Teacher Related

Home affordability in the Golden State has fallen to a 15-year low as home prices and rents soar. Milpitas, a city at the southernmost point of the San Francisco Bay, has become so expensive to live in that many teachers can no longer afford to live there.

Cheryl Jordan, superintendent of the Milpitas Unified School District, told NBC, “We’ve lost out on some employees that we tried to recruit because once they see how much it costs to live here, they determine that it’s just not possible.” The school district has come up with a radical solution after struggling to find teachers and dealing with high turnover rates: asking local families to take in struggling teachers. Jordan claims that the creative plan is effective. 34 respondents have so far indicated an interest in offering a room or a small space on their property to our educators, she said. Like many educators across the United States, many teachers in California struggle with housing affordability due to low pay. According to information gathered from the Economic Policy Institute, between the years of 2014 and 2019, the salaries of the state’s teachers were 15.5% lower than those of their college-educated non-teaching counterparts. But the cost of living in the state is hard on everyone, not just teachers, who are already struggling financially.

According to consumer financial company Bankrate, the cost of living in the state is currently 39% higher than the national average.Additionally, Californians have not benefited in any way from the US housing bubble. Exuberant price increases in California’s housing market are the result of fierce buyer competition, a scarcity of inventory, and skyrocketing inflation. Even though growth has slowed, the median home price in California reached $788,679 in July, a 14.8 percent increase from the same month in 2021.Rents in the state are also expected to rise.Although California’s AB-1482 rent control law forbids landlords from raising rent by more than 5% annually, with an additional 5% allowance for inflation that caps the rate at 10%, this year’s high inflation has given them the go-ahead to raise prices. Although costs vary by metro, rent.com reports that the state’s average rent is more than $2,000, or $1,770 more than the US average.

California’s legislators have introduced a new contentious housing policy to address the state’s affordability crisis. Senator Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, introduced the “Light Touch Density” bill, which Governor Newsom approved in 2021. The law, which took effect at the start of this year, permits cities to modify their zoning ordinances in an effort to boost housing development in California. In single-family-zoned areas, it used to be illegal to build more than one house on a piece of land. The law, on the other hand, now allows up to ten-unit buildings to be built on each parcel. The bill’s proponents hope that more housing development will help to resolve the problems plaguing California’s housing market. Senator Wiener told the press that “small multi-unit missing middle’ housing is a critical part of ending California’s severe housing shortage.” “We can address our housing crisis in a way that makes sense for each city by allowing cities to opt in to use this powerful upzoning tool,” the author writes.

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Citations:

“Milpitas Unified Asks Parents to Open Homes to Teachers – NBC Bay Area.” NBC Bay Area, http://www.nbcbayarea.com, 30 Aug. 2022, https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/milpitas-school-district-teachers-housing/2989286/?_osource=SocialFlowTwt_BAYBrand.