School Lands Housing

Year: 2020

Creative site and building design show how California’s public schools can help solve the affordable housing crisis. School districts can be crucial partners in providing land resources that spur affordable housing production and offer a unique opportunity to reimagine local communities with innovative architectural, urban, and social justice thinking. After looking nationwide for workforce housing projects built on school district owned land, we selected two sites as design case studies. The San Jose design exploration pioneers an opportunistic approach that stitches housing into the most widespread of district owned lands, an active school campus. The Berkeley design exploration takes the most common type of education workforce housing development, building housing on a district owned parking lot, and pushes it further to include community amenities, a shared parking structure, housing, and open space. Together the case studies demonstrate how design can address the intersecting issues of workforce recruitment, workforce retention, educational quality, and lack of housing affordability. This research forms the foundation for California state legislation authored by cityLAB and passed in 2022 (AB2295).