Some old schools in the Silicon Valley region of California could be turned into housing for teachers, as rent prices reach astronomical heights.
“Right now, we’re losing about one in seven classroom teachers every school year, and the No. 1 cited reason for leaving the district is the cost of living,” said Stephen McMahon, deputy superintendent for the San Jose Unified School District (SJUSD), Fast Company reported on Thursday.
The average pay for a teacher in San Jose in 2018 is $23.52 per hour, according to Indeed. San Francisco teachers had an average hourly pay of $23.34 and Oakland teachers earned an average annual salary of $47,404.
“We employ a total of approximately 3,000 staff members with close to 1,800 of them certificated staff (meaning they hold teaching credentials) – we lose approximately 200 teachers each year, many who leave due to the high cost of living in this area,” a spokesperson from SJUSD told The Daily Caller News Foundation over email.
San Francisco is planning to develop over 100 housing units for teachers on land that the school district owns, according to an April press release from the city and county of San Francisco. (RELATED: San Francisco’s Homeless Population Is Surging — And Getting More Violent)
SJUSD called for some schools to be uprooted and moved to a different area so that the land could be used to build teacher housing, Mercury News reported.
Some people are not supportive of the initiatives because they believe building low-income housing would bring down the prices of nearby houses or bring in more low-income people, according to Fast Company.
Screenshot/ Google Maps
Silicon Valley is the hub for the “Big Five” technology companies of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
The 2018 median rent for a one bedroom in San Francisco was $2,478, San Jose was $2,109 and Oakland was $1,817, according to Apartment List.
San Francisco experienced a 75 percent increase in housing prices over five years. The increase in prices has to do with the region’s housing shortage.
Employment in the region between 2010 and 2016 grew by 29 percent while housing increased by 4 percent, Mercury News reported.
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