Facebook gives $25M for teacher housing
Funds help jump-start project to build up to 120 units in Palo Alto
PALO ALTO » In Facebook’s biggest contribution yet to fighting the Bay Area housing crisis, the tech giant on Thursday said it’s donating $25 million to build up to 120 apartments for Peninsula teachers.
That money will help fund a unique development that city and county officials have been trying to get off the ground for nearly two years. Their goal is to provide housing for the area’s teachers and other school workers who often make too much to qualify for subsidized low-income housing but not enough to afford homes in the pricey neighborhoods where they work. Many of those workers are forced to commute long distances, which contributes to high turnover rates in local schools.
The issue is one Facebook has been exploring as Silicon Valley tech companies increasingly are blamed for driving up local housing and rent prices by flooding the area with high-paying jobs.
“We heard direct feedback from the principals in our backyard saying they could not fill teacher positions,” said Menka Sethi, Facebook’s director of location strategy and site optimization, who oversees the company’s housing efforts. “The children they are serving do not have access to consistent teachers. And we felt like this was something where we could help.”
To solve the problem, Facebook has joined forces with several local public agencies to test an experimental plan. Santa Clara County donated the land for the project — a 1.5acre parcel at 231 Grant Ave. that currently holds an aging county- owned office building and a large parking lot. The county also contributed $6 million, and the city of Palo Alto contributed $3 million. County officials have asked for another $600,000 each from five area school districts, but those commitments have not yet been finalized.
Now that Facebook has thrown its $25 million into the ring, the project can move forward, said Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian.
“This is really good news,” he said. “It means the project is good to go. It also means that we can probably do more with the site than we were initially sure of.”
Sarah Chaffin, founder of the housing advocacy organization Support Teacher Housing and a longtime supporter of the Grant Avenue project, said with Facebook’s money, there’s now “no question” that the project will get built.
“It ’ s a real gamechanger,” she said. “We need tech companies like Facebook to step up, and I think they definitely have.”
The site will hold between 90 and 120 apartments for teachers and school employees working in Menlo Park, East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Los Altos. If there aren’t enough eligible school workers, the remaining units will go to other public service workers. Rents will be capped at no more than 30% of a resident’s income. The median price to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto last month was $3,223, according to a Zillow estimate.
Nonprofit af fordable housing developers Mercy Housing and Abode Communities will develop the project.
Facebook’s involvement is an extension of an ongoing pilot program the company launched in 2017 to provide affordable housing to a handful of teachers near Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. The company subsidizes rent for 22 apartments in a 195unit, market-rate building on Hamilton Avenue, making sure the teachers never pay more than 30% of their income. But the pilot program is set to end in 2022, and for a while, the tech giant — and the teachers themselves — weren’t sure what would happen when it was over.
Now Facebook has an answer: Those teachers will be guaranteed a spot in the new Palo Alto building. If the project isn’t finished by the time the pilot ends, Facebook will find temporary housing for the teachers, Sethi said.
That’s great news for 32- year- old Konstance Kirkendoll, an eighth grade teacher at Menlo Park’s Beechwood School. Kirkendoll and her two daughters live in one of the Facebooksubsidized apartments, but she had worried about where they would go when the pilot program ended.
“That’s incredible,” she said Thursday, when she learned she wouldn’t have to worry anymore.
At the same time, Kirkendoll felt bittersweet about her latest lucky break at the hands of Facebook.
“This is great,” she said, “but goodness gracious I wish there could be more opportunities for everyone who needs it.”
While the Facebook donation will help the Palo Alto project move forward, the project likely will need additional funding in the form of loans, Simitian said. So far, the Mountain View Whisman, Palo Alto Unified, Mountain View Los Altos and Los Altos school districts and Foothill-De Anza Community College District also have expressed interest in contributing money.
When Facebook leadership heard about the county’s plans for the 231 Grant Ave. site, it was a “nobrainer” to chip in, Sethi said. Prior to this move, Facebook has invested $18.5 million in affordable housing construction and protection through its Catalyst Housing Fund and joined forces with other tech companies and nonprofits to launch a $500 million affordable housing fund dubbed the Partnership for the Bay’s Future.
The tech giant also is planning to include 1,735 residential rental units in its new Willow Village campus in Menlo Park. If built as currently proposed, that development also would include 1.75 million square feet of office space, which is expected to bring 6,000 new employees into the city
Most of Facebook’s prior housing efforts have been focused on its hometown of Menlo Park and the surrounding San Mateo County, but Sethi said making the leap to Palo Alto was a logical attempt to find a regional solution for a regional problem. The Grant Avenue site is centrally located and is blocks away from the California Avenue Caltrain station.
“It just felt like the right thing to do,” Sethi said, “based on the feedback we were hearing from our own community in our own backyard.”