In recent months, teacher housing programs have begun to receive high-profile attention. And with good reason: As living costs have risen, teacher salaries have not kept pace, thereby decreasing many educators’ ability to live near their workplaces. In an ideal world, districts would just raise their salaries—after all, half of teachers say that salary increases that merely cover increases in the cost of living would motivate them to stay in the classroom—but political and resource constraints may limit this option. Add to the mix anxieties surrounding teacher recruitment and retention, and it’s hardly surprising that communities rural, suburban, and urban, from the east coast to Hawaii, have expanded efforts to improve educators’ access to housing.
Such efforts take a variety of forms. There are programs for which only educators qualify, but others also include first responders or those below a certain income threshold. Some assist with home purchases, including contributions to down payments, title fees, and closing costs. Others make rentals more affordable by providing vouchers or more affordable rents. Some rental properties are district-owned, while others operate through partnerships with private owners. Most teacher housing programs are district-level, but some are state-level or even federal. A handful of others are specific to individual charter school networks.
In sum, a variety of teacher housing efforts are underway, and their number seems to be mushrooming. But are they actually a good idea?
In short: We really don’t know.
The anecdotal evidence is encouraging, but there’s a real dearth of research on such incentives for either attracting or retaining teachers. As for what extant research does tell us, we know that compensation was a major factor for 42 percent of teachers who left the profession (although, paradoxically, it was also a reason for 34 percent to stay). But we also know that few teachers—a mere 11 percent—say that housing support, specifically, would make any difference for them.
What’s more, even if housing assistance would have an impact, many programs are painfully inefficient when it comes to timeframes or population served. In Silicon Valley’s Los Gatos, for example, ninety education professionals completed interest forms to become the first residents of the district’s only available teacher housing complex—which offers an underwhelming four units, thereby serving less than 5 percent of interested parties. Austin is planning to repurpose an underutilized site that the district already owns, which might seem efficient, except for the fact that the entire project will take some seven years to complete. Somehow I doubt that telling teachers they might qualify for workforce housing, two presidential administrations from now, is going to persuade many.
And that’s not the extent of the challenges. Many of the housing programs have such low income cutoffs that few teachers even qualify. Only lower-paid district employees ended up qualifying for a Los Angeles housing initiative that had been intended to serve teachers; while bus drivers and cafeteria workers certainly deserve housing support, the initiative was a failure in terms of its original goal. And the pressure for already-overworked superintendents to serve as “property developers” can’t be helping the exceptionally high turnover rate in that profession, either.
Finally, many teacher housing efforts suffer from serious messaging problems. Quite justifiably, given their credentials, teachers want to be treated more like professionals. But recent reports have celebrated solutions like tiny homes constructed by children and Habitat for Humanity charity projects; hailed parking lots as housing “panaceas”; and highlighted opportunities for teachers to collaborate after hours in their building’s laundry room. Even if many teachers end up pursuing these opportunities, surely no one can believe that such narratives will help them feel more respected.
To be sure, there are ways to address some of these problems. The most promising housing-voucher programs could be scaled to serve more teachers, and they could do so immediately, without waiting for construction. Targeting housing programs to teachers in the most understaffed areas, like instruction for English learners, special education, physical science, and foreign language, could better ensure that limited resources are being put to strategic ends. And the rhetoric around these efforts can surely be revised, such that teacher housing sounds less like charity and more like military housing or the forms of relocation assistance that other professional jobs frequently offer.
Above all, policymakers should ensure that their decision-making isn’t guided by the PR appeal of a flashy initiative and an aesthetic digital rendering of what a building might look like in 2027. First, are there sufficient funds that could instead be spent on raising teachers’ salaries—a less logistically challenging and likely more persuasive policy solution—or are the districts cash poor but property rich? If the answer is truly no, then will the proposed housing solution meet the needs of teachers in that community, and when will it do so? And will it bolster broader efforts to make the teaching profession more appealing? Policymakers must carefully evaluate whether proposed housing initiatives actually reflect the best use of their finite resources.
