The Rent is Too Damn High: Addressing Staffing Shortages through Affordable Employee Housing

Despite our best efforts to address staffing shortages through our collective organizing last school year and our historic new contract, this school year we continue to feel the impact of numerous vacancies in our schools, especially in positions that serve the highest need populations like students with disabilities, 4 year olds in TK and multilingual learners. This means that we must start exploring solutions to other barriers to becoming an educator in our district like the cost of local housing that has grown astronomically since the beginning of the pandemic.

In 2022, the annual income required to afford a median-price home in San Diego was $212,577. Even with the 15.5% increase in salary we are seeing on this year’s paychecks over last year’s paychecks, the average first year educator in SDUSD makes $62,185. If a couple were both working as early career educators in SDUSD, they would be nowhere near making enough income to be able to buy a home in our region. And according to a recent report by the National Center on Teacher Quality, it would take 25 years to be able to save up enough of our paychecks to afford a 20% down payment on the average San Diego home.

So if SDUSD educators are no longer able to pursue the American Dream of long-term financial security with homeownership, why don’t we just rent? This option is now also severely restricted as San Diego is the most competitive rental market in Southern California and the average monthly rent for a one bedroom home in San Diego is $2,532 a month. San Diego Unified is ranked as the third least affordable school district in the country for new teachers looking to rent one bedroom homes. It would require at least a $101,288 yearly income to be able to afford the rent on the average 1 bedroom San Diego home and remain financially stable by not spending more than the recommended 30% of our income on housing.

As educators, we are responsible for preparing the next generation of students for success but more and more of us cannot afford to live anywhere near the communities we serve. Living so far from our school communities makes it harder to understand the complex dynamics of student environments and be able to connect with them. Every year, growing numbers of educators are moving to places like Temecula and Murrieta and commuting more than an hour one way to schools because the rent is too damn high! Spending this much time in traffic not only contributes to global warming, it also diminishes our ability to focus on meeting student needs with the time and stress associated with our commute.

So what is the solution? While no measure is sufficient on its own to tackle a complex problem like the unsustainable cost of housing, one policy tool at our disposal enabled by recent state legislation is the construction of affordable education workforce housing on surplus district land. The SDEA-endorsed Measure U school bond measure passed in November 2022 and allocates more than $200 million to construct affordable SDUSD employee housing. This will start with units at the current Ed Center on Normal St. once the new district headquarters is built in Kearny Mesa in late 2026. We will need to bargain the parameters for district employee housing including the income threshold for educators living in the units and starting these negotiations is a top SDEA priority.

Imagine a future when new educators can afford to live and work in San Diego Unified, save up money for down payments on homes and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by living closer to our schools and public transportation. Through the efforts of our union to pass Measure U, we are now much closer to making this dream a reality and being the first district in the county to build education workforce housing.