School district to consider workforce housing

Coastside News
Sarah Wright
October 20, 2021

Cabrillo Unified School District is the latest to look into workforce housing as a way to make up funding gaps, targeting district properties in El Granada and Half Moon Bay as potential sites.

At last week’s board meeting, district leaders invited consulting firm Brookwood Group to give an overview of potential property uses and ultimately decided to sign a contract with the consultant.

Under consideration for housing are several sites along the Coastside that the district owns but isn’t currently using as part of its educational mandate. District Superintendent Sean McPhetridge said he’s willing to look at both staff housing and general workforce housing as an alternative funding stream for local schools.

“More districts are looking at it as an innovative approach because they have surplus property and may have declining enrollment,” McPhetridge said.

The first property under consideration is a 10-acre site in El Granada parallel to Bridgeport Drive. While Brookwood President Alan Katz said the lot would be ideal for generating revenue through housing, dense development is unlikely to be approved by the California Coastal Commission because the site is environmentally sensitive. Another property, also in El Granada south of Sevilla Avenue, is zoned for medium density residential housing, and may be a better fit for affordable faculty housing, Katz said.

An adjacent plot in El Granada could house relocated district offices, Katz said, to free up the central Half Moon Bay property for new residential use. Katz and Brookwood Vice President Chris White also explored the possibility of building housing in the open space next to Hatch Elementary School.

Brookwood is the same firm that worked with Pacifica and Jefferson Union High school districts on their workforce housing projects. Jefferson staff housing in Daly City is slated to open in spring 2022, while housing in Pacifica is still in the permitting stages.

McPhetridge said that, in later stages of the process, Cabrillo is likely to follow the other local districts’ models of setting up a nonprofit or separate board to govern district housing to keep housing policy separate from school policy. For district-owned parcels that can’t be developed, McPhetridge said he and the board will consider other best uses that help the district’s finances. He said with both affordable housing bills, SB 9 and SB 10, passed at the state level, it might create a political climate to make district-owned staff and workforce housing a reality.

“It's about thinking about how to turn a liability into an asset,” McPhetridge said.