No shelter to be found in 100 housing bills
Some outrages reach out and grab you by the throat. Just last week, there was fury to be had regarding the Paris climate accord, Muslim travel ban, the U.S. Embassy in Israel and the ongoing saga of Russian election interference. There was Greg Gianforte and Kathy Griffin, and there are typographical errors in presidential tweets.
Other outrages move more slowly and are less visible, but they are no less outrageous.
A few weeks ago, The Chronicle’s Heather Knight reported on the plight of Etoria Cheeks, a high school math teacher and coach who, because of a combination of unacceptably low salaries in the San Francisco Unified School District and unconscionably high housing costs in the city and the surrounding region, had become homeless.
At a time when California is estimated to be facing a shortfall of 300,000 qualified teachers, the Assembly is proposing millions of dollars in funding to create incentives for young people to enter the profession, and has debated legislation to exempt public school teachers from state income taxes. The University of California and California State University systems are also developing new teacher recruitment and support programs, and organizations from Teach for America to NASA are attempting to address the crisis as well.
But all those laudable efforts won’t do much to persuade a bright, young, committed aspiring educator if she knows that she might end up living in a homeless shelter.
The topic of teacher salaries deserves a full discussion in its own right. For now, suffice it to say that we should treat our teachers the same way we treat brain surgeons. The best teachers, like the best brain surgeons, ought to be paid large salaries and treated as esteemed leaders in our communities. The worst teachers, like the worst brain surgeons, ought to be encouraged to do something else for a living. Because San Francisco has made the debatable but defensible decision to prioritize smaller class sizes, the end result is that the district must hire more teachers but at lower pay. Which becomes an even bigger problem when those teachers are trying to live in one of the most expensive housing markets on the planet.
A couple of weeks ago, the city of San Francisco commendably, but belatedly, announced plans to open a teacher housing development in the city. But the project will provide only 130 to 150 rental units, serving a tiny fraction of the area’s teachers. The exorbitant cost of housing in the Bay Area makes it fiscally impossible to underwrite living accommodations for all educators who can’t afford market-level rents, to say nothing of the police officers, firefighters, first responders, nurses and other working-class professionals who are forced to commute greater and greater distances to reach their jobs. To successfully address the lack of affordable housing for the broader population, public subsidies can only be one small part of the overall solution.
But while more than 100 bills have been introduced in the current session of the Legislature to deal with this crisis, all but a handful have focused on various ways of providing government money to directly assist residents who lack the financial resources to live in or near the state’s major urban centers. While direct public assistance should be one component of an overall housing strategy, it cannot be the primary means of addressing the problem.
In other words, giving money to people who can’t afford housing to help them pay for unaffordable housing doesn’t do anything to make housing more affordable. In order to rein in the cost of homeownership and rent, there must be something done to expand the amount of available middle-income residential housing. But home-builders face an onerous permitting process that make the construction of new homes exceedingly difficult.
Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown attempted to address this issue, offering $400 million in housing subsidies in exchange for streamlining the approval process for new residential construction under certain conditions. A group of environmental advocates, labor unions and local government stopped Brown dead in his tracks. But this year, state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, has introduced a more specifically tailored bill that would accelerate residential permitting in exchange for affordable housing considerations. Wiener’s legislation isn’t perfect, but it does attempt to address the root cause of the state’s housing shortage.
Here’s hoping that Brown, Wiener and their allies can help us move to a future in which young Californians don’t have to choose between a teaching career and having a roof over their heads.