Students learn about history, math and the housing crisis
Teens come up with creative ideas to help solve problem
MENLO PARK >> As housing advocates hunt for creative ways to ease the Bay Area’s shortage of affordable homes, their search has landed them in an unexpected place — high school classrooms.
In between math, science and history lessons, kids around the Bay Area are learning about, and in some cases trying to help solve, their communities’ housing issues.
A group of high school students gathered at a Menlo Park bookstore last week to add their voices to the housing crisis conversation, sharing an original poem, song, drawing and series of photographs inspired by the housing shortage. In Berkeley last month, students presented their ideas on housing and transportation to civic leaders from around the Bay Area.
Many of those creative projects and ideas were sparked in the classroom, as teachers work with community activists to create new lesson plans to teach kids about the housing crisis, and also to learn from the students’ ideas and experiences.
“If we don’t engage young people in how this crisis is affecting their everyday life and their ability to succeed, we could lose generations of families in our cities,” said Deborah McKoy, director and founder of the UC Berkeley Center for Cities and Schools and founder of Youth — Plan, Learn, Act, Now (Y-PLAN). “Not to mention we’re just going to get it wrong.”
Y-PLAN aims to get kids involved in civic issues by bringing real-world problems, includ
ing housing and public transit quandaries, into their classrooms. The organization, which works with hundreds of students in schools around the Bay Area, connects kids to civic leaders who can make their ideas a reality.
Last Monday evening, 14-year-old Marco Lenzi stepped onto the stage at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park and presented his project: a jazz song he calls “Housing Crisis Blues.” The recorded notes of Lenzi’s trombone filled the air, paired with audio clips he’d taken from news segments about housing prices.
Lenzi, a freshman at Menlo-Atherton High School, won $100 from the Housing Leadership Council of San Mateo County for his song — one of five high school students awarded the cash prize as part of the organization’s first youth contest. The council received 25 submissions from students in Menlo Park, East Palo Alto and Palo Alto and likely will repeat the contest again in future years.
Many of the submissions were about gentrification and how students worry about being displaced from their changing neighborhoods, said Angie Evans, an organizer with the Housing Leadership Council.
“We’ve heard over and over again from parents, ‘I’m just staying here until
my child graduates from high school,’” she said. “So those kids know that they can’t come back here. And that has to be really hard — because how do you define home if it’s temporary?”
Another contest winner was a photo essay that documented the hours that two Palo Alto High School seniors spend on a public bus each day, trekking between school and their homes in Menlo Park and East Palo Alto. The photos, showing two teenage girls passing time together on the bus, highlighted the sacrifices the girls make to attend the highly respected school.
For the creators of that piece, who also are seniors at Palo Alto High School, capturing their peers’ bus ride opened their eyes to a
reality different from their own.
“For me, it’s just, my house is like one bike ride away,” said Jenny Tseng, who helped write the text to accompany Lucia Amieva-Wang’s photos. “But it was really eye-opening to learn what they have to do just to get the same education I do.”
The photo essay also stuck with Menlo Park Mayor Pro Tem Cecilia Taylor, who handed out certificates to the evening’s winners.
“It hurts my heart,” she said.
Menlo-Atherton English teacher Sherinda Bryant created a two-day housing crisis lesson plan around the contest for her freshmen. She presented information on housing prices
and incomes and had her class use real salaries and local home prices to calculate how much they might have left at the end of the month after paying the mortgage or the rent. The answer? Not much.
Her students, including Lenzi, also completed creative projects as part of the class, and Bryant submitted the best ones to the Housing Leadership Council contest.
In the East Bay, students at Oakland High School have been working with Y-PLAN and nonprofit New Way Homes on a plan to bring affordable homes to land owned by local churches. Other YPLAN students appeared before Menlo Park City Council in March to discuss the housing crisis.
And last month, more than 700 Y-PLAN students from 34 classrooms across the Bay Area met with local city officials at UC Berkeley to present ideas on everything from tiny homes to reformed regulations for Airbnb rentals.
Some of the students’ ideas likely will get off the ground — it’s happened before, said McKoy. A few years ago, students at Richmond High School working with the city on environmentally friendly policy ideas suggested that their school install more bicycle racks and replace bottled water with water stations to fill reusable bottles. The school did both, McKoy said.