Education and housing

The Quality of Our Public Schools Depends on Affordable Housing

While many people may associate affordable housing residents exclusively with extremely low income, in a place like Marin housing prices are so high that even teachers and school staff struggle to afford basic housing. Without new affordable housing for these residents, our County’s vaunted high-quality public education system is simply not sustainable: school districts struggle to recruit, hire, and retain educational staff, talented teachers will move somewhere more affordable, and our school revenue will decline as the number of students declines. 

Teachers struggle to afford Marin:

• Teachers’ salaries and local rents don’t match up: Nearly 43% of Marin school staffers cannot afford to rent a studio apartment in the county. In fact, entry-level, mid-experience, and even most highly experienced teachers do not command salaries that would enable them to live in a Marin studio apartment. 
• Quality teachers are quick to leave Marin: Of the teachers who do gain some experience in Marin, our housing prices nevertheless inevitably motivate many of them to leave when the opportunity arises. A median house costs $1.7 million in Marin, so homeownership in the area is simply out of the question for many educators, who make on average $50,000 annually. Among teachers 18-39, a Marin Promise study showed that affordable housing would reduce attrition rates by almost 50%. 
• We face a rapidly worsening teacher shortage: Former San Rafael City Schools Board of Education President Linda Jackson argued that job vacancies, once rare, now commonly go unfilled throughout a school year and that “the solution is affordable housing right here, in Marin!”
• Affordable housing would be an efficient way to increase teachers’ take-home pay. Despite their importance, teachers have long been severely underpaid in the United States. Providing affordable housing to teachers is an effective way to boost their net take-home while avoiding the politics of wage increases. This would also serve as an incentive to take a job in Marin schools.
• Affordable housing shortages hurt racial equity in our classrooms: Although 43% of students in Marin are people of color, just 11% of teachers and faculty are, as high housing prices shut out minorities. Education researchers have consistently found that same-race teachers have a dramatic positive impact on educational outcomes for underrepresented students. Black students who have one black teacher are 13% more likely to go to college. Two black teachers raise that to 32%. Additionally, children benefit from exposure to multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-racial perspectives and interaction.

We don’t attract enough students either:

• Our school enrollment numbers are shrinking: As new families have increasingly been steered away from Marin to more affordable pastures, our enrollment has plummeted. For seven straight years, our student counts have dropped, according to Marin County Assistant Superintendent Laura Trahan, and they are now lower “in almost all grades by about 400 to 500 students.”
• Are budget deficits here to stay for our schools?: Due to these rapidly declining enrollment numbers, schools across Marin are increasingly faced with consistent budget shortfalls. Just this year, for instance, the Sausalito Marin City School District found itself staring down the barrel of a $1.4 million deficit. As a result, it was forced to fire 12 staff members and cut $1.9 million in spending.