Oakland teachers can’t afford to live here. This housing program offers them ‘room to breathe’

Tyler Cardenas has spent the past year as a student teacher, working up to 20 hours a week in the classroom during the day and taking classes in Berkeley’s Teacher Education Program in the evenings. 

Balancing a full course load and student teaching as part of Oakland’s Teacher Residency Program leaves Cardenas with no time to hold another job and few options to earn money outside of the $15,000 stipend he receives for the year. That means housing in Oakland is a problem—for Cardenas and for the many would-be teachers like him who don’t already have a cushion or support from family. 

That’s where TRiO Plus steps in. For the past year, Cardenas has had help from TRiO Plus, an expansion of Teachers Rooted in Oakland, that helps aspiring and early-career educators find and pay for housing in the Town. In a district like Oakland Unified, where housing affordability is a top reason why educators want to leave their jobs and teacher vacancies remain open, that support is crucial. 

“I can’t even imagine having to worry about making ends meet on top of what I’m doing right now,” Cardenas told The Oaklandside. “The security and comfort of having my basic needs taken care of during this has let me focus on myself and on my students, which ends up making me a better teacher because I’m not coming into the classroom disgruntled.”

TRiO Plus is one part of a broader effort addressing housing affordability for teachers in the Bay Area. Some school districts, including OUSD, have committed to building workforce housing for teachers on their vacant properties. Legislators have also taken steps to make it easier for school districts to build workforce housing. 

Launched in 2020 as a program under Mayor Libby Schaaf, Teachers Rooted in Oakland initially targeted candidates in the Oakland Teacher Residency Program, who take on student-teaching assignments in OUSD schools and are partnered with a veteran mentor teacher while working to earn a teaching credential. In exchange for a four-year commitment to teach in OUSD, resident teachers would receive up to $1,500 a month for housing. The goal was to make it a bit easier to become a teacher in Oakland, especially for teachers of color and those interested in working in harder-to-fill roles, like special education or math. 

Now in its second year as a standalone nonprofit, TRiO Plus has expanded its financial resources in addition to providing housing stipends to student teachers. The organization also works with landlords to negotiate discounted rents for OUSD staff and runs what they colloquially call “Zillow for teachers,” a map showing the discounted rental properties available to all OUSD staff. It offers financial coaching through HoneyBee and helps candidates with security deposits or acts as a cosigner.

Kyra Mungia, the CEO of TRiO Plus, can speak from experience. “I taught in OUSD, kindergarten and first grade. After my third year of teaching, I had to leave,” she said. “For two reasons: Because I saw there were policies impacting my students, families, and colleagues that I couldn’t control, and I couldn’t afford to live here on a teacher’s salary.”

In a 2023 survey, 60% of OUSD teachers said the issue of housing affordability and the cost of living in the Bay Area makes them want to leave their jobs. No other factor mentioned in the survey left educators feeling so despondent–not salary (54% said pay made them want to quit), work-related stress (51%), or a lack of resources (50%). 

Cardenas lives in a three-bedroom apartment with his partner in Oakland’s San Antonio neighborhood. Through the program, he was offered a four-month rent concession, plus he receives a $1,500 a month stipend for housing as a student teacher. After the completion of his student teaching year, that stipend will drop to $500, but it’s still critical help for Cardenas, who teaches in the dual-language immersion program at Melrose Leadership Academy. Many of his classmates, he said, are subletting rooms or living on campus.

Cardenas, a male teacher of color who is also bilingual, is exactly the sort of educator whom OUSD and TRiO Plus want to help.

“School always felt like it was separate from my community, and I didn’t really have any Latino teachers growing up, or even male teachers. When I came into this teaching program, I knew that I wanted to use the fact that I’m bilingual from birth as part of my educator journey,” Cardenas told The Oaklandside. 

Today, his classroom includes refugee and newcomer students from all over Latin America, he added. “I wouldn’t trade my class or my group of students for anybody.”

Part of OUSD’s strategic plan is to help grow and develop nonwhite educators who are already in Oakland. Like Melanie Turner. Turner worked in early childhood education for 13 years before her son’s teacher encouraged her to consider the elementary special education field. Turner completed a program at the Alder Graduate School of Education to earn an education specialist credential last year, enabling her to work with students with mild to moderate special education needs. 

This month, Turner finished up her first year as a full-time resource specialist at Emerson Elementary, where she provides academic intervention support to students with IEPs. 

Turner, a single mom, was unemployed as she pursued her second master’s degree from Alder. Help from TRiO Plus during that time removed the burden of figuring out how to pay her rent.

“I tell people all the time it allowed me the room to breathe,” she said. “Not having an income was definitely something that was a concern for me, and knowing there was a program available to help ease that stress made it so much easier for me to stay engaged in my learning experience.”

To date, TRiO Plus has helped more than 90 aspiring and early-career teachers secure housing they can afford. 

“A lot of our landlords are smaller mom-and-pop or local landlords who really do care about the community and want to support our educators and see the district be successful,” Mungia said. 

Is it working?

It’s too soon to measure on some fronts whether TRiO Plus is improving things like student outcomes, Mungia said. But other measures seem to indicate that the model is working. 

Those in the program pay, on average, 26.5% of their income on rent, Mungia said, which is within the 30% range that experts suggest people should budget for their rent. The Oakland Teacher Residency Program has seen a 175% increase in residents and a 320% increase in teacher residents of color. The organization also plans to measure how and whether educators’ savings and credit scores have changed during their time in the program. 

Mungia wants to continue to expand the organization’s housing marketplace and include more three-bedroom units and properties above Interstate 580. Eventually, Mungia envisions a pathway to help educators buy their own homes in Oakland. 

“We are tackling housing affordability for educators so that our students can have high quality, stable, and diverse educators and ultimately our schools and communities can thrive.”