Is There a Solution to Silicon Valley's Teacher Housing Problem?

To lay one important card on the table, I'm married to a teacher in a public school district known far and wide for desperate need among many of its students and low pay for its employees.

That's relevant here only because the reality of relatively meager compensation for teachers -- a key component in California's perennial ranking near the bottom nationally for classroom spending -- is one of those issues that feels like it has become part of the fabric of our society. Something intractable and incurable, like our inability to house thousands of our fellow citizens or rein in the cost of health care or amend Proposition 13.

One of the rich ironies facing teachers in Bay Area school districts is their growing inability to afford homes in the communities in which they teach. That's not a brand-new phenomenon. I've been hearing for years, through my wife, of colleagues unable to pay rent here unless they find a roommate or two or three. Home ownership? In this market? Ha!

The impression that teachers have joined low-wage service workers, students and starving artists among the legions priced out during the current boom is backed up by cold, hard facts. The realty firm Redfin published a report earlier this year that found that 83 percent of the homes for sale in California were beyond the means of a teacher earning the statewide annual average salary of $69,300.

The picture was considerably worse in the Bay Area.

Redfin reported that there wasn't a single home for sale in San Francisco that a teacher making that average salary could afford. In San Mateo County, 1.2 percent of homes -- one in 80 -- were affordable for teachers; in Santa Clara County, the number was 1.3 percent. The more affordable counties for teachers: Solano (22 percent), Marin (12 percent), Alameda (9.7 percent) and Contra Costa (8.6 percent).

Lillian Mongeau, who has reported on education for KQED News and now writes for The Hechinger Report -- published by Columbia University's Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media -- has just taken a closer look at how the teacher housing issue is playing out in Silicon Valley.

In a piece published last week by The Atlantic, she looks at the roots of the problem -- the high-tech industry salaries chasing a limited supply of housing, for instance -- and some suggested remedies. Among the latter, she mentions a San Francisco program that provides down-payment loans to teachers and one district's more direct intervention in the housing market:

Perhaps one of the most straightforward solutions to the lack of affordable housing for teachers in the Valley is the “Casa del Maestro,” or “House of the Teacher” apartment complex in the city of Santa Clara. Over the past 15 years, 70 one- and two-bedroom units have been built on district-owned land and rented only to new Santa Clara public-school teachers at reduced prices ranging from $1,110 to $1,805 a month for a maximum period of seven years.

But Mongeau's conclusion is, well, less than hopeful:

If a Bay Area tech company needs to set up a server farm, they could, say, open it in a less expensive mid-sized city, like Bend, Oregon. But a Bay Area school has no such luxury. Advances in computer-based learning aside, Stolan’s eighth-graders are unlikely to teach themselves algebra while he monitors their work from Oregon via video conference call.

“You can’t really have teachers just living in the Pacific Ocean,” Brennan said. “We need to make sure these workers can afford to be in our communities.”

But unless something changes drastically (or an as-yet-unknown app is invented to solve the problem), Silicon Valley risks losing the very people it’s counting on to educate its future stars.

KQED News morning anchor Joshua Johnson talked to Mongeau about the situation Monday morning: