When the Oakland school year began Monday, the city’s public school system was still scores of teachers short of the number it needs. The Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) has thrown job fairs and deployed administrative employees with teaching credentials to the classroom to cover the shortfall.
But now, thanks to a twist in a city land deal that’s been years in the making, the district may have a new lure to offer potential hires: teachers-only affordable housing.
OUSD is weighing a bid to build below-market rental housing units for city teachers on a plot of land near Lake Merritt. Earlier this summer, the acre appeared to be headed destined to turn into high-end housing. But critics scuttled the deal before it could receive final city council approval, and Oakland announced it would accept new proposals for developing the land.
Converting the plot to teacher-specific housing at an affordable price could solve multiple problems at once for the district. Rents are rising faster in Oakland than almost anywhere else in the country — including neighboring San Francisco, though separating the two cities’ readings downplays the connection between San Francisco’s infamously tight real estate market and Oakland’s role as first-choice spillover city for many people who work across the bay. The 12.1 percent increase in rental costs from 2014 to 2015 is second only to Denver’s 14.2 percent hike, according to Trulia.
As rents boomed, teacher salaries didn’t keep pace. The contract approved by teachers earlier this summer includes gradual 14 percent raises, but Oakland Educational Association (OEA) members are hardly thriving. First, that 14 percent hike over three years will mostly be playing catchup to the 12 percent rent increase that’s already happened.
Second, the raise is applied to an obscenely low floor. Out of 125 major city school districts analyzed in a 2014 National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) report, Oakland ranked 121st on teacher pay. After adjusting for cost of living in the various cities, the NCTQ report estimated that Oakland teachers start at just $25,713 and never earn more than $42,420 in salary. Pittsburgh, at the top of the report’s list, pays teachers a starting salary of $42,420 and allows pay as high as $106,000 a year in cost-of-living terms.
As it’s become harder and harder to live in the city on a teacher’s salary, OUSD’s teachers have been pushed outside the city where their students live. About three in four Oakland teachers lived in the city when teacher’s union president Trish Gorham started in the system 20 years ago, she told the Contra Costa Times, but now that ratio is down below 60 percent.
The pinch between pay and housing costs that Oakland’s teachers face is common around the country. For decades, teacher pay has fallen as a share of GDP per capita — indicating that society is placing a shrinking value on the profession as compared to other lines of professional work. As the rental market has tightened dramatically in recent years and the housing market has struggled, it has become very difficult to afford a place to live as a public school educator.
While teachers fair reasonably well in communities in the middle of the country where housing costs are generally lower, it’s very difficult to afford a place to live on a public teacher’s salary on the coasts. Statewide, just 17 percent of homes for sale in California are affordable on a teacher’s salary. Homeownership and rental costs are so out of whack with teacher pay in Los Angeles that the city school system is building three separate buildings of teacher-specific affordable housing.