Teacher housing at Cooper Park?

The Mountain View Whisman School District is taking a close look at building workforce housing at Cooper Park, giving teachers and other school staff an affordable place to live on salaries that haven’t kept up with the high cost of living. The move comes amid high teacher turnover and multiple surveys showing district staff commute long distances and struggle to pay the rent.

At a board meeting last week, Superintendent Ayinde Rudolph said the district is launching a “feasibility” study to build an apartment complex on 9.5 acres of district-owned land at Cooper Park, located in the center of the Waverly Park neighborhood. The sizable portion of the park includes field space as well as a privately-operated preschool.

District staff first floated the idea last year following a survey that found resounding support among its staff members for an affordable housing option that allows them to live in the city, close to work. Among the 159 respondents, 76 percent said they would be interested in living in district-run below-market-rate housing.

The results also revealed a majority of teachers, who make $60,000 a year on the low end of the salary scale, are largely unsatisfied with their current housing situation, and deal with long daily commutes and rental costs that eat up anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of their monthly paycheck. Many simply can’t afford what costs to live on the Peninsula, Rudolph said.

“When all of the housing units are above what our staff can afford, they’re forced to move further away, and after a while they start making decisions about, ‘Well, is it worth driving past seven or eight school districts to come here?'”

The district will hire an outside firm to study, among other things, how many units could be included in a housing project at Cooper Park as well as the types of units, and which funding strategies — there are several — could help the district pay for the construction costs.

Rudolph suggested that Mountain View Whisman employee housing could be done in the same mold as Santa Clara Unified School District, which built an apartment complex for its teachers during the height of the dot-com boom. The housing programs allows teachers to live in affordable units for up to seven years, and is seen as an opportunity for teachers to save up money for a down payment on a home.

Even that wouldn’t entirely solve the problem, Rudolph said, because the average cost of homes in Mountain View is so high. Even in his short two-year tenure in Mountain View, he said average housing prices have gone from $1.2 million to $1.5 million, and that it would take him 10 years to save enough money for a down payment on a home on his executive salary — let alone on a teacher’s salary.

That is not to say that you can’t find something cheaper,” he said. “Yes, you can find a town home in Oakland for $500,000, but you would still have to drive an hour and a half to get to work.”

The district is considering several strategies aimed at attracting new teachers and retaining current staff, which has been an ongoing challenge for Mountain View Whisman — arguably for reasons beyond its control. Rental costs have jumped by over 46 percent since 2011 in Santa Clara County, according to the real estate website Zillow, which has a huge impact on the district’s employees. More than half of the respondents in the survey identified themselves as renters.

Other Bay Area school districts are also looking to teacher housing for relief from the explosive real estate market. San Francisco Unified School District’s school board voted unanimously to pursue a teacher apartment project to house between 100 and 150 of the district’s 3,600 teachers. The project relies on $44 million from the city’s affordable housing funds.

Rudolph acknowledged at the Oct. 5 board meeting that teacher housing will be subject to some constraints, given the nearby geography. High-density housing would be an awkward fit in the middle of the single-family residential neighborhood. Cooper Park, which is about two blocks off Grant Road on Eunice Avenue, is not along major public transit routes, and traffic in the area would likely be a challenge, he said.

Last year, former trustee Steve Nelson did an informal survey of residents near Cooper Park, and said he found broad opposition to using the park for any development that would take away open space.

Rudolph said the ultimate goal — allowing teachers to buy a home — would take a multi-pronged approach. In addition to the workforce housing idea, district officials are also weighing a potential partnership with the real estate firm Landed, which sets up a local investor pool to help teachers shore up money for a down payment on a home in exchange for a stake in the home’s appreciation at the time of a sale or refinancing. Nearby Los Altos School District and Mountain View-Los Altos High School District have both established an investor pool of about $500,000 to launch the program.

The money provided by Landed would essentially “match” the amount ponied up by the teacher for a down payment, which means teachers are still going to need to find a way to save close to $120,000 to take advantage of the program. That could be achieved by saving up in a district-subsidized apartment, according to district officials.