Etoria Cheeks teaches math at a public high school in San Francisco, explaining algebra and statistics to teenagers. But it’s the math behind her housing predicament that simply doesn’t add up.
In a shocking indication of just how bad San Francisco’s teacher housing situation is, Cheeks is homeless. She’s a professional with a teaching credential and master’s degree in one of the richest cities in the world who cannot find housing.
She slept on bunk beds in downtown hostels for two months and a homeless shelter for one terrible night before the teachers’ union found a retired member willing to let Cheeks sleep in her guest room until she finds her own place.
“Technically, I’m still homeless until I have my own lease,” Cheeks said. “San Francisco isn’t geared for me; it’s not built for someone like me.”
That’s true. San Francisco is no longer geared for teachers. It’s not geared for anyone who makes Cheeks’ salary — about $65,000 — as a full-time instructor at the Academy-San Francisco at McAteer, a public high school that shares a Portola Drive campus with Ruth Asawa School of the Arts.
But as long as the city has families with children, it needs people like Cheeks. And it needs to do far more than it’s doing now, so they don’t end up living in homeless shelters or hostels, couch-surfing, or commuting several hours a day as so many San Francisco teachers do. There’s no time to waste, considering that a new report shows San Francisco teachers have it worse than educators anywhere else in the country when it comes to affording housing.
The 35-year-old moved from Georgia in summer 2015 to substitute teach before joining the school district full-time six months later. She coaches badminton and helps struggling kids in an after-school tutoring program for extra cash.
She was renting a room in a house in Daly City when she learned in December the house was in foreclosure, and she was evicted. With no family here, few friends and no savings because of a dispute over the security deposit, Cheeks had to scramble.
She put her belongings in storage and paid $30 to $50 a night for dorm beds in downtown hostels, moving around because they prohibit stays of more than 14 days. She looked at the below-market-rental lotteries run by the Mayor’s Office of Housing, but she made too much to qualify. She applied for apartments on Craigslist and other sites, but there was very little she could afford, and she kept striking out.
When her money ran low after two months in hostels, she was forced to sleep in a South of Market emergency homeless shelter called A Woman’s Place.
“I was there for a night, and I was so freaked out,” she said. “I finally went to sleep and woke up the next day and went to work. I didn’t let anyone at the school know.”
Desperate, she called the teachers’ union for help and has been staying with a retired member in West Portal until she finds permanent housing.
The unworkable math behind teachers and housing was detailed in The Chronicle last year: San Francisco’s cost of living was by far the highest among 821 school districts in the state, but its average teacher pay ranked with the likes of Dixon, Susanville and Chowchilla at No. 528.
Nothing much has changed. In fact, a new report by Apartment List, an online listing of apartments for rent grouped by location, shows that San Francisco’s teachers have it not only the worst in the state, but the worst in the entire country.
Most people become more financially secure as they advance in their careers. San Francisco’s teachers, it turns out, actually have it worse, unless they want to live with a roommate, college-style, forever.
A rookie teacher in the city makes $4,473 per month. That teacher has to spend 51 percent of his or her income before taxes to rent half of a two-bedroom apartment, sharing it with a roommate, the Apartment List report concludes.
But let’s say that by a teacher’s fifth year on the job, living with a roommate is getting old. Living solo in a one-bedroom San Francisco apartment will eat up 69 percent of the teacher’s income. And 10 years into the job, if our teacher wants to really spread out in a palatial two-bedroom apartment with a spouse and kids? The price tag will be 73 percent of the paycheck.
At every level of experience, San Francisco’s educators must pay more of their income for housing than anywhere else in the country.
Think the answer is the far-flung suburbs? The report figured that Pittsburg and San Pablo are the only semi-nearby places where San Francisco teachers can live without spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent. As anybody who commutes from there to the city knows, that will take a couple hours out of your day.
“Certain jobs have to be local: police officers, teachers, firefighters,” said Andrew Woo, a data scientist at Apartment List. “We want to make sure our cities continue to be affordable for those kinds of workers, and so far, it seems like San Francisco is really struggling to make that happen for our teachers.”
According to Woo, even other cities with expensive housing are managing to pay their teachers more. A 10th-year San Francisco teacher currently makes $74,799 max.
“Boston teachers in year 10 make close to $93,000,” Woo said. “Even in Chicago, which is much more affordable than San Francisco, they’re making $87,000 in year 10.”
San Francisco district officials say salaries are low because California’s funding for education isn’t keeping pace with the rest of the country, and the district prioritizes spending the money it does get on keeping class sizes small.
So in the meantime, what is the city doing? Um, not much. In April, I wrote that a working group charged with building teacher housing had made zero progress identifying sites or a way to build on them. Since then, the group has — gasp — set up a meeting. Its first in two months.
Nothing that comes out of the working group — “working” is a generous adjective — will come in time for Etoria Cheeks. She has submitted her resignation to the San Francisco Unified School District and isn’t sure where she’s headed next.