‘Lesson Planning in the Laundry Room': What Housing for Teachers Looks Like

Education Week
Madeline Will
December 4, 2023

To respond to both soaring housing costs and staffing shortages, more school districts across the country are getting into the property management business.

District leaders say that renting housing units to educators at below-market rates has become an effective recruitment and retention strategy. While overseeing housing complexes can be complicated, it can also be cost-effective: School districts can tap outside sources of funds to build the units, instead of dipping into their own coffers. Some districts even already own the land.

Six percent of district leaders and principals said they provide teacher housing or a housing supplement, according to a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey conducted this fall. Two percent said they’ve introduced or improved those benefits in the past two years, in response to staffing challenges.

The exact details vary from place to place. Education Week spoke to officials from four districts with workforce housing projects. Here’s how districts devised solutions in their communities.

In Miami, teachers could live and work in the same building

Florida’s Miami-Dade county and its school system are including workforce housing in a multi-million-dollar expansion of Southside Preparatory Academy, a pre-K-8 magnet school that needed additional seats for its middle school grades.

The seven-story building in the downtown Brickell neighborhood of the city will add capacity for 630 new students and include 10 housing units for educators in the district. The teachers who live in the building can—but do not have to—work at Southside.

Raul Perez, the chief facilities, design, and construction officer for the school district, said he saw some comments on social media from teachers who were concerned about the implications of living on the same site as a school. For example: “If I call out sick, they can come to my apartment to check on me.”

“The way that we envision it is not that at all,” Perez said.

The building is designed so that there is no overlap between the residential and the educational sides. If a teacher wanted to go from the school to their home, they’d have to leave the building and walk around the corner to a separate restricted-access entrance for residents only.

The district hopes to have the housing units available by the start of next school year. The county will determine the exact rental prices based on tenants’ income, but it’ll be significantly less than Miami’s typical market, Perez said.

“This is a way of having new teachers come on board and having an opportunity to start off with reasonable rental [prices]—and move on from there as their careers start to grow,” he said.

The district wants to replicate this project elsewhere, Perez said. Some schools are being underutilized due to recent enrollment declines, so renovating the school building and adding a residential component would be a “win-win,” he said.

In San Francisco, workforce housing has led to more teacher collaboration

The Jefferson Union high school district, located just south of San Francisco, opened an educator housing development a year and a half ago. District staff can live in one of the 122 units—which range in size from one to three bedrooms—for below market-rate rent.

The district has just started collecting data on the effects of the program, but Austin Worden, the district’s director of communication and staff housing, said early signs are promising. The district started this school year fully staffed with certified teachers.

It aims to keep the housing development approximately 60 percent certified staff and 40 percent classified staff, he said.

“A lot of teachers who live in the building, they love it,” Worden said. “They’re still able to maintain a sense of privacy ... [but] they’ve really embraced the sense of community living there.”

The building is designed with several community spaces, and Worden said the district staff and their families will often come together for karaoke nights or game-watching parties. Some of the teachers who live there will use the common areas for collaboration—he’s even noticed “lesson planning in the laundry room.”

The district is now exploring building another apartment complex on the same site that would generate money through market-rate rents.

A 100 percent goal for workforce housing in Aspen, Colo.

The Aspen school district is in a Colorado ski town, where property values are “through the roof,” said Superintendent Dave Baugh.

“Nobody can afford to buy a house,” Baugh said, adding that affordable housing is 60 to 70 miles away from the district’s schools. “As a superintendent, I can’t afford to live here.”

Baugh lives in district-owned housing—along with about 37 percent of the system’s 271 full-time employees. The district’s 15-year goal is to have the capacity for all its employees to live in workforce housing.