
Cities look at subsidized housing to stem teacher shortages - blueatlas
http://www.bigstory.ap.org/article/f4cbc9ca2cad46ebb6fdb2c3008919c8/cities-look-subsidized-housing-stem-teacher-shortages
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brudgers
_About $35 million of the $310 million to be raised has been earmarked for
construction of up to 100 new apartments on surplus land owned by the San
Francisco Unified School District. The units would be rented at below-market
rates to the district 's 3,500 teachers and 1,600 classroom aides, who also
would be eligible for new rental housing allowances and home down payment
loans aimed at reducing living costs for another 300 educators, Deputy
Superintendent Nyong Leigh said._

5100 staff per 100 apartments. A 2% dent in the problem for $35 million. Even
if the entire $310 million were put toward housing, it would still mitigate
housing costs for less than 20% of the staff.

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tracker1
Sounds like the cost of business licenses in SF should go up...

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dikdik
Instead of paying teachers a livable wage, we will meddle with the housing
market and cause everyone else's rents to go up! HOOOORAY!

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mhuffman
Teacher's wages are only not "livable" in SF, because the housing market is
dicked.

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dikdik
Exactly. Increase taxes on homeownership to pay the teacher's salaries. If
homeowners don't like this, they can cut out their NIMBY ideals and allow
adequate construction of new housing.

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edward
Teachers in San Francisco should demand to be paid more instead of receiving
subsidized housing.

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imh
I can't understand why we don't just pay teachers more. Is it even
controversial?

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mikeyouse
Paying for better performance only applies for CEOs and engineers. Teachers
should live in squalor for the love of educating.

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golergka
(1) Measuring teacher performance is hard (and because it's taxpayers miney,
there's much less space for subjective opinions), (2) supply/demand ratio of
teachers is quite different.

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mikeyouse
Wouldn't paying them more across the board lead to more competition for
positions which should lead to higher overall quality?

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golergka
There's quite a lot of competition already. It's not a startup, you can't
select this teacher over that one because of your gut feeling: it's public
money, so you have to have clear and transparent selection process to ensure
that you're not corrupt.

Which means that this competition doesn't necessarily translate into higher
quality of teachers, but instead into skills of navigating bureaucracy in
western countries and navigating corrupt bureaucracy in others.

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imh
Just because it's already competitive doesn't mean the best people are
competing. If you're really good at math, you can end up with a full 10x
difference on disposable income being a teacher versus other available
careers. There's no way we're getting the best people or anywhere close to it
into education, competition or not.

(Your point about the difficulty of measuring performance is a very good one
though)

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randyrand
Few thoughts:

1) expensive areas have a proportional amount more to spend on teachers. If
they actually were short teachers and needed to pay teachers more, the easily
could and would.

2) teachers are generally easy to find. Open teaching positions routinely have
hundreds of applicants. It is a very desirable job despite the 'low' wages.
Working with kids, month long holidays, and tenure appeal to a lot of people.

3) 45% of your income on housing is not that extreme. I pay 30% and I'm in LA
on a CS wage

I'm not convinced this is a problem, just your typical heart throb emotional
piece.

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dangrover
Normally, expensive areas _would_ have a proportional amount more to spend.
But California's Proposition 13 locked the land values that property taxes are
based on to 1978 levels. And in SF specifically, rent control laws lock
tenants into the same rent price as when they started renting (for pre-1978
apartments, which is most of them).

Therefore the seemingly "expensive" rent of rentable apartments in SF is not
an indicator of the actual rent being paid by most renters, much less of the
taxes the owners pay to fund things like schools. So even if _open_ apartments
are rented for $4k/month, the level of service residents are able to fund
could be more like that of a poorer city where apartments rent for
$1.5k/month.

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sjg007
Build apartments above the schools.

