US teachers grapple with a growing housing crisis: ‘We can’t afford rent’

In her first year as a student teacher, Gina Gray also delivered groceries for Instacart. She was driven to give back to the city that raised her, but also needed help with the bills and rent.

Now Gray, a Black English teacher at Middle College high school in Los Angeles, takes on additional work in the district such as teaching summer and Saturday schooling and commutes one hour each day from her rental in Norwalk-La Mirada, a district near Los Angeles.

"A new teacher with a starting salary in [Los Angeles unified school district] can't afford rent," Gray says. "That's just the facts of it. When you come in, to know that you can't afford to live on your own, that's a huge reason why you would choose another career. We're not even talking about home ownership. We're just talking about comfortable rental accommodation."

In California and across the country, teachers are navigating a difficult terrain: making enough money to afford living in the districts where they serve. Research by the Economic Policy Institute's Sylvia Allegretto found that public school teachers nationally make nearly 24% less in weekly earnings than similarly credentialed college graduates in other fields. When benefits such as healthcare were taken into account, the total compensation penalty was 14%, the widest gap since 1979.

The so-called "wage penalty" makes it increasingly difficult for teachers to live in the same communities as their students, forcing them to commute extensive distances to and from school, renting rooms from parents, taking on second jobs and living in school district-operated housing.

"Educators are educating astronauts, physicists, doctors, lawyers, construction workers, plumbers, electricians," says Cecily Myart-Cruz, the president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). "However, educators who have two and three and four degrees are not making enough or more than all of the professions that I brought forward."

In December, UTLA proposed a 20% raise on salaries over the next two years, among other demands like smaller class sizes. In Los Angeles, a teacher in their first year makes nearly $49,000 whereas the average apartment rental ranges between $2,247 and $3,826, meaning that they would pay at least half their salary in rent each year.

Ongoing negotiations between teachers unions and school districts in recent years in Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere have increasingly centered around compelling districts to address housing affordability challenges their employees face beyond raising salaries and bolstering benefits.

In California, teachers on a weekly basis make nearly 18% less than comparable college graduates, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Gray says that disparity puts an "additional tax" on teachers of color who come into the profession saddled with more debt. She blames the lack of diversity among teachers on meager wages and benefits that are worsened by the housing affordability and childcare challenges.

Her daughter, who is in the second-grade, goes to school there, making her the first kid dropped off and last to be picked up thanks to Gray's extensive commute. For Gray, it's a "sobering" reality: friends have moved to other districts where the pay is higher and she knew of teachers, particularly early-career teachers, who left the profession altogether because of the compensation disparity.

The pandemic further illuminated the disparities within the education system for students and teachers, forcing districts to reckon with what investments in salaries and beyond need to be made. And as a national teacher shortage persists, the shortage of Black and Latino teachers, particularly in diverse, impoverished school districts like Los Angeles, creates a gap between who students from marginalized backgrounds can relate to.

"The pandemic shined a light on the underfunding of the education system overall. It highlighted the impacts on our families and our communities. And now, as we move beyond that, we're seeing investment has to be made in all those services," Gray says. "Housing impacts our students, our families, and our communities and our teachers. It's a great thing when teachers live in the communities that they serve. But we don't see a lot of that."

Districts have resorted to creative solutions to ease the housing burden on teachers. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill last October that would make it easier for districts to build housing specifically for teachers and school employees on district-owned properties beginning January 2024.

In Daly City, in expensive San Mateo county, where the average rent ranges from $2,100 to nearly $3,300 per month, the Jefferson Union high school district opened a 122-unit apartment building for teachers and district employees to live in, one of a handful of teacher housing developments in California. A district presentation shared with the Guardian shows that teachers in the school district start at $53,000 and top out at nearly $94,000. By comparison, teachers in nearby San Mateo Union high school district start at nearly $76,000 and can make as much as $139,000. A report from UCLA's CityLab and the Center for Cities and Schools and the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley noted that more than 40 districts were considering similar projects.

Austin Worden, the district's director of communication and staff housing, said the educational housing project had helped with recruiting teachers in the district that typically experiences a 25% yearly turnover in teachers, adding that other districts have reached out to inquire about their model. When asked why the district did not raise teacher salaries instead of building housing, Worden noted that the bond funds used to build the housing facility were geared specifically toward construction and couldn't be used for salary increases.

When Corazon Gatbonton, a math teacher at Jefferson Union high school, moved from the Philippines in October 2019, she shared a one-bedroom apartment with two other teachers. She wasn't used to living with other people aside from her relatives. While she split $2,400 a month for a one bedroom with two other people, she sent money to her family in the Philippines.

Last May, she moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the district-owned housing complex, where she was able to bring her three children from abroad to live with her. Gatbonton has found the communal environment at the housing complex helpful with meeting colleagues from different experiences within the same school district.

Gray sees the value in district-operated housing as a "great place to start" especially for attracting and retaining newer teachers who struggle with low pay. Still, she and other teachers argue that the short-term solutions to housing assistance only go so far.

Officials at Milpitas unified school district, more than 70 miles south-east of San Francisco, called on parents to offer rooms to teachers and school employees to rent. Scott Forstner, a communications specialist for Milpitas unified, noted that the district had about 80 listings ranging from rooms to single family homes. The Milpitas Teachers Association president, Diana Orlando, said in a statement that the district needed to better compensate teachers "for their hard work with salaries that allow them to reasonably live in the communities they serve".

"While we truly appreciate the dozens of parents who have offered rooms for educators to rent as a result of the district's recent request, sympathy and short-term fixes will not solve these challenges," Orlando added. "We need long-term, sustainable solutions that recognize educators for the valued professionals that they are."

Gatbonton says that she and her family can only stay at the Jefferson Union high school apartment complex for five years, raising the difficult prospect of figuring out how to pay for housing to accommodate her children as they grow up. It forces her to think about what it would mean to teach in another district. She stays because of her relationship with the district and because of her housing stability.

"There's a big impact in our lives," Gatbonton says. "We know that we have secure housing. We can live comfortably. This gave us a chance to live together."

As a student-teacher years ago, Halle Youngblood lived with her mother in Antioch, California. She rode the train nearly an hour to get to the elementary school she worked at in Oakland's Chinatown. She made about $30,000 in her first year, but the hour-long commute on the Bay Area Rapid Transit train to Oakland was taxing.

During the pandemic, as she studied for her teaching credentials, a department director told Youngblood about Teachers Rooted in Oakland (Trio), a city-operated program aimed at recruiting and retaining teachers of color in Oakland by providing mentorship and housing assistance stipends to new teachers.

"I don't think I would have become a teacher if it wasn't for this program, honestly," Youngblood says. If she had gone another direction like most of her peers, Youngblood would have gone unpaid as a student-teacher as she took classes for her teaching credentials then would have started at a subpar salary at a predominantly Black and Latino school district nestled in one of the most expensive regions in the country. Youngblood wanted to return to her home town and the program gave her the chance.

Youngblood, who works as a third- and fifth-grade inclusion teacher at Emerson elementary in Oakland, agrees that, at its core, higher salaries are needed to retain teachers in the districts they serve. She thought of a colleague of hers who commutes more than 70 miles from Stockton to Oakland every day.

Now, she finds herself in a similar situation: thanks to the housing assistance, she saved enough money over the years from her reduced rent to purchase a condo in nearby Pleasant Hill, 17 miles away from school. It's not nearly as far as the extensive rides on public transit she used to take from her mother's house in Antioch in her early career. But Youngblood, like many of her peers, will return to commuting to the district she serves, albeit this time as a condo owner.

"Commuting, it sucks, but I'm looking at the brighter side," Youngblood says. "I wish I could afford Oakland, but it's just too expensive."