Carolina Sanchez Garcia, a teacher at Rosa Parks Elementary in San Diego, used to wake up at 3 a.m. to leave enough time to drive to work as her children slept in the back seat.
Housing in Southern California was so expensive that she was living in Tijuana, Mexico, and spending up to four hours on her commute, which included crossing the border, to get to work.
Then in 2023, Ms. Garcia got a break. She won a housing lottery to live in a subsidized, three-bedroom apartment at LIVIA Scripps Ranch, a 264-unit multifamily development on the site of a former school. The complex, built by the real estate investment firm Monarch Group on land owned by local school districts, has over 50 subsidized apartments set aside for educators and other staff members working at schools in the area.
Ms. Garcia, who pays $1,500 a month for a three-bedroom apartment that would typically go for $4,500 in the area, called it a “miracle.” She has a 15-minute commute, a nearby school for her children, new appliances and a lot more energy at work.
“As a teacher, it has impacted me tremendously,” Ms. Garcia, 42, said. “I have extra time to plan. And as a mom, I have less stress and worry.”
As housing remains scarce and increasingly expensive, cities and states across the country have been looking for ways to help essential workers like educators afford to live near where they work. Assistance and allowances toward housing, grants on down payments and rents at below-market rates are just some of those solutions.
School districts in California, Texas and Florida are among those actively pursuing developers to turn their excess land and unused or underutilized facilities into subsidized housing. The partnerships differ by state and district, depending on property taxes, tax incentives and financing, but the developer is typically responsible for construction and other upfront costs while schools provide the land.
Subsidized housing can be an attractive recruiting strategy for schools in areas with high housing costs. It can also offer schools an additional revenue stream as student enrollment declines because of falling birthrates, the immigration crackdown and other factors.
In California, one of the most expensive places to live in the country, the San Diego Unified School District said this year that it would turn six sites occupied by former administrative buildings into roughly 2,500 apartments for teachers, the largest project of its kind in the country.
The developers who submitted the winning bids, which often include child care centers and playgrounds, will sign 99-year leases and keep the units affordable through the length of the agreement. The apartments are expected to welcome their first renters in 2030, said Lee Dulgeroff, senior executive director for facilities planning and construction at the district. Across the state, roughly 925 such units have been completed, with 305 more under construction.
Thousands of new homes can “shift the entire rental housing market for San Diego,” said Kyle Weinberg, a special eduction teacher and president of the San Diego Education Association union, which has more than 6,000 members who are educators and support personnel.
Mr. Weinberg said his school district had rolling vacancies for special education positions for the past seven years. Even after adding stipends and increasing salaries by 20 percent, the district was never able to hire enough staff.
“We have to look outside the box,” Mr. Weinberg said, “and offering affordable housing is equivalent to a pay increase.”
Nearly 200 local education agencies in the state are said to be exploring their portfolios and considering development, quadruple the number four years ago, according to data provided by the California School Boards Association. Affordable housing advocates believe that more of these projects will break ground in the coming years because of the growing need for housing and the surfeit of school land left from a time when districts had more students.
And unlike other parts of the country, California passed laws that allow school district developments to reserve housing for teachers and other staff members. (Fair housing laws, especially for developments using public funding, usually restrict reserving homes for any specific groups to avoid being discriminatory.)
Dana Cuff, a U.C.L.A. architectural professor focused on affordable housing who runs the cityLAB research center, has written reports on teacher housing projects. She said efforts to educate school districts about the intricacies and financial models behind development opportunities, like the ones run by the California School Boards Association, were helping educators handle housing development deals. CityLAB is also working with community institutions in health care, like Cedars-Sinai hospitals, to find ways they can use their land to develop work force housing in a similar fashion.
“What we’re seeing in California is a lot of different models and experiments,” said Harold Freiman, a lawyer at Lozano Smith who helps public school districts in California with real estate issues. “It’s actually very exciting right now.”
But ensuring these projects work for developers while navigating funding issues, subsidy levels and neighborhood pushback remains difficult. Unions that represent teachers and other school employees want to make sure that their members won’t be cut off from affordability limits imposed by public funding. Experienced teachers often make too much money to qualify for subsidized housing.
And some residents near the sites have concerns with subsidized housing, including declines in property value, the loss of historic school architecture or the end of access to campus parks and open spaces.
At the same time, developers typically say they can achieve higher profits with more, smaller units. But school districts want complexes with fewer, larger units that can accommodate teachers with children who increase the student population.
“The challenge with this work is all the federal, state and local laws that you have to navigate,” Mr. Freiman said. “We’re all building the plane while we’re flying it.”
In Texas, the NRP Group, a national apartment developer, recently broke ground at an 18-acre former school site in East Austin with plans to replace it with 675 apartments. The Austin Independent School District will grant NRP a 99-year lease, and the developer will take on the district’s property tax exemption so that it can build more affordable units. The developer told The New York Times that affordability would remain in place as long as the property continued to receive tax exemptions. NRP plans to give early access to the district’s staff.
The district’s superintendent, Matias Segura, said a third of staff members live outside the district because of costs. “I believe every resource that we have, whether it’s money or time or real estate, should be leveraged to support the core competency of the organization: education,” he said.
The district, which has an enrollment of roughly 72,000 children, has lost about 10,000 students in the past decade and is worried about further declines. It agreed to lower lease payments from NRP so that it would include more two- and three-bedroom units into the development.
And in Florida, 10 districts in the state have used or are actively pursuing the use of district-owned land for work force and affordable housing, according to the Florida Housing Coalition. That tally includes an effort by the national developer Related Urban Development Group to transform the J.R.E. Lee Education Center, a vocational and special education site in South Miami, into a mixed-use complex with 355 residential units as well as office space and an educational facility for early-childhood programming. The group plans to break ground early next year.
“There’s certainly a lot more red tape, because this is a private real estate development on public educational land,” said Albert Milo Jr., president of the Related Urban Development Group. “But this is a win-win scenario.”
