Education Workforce Housing

Year 2019 – Today

The State of California employs over 600,000 educators, from teachers, to teaching assistants, to janitors, to food service workers. These selfless public employees provide an essential social service in teaching the next generation of Californians and preparing them for success, but far too many cannot afford to live in the communities they serve. California’s housing affordability crisis is well documented, but its negative effects on the state’s educational system are especially detrimental. The housing affordability crisis directly impacts teacher recruitment as districts across the state struggle to attract qualified teachers. The crisis directly impacts teacher retention as experienced teachers are forced to leave the profession. And the instability caused by a constantly changing workforce directly hurts students’ educational outcomes. The educators who remain in their positions are forced to travel long distances and are thus unable to deeply engage in their communities after the school day ends.

Education Workforce Housing (EWH)—building housing on district owned land to house district staff—is one way to address this problem, and since 2019 cityLAB-UCLA has been working alongside UC Berkeley’s Center for Cities + Schools and the California School Boards Association to help more School Districts and County Offices of Education build these essentially important projects. Public K-12 educational institutions in California hold over 150,000 acres of land, and EWH represents an opportunity for them to leverage their underutilized landholdings to build something that directly benefits them and the state at large. Our research has led to two significant publications: a research report and how to handbook, a state law that unlocks school land for housing, and, most recently, a series of educational academies where we have worked directly with school districts to help them build new Education Workforce Housing projects. When we started this work there were four built educator housing projects and 46 interested school districts. Today, there are nine built projects, another three under construction, and 175 interested districts.

This project represents one of cityLAB’s most significant housing development efforts to date, and our collective team of researchers, architects, developers, and subject matter experts have produced incredible work helping California’s school districts build sorely needed housing to help their staff.