacher Props fielded inquiries from more than 400 new and veteran teachers this fall, a 20 percent increase over last year, leading to more than 80 leases.
Challenges
While teacher-targeted housing projects have been welcomed in places like Newark, some proposals have faced local resistance.
In Denver, a teacher housing proposal was dropped in 2018, opposed by local residents who said they didn’t want to see the vacant former school building permanently lost for educational use. In other cases, opponents cite the same concerns often raised against other affordable multifamily housing proposals, such as increased traffic or decreased property values.
In Menlo Park, where Alliant is now hoping to build, a group of local residents were so opposed to higher-density development on the site that they introduced a ballot measure to block the project and restrict the city council’s power to upzone land for greater density.
But Measure V (“vee”) was roundly defeated by the city’s voters in 2022. A successful “No on V” campaign highlighted the fact that 30 percent of teachers, unable to live near their jobs in a municipality where Zillow reports the median home price is $2.7 million, were leaving the district each year, and argued that Measure V would block other needed housing development and perpetuate racial segregation.
Financing is another perpetual challenge for affordable housing developers, particularly those aiming for moderate-income “workforce” pricing. A promising effort in San Francisco’s Mission District to renovate a decrepit vacant building into 63 condominiums affordable for teachers is stalled after the housing nonprofit behind the project, Mission Economic Development Agency, lost a key source of project funding when its application for New Market Tax Credits was denied. “That means the project is now delayed indefinitely,” according to Mission Local.
Beyond these process obstacles, there are some counter-arguments to the very idea of creating teacher-targeted housing. Even among those backing teacher interests, not everyone believes that providing housing is the right solution. Some say raising pay is a better idea; others question whether schools should take on the roles of developer or landlord. A recent EdWeek Research Center national survey found that among factors that would entice teachers to stay in the teaching profession long-term, the top answer was “salary increase that exceeds increases in the cost of living,” with 60 percent of respondents selecting it, while “free or subsidized housing for educators” was far down the list, with just 11 percent selecting it.
Stable Housing, Stable Teachers
In Baltimore, Shannon Montague recently moved out of Miller’s Court into her own apartment when her roommate moved away. At that point, she considered buying a home, she says. While she’s not quite ready in the current economy, homeownership is now “on her radar” because she was able to save money during her years of discounted rent. She plans to stay in Baltimore.
“There was a point where I thought I would return to Cleveland, but I felt so comfortable at Miller’s Court. There were always people around me focused on making sure teachers could show up as their best selves. That made me realize it was possible without going back home. Finding a community that lasted beyond the Teach for America cohort really helped make that decision easier.”
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