San Francisco schools turn to teacher housing to fight turnover

Inside Shirley Chisholm Village at 1360 43rd Avenue in the Outer Sunset, George Washington High School ceramics teacher Shayla Putnam is living the policy question San Francisco schools have been trying to answer: can teachers afford to stay in the city long enough to keep classrooms steady? Her child is old enough to ask where high school will be, and that simple family question captures the larger risk for SFUSD, which keeps losing educators to a housing market that can outpace school salaries.

Shirley Chisholm Village opened as San Francisco’s first educator-housing development, a 135-unit, 100% affordable project the city said was designed to prioritize SFUSD educators and staff. SFUSD later described the development as 134 affordable rental units, a small discrepancy that still underscores how new and closely watched these housing efforts are. However the count is handled, the point is the same: the city and district are now using housing as a retention tool, not a perk.

That shift became part of SFUSD’s planning after the Board approved the Facilities Master Plan on May 9, 2023. The district says that plan prioritizes housing opportunities for educators, and in July 2023 the city said two educator-housing projects would deliver more than 135 affordable homes for SFUSD and San Francisco Community College District employees. Lottery applications for SFUSD workers at Shirley Chisholm Village opened April 2, 2024, with the first round closing April 23, a sign of how quickly the district moved from planning to trying to place teachers in units of their own.

The broader Bay Area has moved in the same direction. Santa Clara Unified’s Casa del Maestro offers 70 below-market units for faculty and staff. Jefferson Elementary School District opened Eastmoor Heights in Daly City with 56 units, calling it the first K-8 staff housing in San Mateo County. Mountain View Whisman built staff housing at The Sevens with the City of Mountain View and Foothill-DeAnza Community College District, while Palo Alto’s 231 Grant Avenue project is planned as a 110-unit educator workforce development backed by Santa Clara County, Meta, the city and participating districts.

State leaders have also encouraged the shift. The California Department of Education has urged districts to build homes for teachers on district property, and State Superintendent Tony Thurmond has backed that approach. In January 2026, the California Teachers Association said it surveyed more than 2,000 TK-12 public school teachers about economic pressure and affordability, a reminder that the housing crunch reaches far beyond one district or one neighborhood.

For San Francisco, the lesson is blunt: educator housing can help recruitment and keep some teachers closer to the schools and students who need them, but it is still a stopgap in a city where rent remains a daily threat to staffing continuity. Shirley Chisholm Village may help keep teachers like Putnam in place, yet the broader affordability crisis that drives turnover is still shaping who can teach in San Francisco at all.