Far from home: Too many teachers can’t afford to live where they work

It’s budget season in many districts across the country. There will be much wrangling over the lion’s share of school district budgets: teacher salaries. While the superintendent and other administrators often think about teachers’ salaries in terms of how much the district can afford, NCTQ’s new report on housing affordability for teachers suggests that districts need to reconsider their salaries through the lens of what teachers can afford.

NCTQ’s Priced out: The growing challenge of teacher pay and housing costs by Dr. Katherine Bowser sheds new light on just how far a teacher’s salary will go toward housing, and the results of the analysis give me a pit in my stomach: Despite raises in teacher salaries across the country, skyrocketing rental and mortgage costs are outpacing teacher salary increases. Teachers are falling further behind in the race for housing affordability.

Across the 72 large, urban districts we studied, teacher salaries rose by 24% on average since 2019, while apartment rentals shot up by 51% and home prices increased by 47% over the same period. This means that the gap between teacher salaries and housing costs has widened considerably in the past five years.

This isn’t just bad for teachers. It’s bad for everybody.

When teachers have long commutes from their homes to their schools, they are more likely to miss work, receive lower observation scores, and leave the district than their peers who live nearby. Retaining the best teachers is particularly critical for cash-strapped schools, as some estimates calculate it costs $25,000 to replace them. When teachers are forced to live far away, the district loses out on a high-quality workforce, student learning suffers, and the community misses out on the benefits of having teachers knitted into its fabric.

Top takeaways:

1. Renting a one-bedroom apartment is now unaffordable for new teachers in half of big-city school districts. Rent costs more than 30% of a teacher’s salary in 39 of the 72 districts we analyzed.
2. The American Dream has become a mirage for many teachers, ever in the distance, ever out of reach. We estimated it takes teachers 13 to 14 years to save for a 20% down payment on a house (and that doesn’t factor in how home prices might grow even more over that time period).
3. Black and Latino teachers will disappear from the workforce, as they are already disproportionately affected by higher school loan debt. Crippling student loan debt coupled with higher housing prices is a double whammy for their wallets. The impact of increasing housing prices will disproportionately affect beginning teachers of color, who carry higher undergraduate loan burdens than their peers.
4. The impact of housing costs and the lack of other employment benefits are interdependent—and the costs add up for teachers. When considering where to work, teachers take into account not only whether they can afford housing, but also other benefits, such as parental leave. Increasingly, districts are recognizing these important links, as the share of large districts offering paid parental leave has more than doubled in the last three years. Yet, just as districts struggle to offer salaries that keep pace with housing costs, 57% of the districts we analyzed in our sample still do not offer such benefits beyond normal sick days, despite the clear importance of these policies for teachers.

Teachers who live in the community where they teach invest in the communities as their own, and their presence deepens their connections to their students and their families. When I taught fourth grade, I often saw students and their families at the grocery store (“Yes, I do buy groceries!” I would respond to their astonished inquiries). These encounters foster relationships with students and families and cement impressions of teachers as important both in and out of schools. To keep a high-quality teacher workforce, it is in the best interests of the districts—and the students and families they serve—to pay teachers enough to afford housing reasonably close to where they teach, and to enact creative solutions (like some districts we spotlight in our report) when higher pay isn’t in the budget.