Years ago, a friend of mine began her teaching career in a small town out West, located a stone's throw from the Canadian border and not near much of anything else. The job came with a rent-free house to live in, a necessary feature of a job in a place where there was little real estate to come by.
Nowadays, there are versions of that problem cropping up all over the country, particularly in places where the gap between housing costs and teacher salaries are so great that teachers, particularly new ones, must either commute huge distances or just pass the district by.
It's a serious problem for districts, who can have real trouble recruiting teachers. And even if they do hire teachers who end up making long commutes, they lose the benefits of having those teachers as active members of the community in which they teach. As for teachers, housing troubles just add one more item to the list of pinches they feel from low pay.
One national study found that 35% of teachers are "rent burdened." In other words, if you remember the old rule that 30% of your income should go to housing costs, 35% of teachers are above that line. And that's just looking at rent.
There are various patche4s out there, like grant programs for new teachers who are first time home buyers. Homes for Heroes is another such program that says it's out to give back to teachers and other community workers.
Many districts take on the job of building and renting housing for district employees. California has several such programs that allow teachers to rent new homes at below-market costs. A study looked at the various locations in the state where such a program could be or is being operated (every county in the state has some LEA-owned property that could be so developed). Several districts in North Carolina offer subsidized housing for teachers. Currently the state of Hawaii, another location with many districts in which teachers can't afford to live, is working on developing state-owned below-market-priced housing for teachers. Heck, even Florida just set aside $100 million to help teachers, law enforcement officers, nurses, and firefighters buy homes.
The benefits of having teachers live in the community where they teach are huge, as are the benefits of having teachers who don't spend their days worrying about how to keep a roof over their heads, or wondering if they'll ever be able to settle down and start a family. When you start out as a teacher, you don't expect to be rich, but you also don't expect to be homeless or to be spending many hours of your day driving back and forth to work. The housing crunch gives an unexpected hiring advantage to districts like those in my area, where a teacher's salary can buy you an affordable but nice home.
The most obvious solution is to pay teachers more, though in out of control markets like Silicon Valley, I'm not sure there's enough "more" to ever solve the problem. Subsidizing housing for teachers is a cheaper solution for districts and states, though there can be a lot of devils in those details, with the least desirable option being a creepy company town. On the other hand, having a brace of fellow beginning teachers living nearby to commiserate and brainstorm would be a nice benefit.
I almost didn't write this post. It seems outside the realm of policy debates and instructional ideas, but that's kind of the point. We've got whole groups of beginning teachers who should have their brain free to think about how to teach and how to prepare lessons and maybe even how to push for important policy ideas, but instead a whole lot of them are all tied up worrying about things like what they can afford to eat and which bills to pay and which second job to land and how they are going to find a livable place to come home to and just how they're going to stitch together a life with their paycheck. How many teachers are we losing because of that moment when they look at their paycheck and look at housing market and just think, "Shit. I can't do this" and dreams of starting out an independent life as a young twenty-something just kind of shrivel up and die.
If we aren't going to pay teachers well, the very least we could do is find ways to help them stretch that tiny paycheck a little further.
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