This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Street Blocks to Alphabet Blocks: The Housing-Education Connection
In 2021, the Yampa Valley Housing Authority got a gift—one any nonprofit affordable housing provider would dream about: 536 acres of vacant land and a directive to fill it with as much affordable housing as would fit. Called Brown Ranch, the land sits outside the city limits of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, population 13,000.
Once a sleepy ski town nestled in the Rocky Mountains where Olympians went to train, Steamboat’s home prices have skyrocketed in recent years. So much so, in fact, that earlier this year when the city posted a job offering $167,000 to the new head of its human resources department, there weren’t any takers. None of the qualified candidates, even at that salary, could find an affordable place to live. As of October 2024, the median listing price for a Steamboat Springs home was $1.7 million—it was $531,200 just five years ago—and median rent currently sits at $4,000 per month.
Despite the gaping lack of housing and the dream donation, Steamboat voters in early 2024 rejected a referendum that would have allowed the Yampa Valley Housing Authority to begin construction. Among the gripes heard from residents: fears the new housing would overcrowd local schools.
“Are all these Brown Ranch children meant to attend the new Sleeping Giant School?” Leslie Alpert asked in a Steamboat Pilot letter to the editor. “That school will probably lose its luster with overcrowded classrooms, and probably a lower educated [sic] student base.”
That’s a common complaint from locals in areas where affordable housing is proposed. One recent study found that a high-quality school district is the second most important factor (behind affordability) for parents choosing a home. This was particularly true for suburban area resident respondents, and tracks with national data showing that families that are able to select homes based on their school district affiliation, do so. The study also found that parents with kids in school were more likely to oppose abolishing single-family zoning in their area, citing concerns of lowering property values, changing neighborhood character, increased traffic, and overcrowding in schools.
Residents in Keystone, Florida, for example, recently turned out to protest a proposed 330-unit affordable housing development. “The overcrowding in the schools is crazy and it just compounds the problem even with more cars coming to schools and severe lack of teachers right now,” Karen Potter—a parent and teacher who opposes the project—told reporters.
The data show that we should be on our knees praying for a hailstorm of children to fall from the sky.’
Adam Bosch, executive director of Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress
Similarly, in a town outside Portland, Maine, voters in March 2024 turned out en masse to reject a 107-unit development. One “no” voter, Caitlin Day, told the local paper she was concerned about school overcrowding—then offered another, perhaps more honest, explanation. “We felt there was a lot of uncertainty with who would be living there and thought the income level was a bit low for the people we want to attract to town,” she said.
Adam Bosch, executive director of Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, a nonprofit organization that provides objective research, planning, and educational training in the Hudson Valley region of New York state, says he hears many reasons for opposition from people “who show up to meetings to fight housing projects.”
“And one of the biggest is ‘We can’t afford to have more kids in the schools,’” Bosch says. But, he adds, those people are wrong. “The data show that the opposite of that is true. The data show that we should be on our knees praying for a hailstorm of children to fall from the sky.”
A “Continuous Decline” in Enrollment
School administrators and others, like Bosch, who gather and analyze enrollment data, say the school overcrowding argument is a red herring. The Hudson Valley, for example, has 120 school districts. According to Bosch, 97 of those are losing students to disenrollment each year.
“Around 2006 was when most school districts in our region saw their peak of enrollment. Since then, our public-school districts have lost nearly 48,000 students,” he says, adding that the region’s private schools have added 7,000 students during the same time frame. “So on a net basis, we’re still down a total of about 40,000 kids. We have 97 of our 120 school districts actively shrinking.”
And those that are shrinking are often losing a considerable chunk of their student body.
“In five of our nine counties, every single school district since the Great Recession has shrunk by more than 10 percent,” Bosch says. “And half the districts in those five counties have shrunk by more than 25 percent in their enrollment.”
This is also happening in areas with less active opposition to creating new affordable housing. In California’s Coachella Valley, for example, a nonprofit collaboration of local organizations called Lift to Rise launched an ambitious plan in 2018 to site and develop 10,000 units of affordable housing in the valley over the next 10 years. Prior to this effort, the Coachella Valley was getting a few dozen new affordable units each year. Halfway through the project, they’re on track to meet their goal.
Yet when Shelterforce contacted the three school districts in the area, the two that granted interviews said their schools haven’t seen an influx of students since the new units started coming online. In fact, schools there are still shrinking.
“Since 2018, we’ve lost over 2,000 students, and many other districts are facing the same thing—anywhere from a 1 percent drop to up to a 5 or 6 percent drop in students each year,” says Jeff Simmons, assistant superintendent of business services at Palm Springs Unified School District (PSUSD).
Neighboring Desert Sands Unified School District (DSUSD), also part of the Coachella Valley, is also experiencing a “continuous decline” in enrollment, according to Jordan Aquino, who serves as assistant superintendent of business services there.
“In 2017 and ’18 we had about 26,500 kids, and now we’re at 23,500. We’ve been declining on average about 1.7 or 1.8 percent annually,” he says. “Our schools are at around 75 percent of capacity.”
Where Have All the Children Gone?
So, where are all the students? There are couple of things going on.
“Schools lost an enormous number of children during the pandemic to homeschooling and private schools,” says Megan Gallagher, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center and Center on Education Data and Policy. According to Brookings Institution findings, public schools experienced significant enrollment declines during the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years. Between the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years, about 12 percent of public elementary schools and 9 percent of middle schools experienced a 20 percent enrollment decline or more, whereas pre-pandemic (between 2015-16 and 2018-19), only about 5 percent of elementary and middle schools did. These enrollment declines are widespread but vary significantly across different types of schools, locations, and socioeconomic groups. Urban and high-poverty districts saw larger declines in enrollment.
And the kids haven’t all come back. Statewide in Colorado, for example, school enrollment had been increasing every year starting in the 1980s. But in the fall of 2020, enrollment tanked by about 30,000 students compared to the previous year. It bumped back up a bit when in-person classes began again in 2021 but has been dropping ever since.
Aquino attributes the high rate of student attrition in the Coachella Valley to “a combination of things,” including outmigration from Southern California due to the high cost of living and lack of well-paying jobs. But he adds that because DSUSD doesn’t get information about where students end up after they disenroll from Desert Sands schools, it can be difficult to trace exactly what’s causing individual people to leave.
But according to years’ worth of data, American K-12 schools are all facing a looming “enrollment cliff,” that has been coming since well before the pandemic. The National Center for Education Statistics projects enrollment in U.S. elementary and secondary schools will drop by 8 percent between 2019 and 2030. The causes are complex, but stem primarily from falling birth rates and broad demographic shifts. Birthrates dropped notably after the 2008 recession and never picked back up—translating to a projected nationwide decrease in K-12 school enrollment by more than 4 million students between 2019 and 2030.
This significant social change is already affecting all types of K-12 schools, according to data—public, private, charter, and magnet. The “birth rate has declined,” says Aquino. “The newer, younger population are having less kids, so that’s having an impact on our facilities.” Fewer students mean fewer full classrooms, fewer jobs for teachers, and in some locations, fewer schools.
Palm Springs USD’s Simmons also points to this long-term trend. “In 1971, 1 in 3 Californians were under the age of 18, and by 2030 it will be 1 in 5, so there are just less kids,” he says. “Perhaps lower-income housing is a bit different, but overall, the generation rate is a little less than 0.2.” In person-sized terms, that means the schools get “maybe one kid per five [new] houses.”
Bosch’s findings also show that households are having fewer children than are needed to sustain a the “replacement birth rate,” i.e., two children to replace two parents. “The only exception to this is during the pandemic,” Bosch says. “During the pandemic people were doing more than working from home; they were making babies from home. And it’s the first time in 30 years that we’ve actually seen births go up.”
Fewer Students, Less Funding
Most public-school districts receive funding based on the number of students enrolled, so “they are very eager to see their numbers come back up, most of them,” the Urban Institute’s Gallagher says. She also says districts are starting to take more notice of their declining enrollment numbers since pandemic-era relief funding shut off in September 2024. “They are in a different place financially than they have been for the last five years, and one way they can get more dollars into their school is by having more students,” she says.
Schools are losing students at such a rate that it’s affecting the amount of federal money districts get, which hurts the students who are there. In some cases it’s causing schools to close altogether. In Paradise Valley, Arizona, for example, the school board elected to close three schools in 2024 due to declining enrollment rates. The Poudre School District in Fort Collins, Colorado, in 2024 narrowly avoided closing and consolidating several schools, but is still facing a potential 10 percent drop in enrollment during the 2025-26 school year, which would result in a loss of about $40 million in state funding from the district’s $400 million budget.
This is happening across the U.S., data shows. Large cities like San Diego, Chicago, and Los Angeles have all experienced 12 to 15 percent drops since around 2015–16. But suburban and rural areas are feeling it as well. Alpine, Utah, voted to close down two elementary schools by the end of the 2024–25 school year. Two schools in the Edgewood Independent School District near San Antonio, Texas, closed at the end of the 2023-24 year; Edgewood was one of four San Antonio–area districts to shut down schools that year.
Even if schools don’t close, “fewer seats in attendance on top of fewer kids enrolled can greatly decrease the support and funds of districts,” Morgan Polikoff, associate professor in education at the University of Southern California, told nonprofit news outlet The74. “Having less funding can affect the overall structure of districts since it covers operating buildings, hiring teachers, labor costs, and programs.”
Unsurprisingly, students of color are feeling these effects more acutely than white students. A 2023 report published by researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education found after analyzing federal data from 2010 to 2018 that majority-Black schools were about three times as likely to close as schools with smaller enrollments of Black students, even when accounting for common reasons behind closures.
This matters in the Coachella Valley, which is largely rural, and where residents have widely varied socioeconomic situations. A large portion of students come from migrant labor camps. Their families get by on incomes at or below the federal poverty line. More than 50 percent of DSUSD students receive free or reduced-price lunches, and 26 percent are limited English speakers. California schools, which saw $37 billion in federal COVID-era relief expire at the end of September, are bracing for an era of austerity, with low-income districts facing the biggest shortfalls.
“So if I have somebody who calls me to complain and say that a school can’t handle this new development, my typical response is, ‘We’ve been in decline and we will take as many students as we can get,’” DSUSD’s Aquino says. “Because our whole school system is funded based on the amount of students we have.”
Bosch says that the shift to private education, residual effects from pandemic disenrollment, and declining birth rates means we can’t continue to fight against developing more housing—especially affordable housing—by arguing that we can’t afford to have more children in schools. First, he notes, because it’s inaccurate, and second, because losing kids from the schools “portends a shrinking customer base, a shrinking workforce, a shrinking vibrancy quotient. . . . So, we can do it politely, but we have to be very comfortable with disabusing people of this notion that we can’t afford to have kids in the schools.”
Besides, he adds, having vibrant neighborhoods with children and families is what makes communities inviting places to live. “Is the thing we’re going to use to fight back against [building] homes for people—that we don’t want kids around?” Bosch asks. “Because that’s ridiculous.”
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2 thoughts on “Fact Check: New Housing Doesn’t Lead to Overcrowded Schools”
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“figures lie and liars figure” your broad brush approach to both upzoning and the consequent diseconomies including but not limited to school capacity IS THE DEFINITION OF A RED HERRING. Students do not go to ALL schools in a district of school board. They do go to one school. Large scale upzoning totally ignores the impact on particular schools and neighbourhoods. Ignoring those impacts is a tool to destroy neighbourhoods. Upzoning destroys affordablilty always has and always will – to support upzoning on the basis of enhancing affordability is divorced from reality.
In New Jersey, Public school costs are primarily funded through municipal Property taxes. Princeton’s current School budget is almost $120 million. New Jersey State Aid Funding will cover less than $6 million of the Princeton budget. Federal Aid will provide even less to offset the school budget. For profit Developers are creating low and moderate cost rental housing n\in Princeton through 30 year deals where they have PILOTS, (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) that will not help ofsett the Public School Budget. The quote cited above (“The data show that we should be on our knees praying for a hailstorm of children to fall from the sky.’”) byAdam Bosch, executive director of Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, is a gross distortion. Counting on a decline in school population for the next 30 years is a risky wish.