The City’s first affordable development for educators opened its doors late last year — but the job of providing housing to teachers is just beginning
Editor’s note: With tens of thousands of San Francisco students returning to classrooms this month, The Examiner is sharing throughout August the stories of the educators, initiatives and organizations supporting them.
Read the full series here. San Francisco’s longstanding ambition to create homes specifically for cash-strapped educators is finally getting a real-world test. In December, the first new residents began moving into Shirley Chisholm Village, a 135-unit affordable housing development in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood. It is The City’s first affordable-housing complex with housing specifically set aside for San Francisco Unified School District educators. “I feel like it's a good situation,” said Terrente Richardson, a paraeducator at Malcolm X Academy who lives with his daughter. Given the deep housing-affordability challenges faced by district teachers, he said, “for to have a set spot for teachers and educators is a good thing.” Like other educators who recently moved into Shirley Chisholm interviewed by The Examiner, Richardson said that if he had not won out in the lottery for apartments in the development, he likely would have eventually been forced to move out of the school district. Stories such as Richardson’s offer some encouragement that the district’s foray into housing development is helping to address the way The City’s affordability crisis has affected teachers, a problem that some have argued has contributed to the district’s struggles to retain qualified staff. But one development can only go so far — more than 1,200 people entered into the lottery for rooms there, according to school-district officials. Backers of teacher housing say it offers an appealing opportunity to turn underused city- or district-owned land into housing. They’re hoping that Shirley Chisholm, which was developed by MidPen Housing, will just be the first of many such developments to come online in the coming years. But the project — which had been in the works for 10 years before teachers finally began moving in last year — has also made clear that building teacher housing comes with a host of challenges. “We're definitely at an inflection point with what happens next and what our priorities are for the properties,” said SFUSD Board of Education Commissioner Alida Fisher. In 2020, the Board of Education passed a resolution that set the goal of creating 550 homes for teachers by 2030. Fisher acknowledged that meeting that target will require speeding up the development process for future projects, but she said that is possible. “There are a lot of hurdles that we've knocked out of the way” through the process of creating Shirley Chisholm, she said. A 75-unit teacher housing project has already broken ground at 750 Golden Gate Ave. Another, a 63-unit building at 2205 Mission St., had been slated for groundbreaking in 2023, but funding challenges have led to delays, and it is now unclear when work might begin. Both are on land owned by The City, rather than the school district. The district has also identified two other sites it owns — one at 1620 7th Ave. and another at 95 Gough St. — that could potentially become the sites of future projects. For the time being, some San Francisco educators who did not manage to get spots at Shirley Chisholm said the process has left them disappointed. In some cases, teachers have complained that the affordable rents offered at the development — which are determined based on income — are still too high for them. Ex // Top Stories The ‘unofficial mayor of Chinatown’ is a firefighter who seldom fights fires Doug Mei might be the most popular person in the neighborhood — just don’t ask him if that’s true Four ways you can volunteer in SF public schools Forty-seven “priority schools” are in need of assistance, according to nonprofit officials SFUSD has plans to get students in class, teachers paid on time SFUSD superintendent Maria Su addresses worries old and new less than one week before her first opening day as head of The City’s public education system That was the case for special education teacher Kaela Marie Williams, another Malcolm X Academy educator, who said that she had been following the development for well over a year.But then she was quoted the monthly rent she would be asked to pay: $2,900.Williams, who has experienced homelessness and is currently living with family, said she is pursuing other affordable-housing options. But eventually, she said, she might need to leave the district. “I stay because I love my students,” she said. “I also stay because I grew up in this neighborhood. I went to this school.” MidPen Housing President and CEO Matt Franklin noted that the application process was conducted in close consultation with district officials and that it included an appeals process. Furthermore, he said, the high demand offers a proof of concept “that there's significant demand, that we can create a really high-quality community, and that this can work.”The experience has offered many lessons, Fisher said. First and foremost: “It is really difficult to be a landlord.” MidPen Housing took the lead on managing the application process, but even so, “it still does take a huge amount of staff time to be a partner to this kind of program,” she said. “We ran into capacity issues very, very quickly.”In the meantime, some are urging faster action. “I know it worked out for some, but what about the ones that it didn't help?” Williams said. “What are we doing to help those ones?” District officials note that separate programs also attempt to help educators afford down payments on new homes. “Since the development of housing takes time, we know that partnership and collaboration is critical to creating more housing opportunities,” a district official said via email.
Affordable Housing Development Affordability Teachers
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