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Subscribe here. Teacher salaries are always in the news, but in the last few months we've noticed that housing affordability for teachers is in the spotlight, with many school districts exploring ways to support teachers' ability to rent or purchase homes.
San Francisco is putting in place an idea for affordable housing in a city known for the highest rents in the nation. Indianapolis , and even smaller districts , have all taken steps to ensure teachers have access to affordable housing through various community and developer partnerships. This month, we assess the ability of teachers to: 1 rent an apartment, 2 save for a down payment, and 3 make a monthly house payment.
We use salary data from our Teacher Contract Database and couple it with rental and housing data from Zillow , a real estate website and marketplace that tracks housing and rental prices, and the US Census Bureau. You can view an interactive map of this data here. Here are the parameters we applied to conduct this exercise. We consider the largest districts in the country and the largest district in each state, if not already represented in the set of , for a total of school districts.
It was necessary to make several assumptions to arrive at the relative difficulty of renting or owning a home in these districts. While each of these assumptions is debatable, we consider them reasonable for this exercise and in the context of the expectations of professional adults. We do fully acknowledge the many compromises not just teachers have to make to put a roof over their heads. Compromises are routinely made to secure housingβboth rentals and ownershipβ not just in lowering the amount of down payment, but also by agreeing to living arrangements which may not be ideal such as living with parents, having roommates, or commuting longer distances to work.
