Tag Archives: San Francisco

The big bet on “tiny homes” to fix homelessness

Originally published at Vox on November 29, 2023.
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Before she moved into the first shelter village of “tiny houses” in San Francisco, Sharon Sandelin — a 66-year-old who goes by “Mama T” — had been sleeping on the streets.

Now she lives in a 64-square-foot unit with heat, electricity, a twin bed, desk, and chair. There is a combination lock on the outside. The gated community where some 70 other people now live is clean and cheerful-looking, painted teal and sea-foam green. Residents are connected with supportive services like health care and served three meals daily.

Sandelin detests traditional homeless shelters, and appreciates the privacy of her locked room on Gough Street, knowing she can rest undisturbed. But she still considers herself homeless. Though she likes her tiny cabin more than she liked being unsheltered, residents must use porta-potties, they are not allowed to have outside visitors, they can’t shower after 2 pm, and they can’t cook anything that requires more than a microwave or toaster.

“I want to eat my own cooking,” she told me. “My daughter can’t visit me, and there shouldn’t be no set time for a person to take a shower.”

Sandelin has a place to sleep in large part because of Elizabeth Funk, who spent three decades working at investment firms and tech giants like Yahoo and Microsoft, while serving on boards of various homeless nonprofits. Since 2020, Funk, now the CEO of Dignity Moves, which fundraised and developed the San Francisco village, has brought her experience and Rolodex to bear on a singular goal: to, as Silicon Valley puts it, disrupt the problem of homelessness in America.

Since 2016, unsheltered homelessness — meaning those sleeping somewhere not designed for human residence, like a car, a park, or a train station — has been going up. Particularly on the West Coast where housing costs are often prohibitive, local governments have struggled to curb sprawling and politically unpopular tent encampments, and many unhoused people prefer sleeping outside to crowded shelters with bunk beds. The challenge has been exacerbated by Martin v. Boise, a 2018 court ruling that said people can’t be punished for sleeping outside on public property if there are no adequate alternatives available.

To Funk and other tiny house proponents, villages like the one where Sandelin now lives offer creative solutions to all these issues. The small, relocatable cabins provide leaders new ways to bypass restrictive zoning rules, by leveraging emergency building codes and “borrowing” rather than purchasing land. They also offer, at least for some, a more dignified shelter option, providing an affordable answer to the difficult reality that many people prefer to sleep outside rather than endure the rules and conditions of typical shelters.

Advocates of “tiny homes” as a solution to the homeless crisis say the units should be understood as a key tool to preventing chronic homelessness amid a brutal housing shortage. If people lose their homes but can get quickly off the streets into a temporary private dwelling, then they’re in a much better position to get back on their feet, and avoid the tumble into longer-term homelessness that can transpire from even just a few weeks without shelter.

For elected officials, the villages also mean that fewer people have to see — or think about — homeless people on a daily basis. Tiny homes provide leaders with a faster and cheaper alternative to building permanent housing or congregate shelters, and may provide cities with the legal authority to then clear out any remaining tent encampments: Funk told me she can determine “exactly how many units you need in order to make it illegal to sleep on the streets within the city limits in San Francisco.” All this has thrilled leaders eager to reclaim their cities from what they see as spiraling chaos and disorder.

Advocates for the homeless, meanwhile, worry that the tiny shelter boom will divert funds that could otherwise go to new permanent housing, preventing people from moving into a real home for even longer. The rush of private industry into the space also gives advocates pause, and they worry that cities will buy bare-bones, cheaper models, place them in remote parts of town, and criminalize those who refuse to go.

At the heart of the tiny houses debate is a question about the meaning of housing and shelter itself. As more companies rush to manufacture models with varying features — some out of plastic, some out of repurposed shipping containers, some built on factory assembly lines, others on-site or on wheels, some with in-suite bathrooms, kitchenettes, and storage space, others lacking plumbing and electricity and with virtually no amenities at all — there is little consensus on what a “tiny home” is, or what standards it must meet.

Tiny house shelter units are typically between 60 and 150 square feet, but the sharp variety of products within the industry creates confusion. How spartan is acceptable? Is anything better than sleeping outside?

Lots of arrangements can be tolerated if they’re understood as emergency solutions — but some communities have also started to explore the idea of treating the units less as temporary shelters and more as something approaching new housing options.

“Harnessing NIMBY” to expand tiny houses

America has a housing shortage in part because it’s become so expensive and difficult to build new housing. The cost to purchase new land has skyrocketed, byzantine zoning rules make residential construction hard, and people living in communities often protest new development — wary of decreased property values, new neighbors, noise, traffic, or general change. This barrier is so common it goes by NIMBY, short for “not in my backyard.”

Yet over the last few years, “tiny home” shelters have been built in communities through what you could call creative hacks of the zoning code. In some places, structures smaller than 120 square feet are not classified as permanent dwellings, and therefore not subject to the same regulations applicable to residential buildings. Other groups have capitalized on cities that declared local states of emergency, which give governments more flexibility to build units with faster permitting.

A photo of Dignity Moves tiny homes. They are small structures that open onto a patio with potted plants and outdoor furniture.
Dignity Moves is a transitional housing program in San Francisco. These 70 modular units are set at 33 Gough Street, right in the middle of San Francisco. They offer the unhoused a non-congregate shelter option.

Dignity Moves formed in 2020 as a task force within the Young Presidents Organization, a global networking group of chief executives. The group wanted to “apply private sector approaches and Silicon Valley-style ‘disruptive thinking’” to America’s homelessness crisis, as they describe it.

Funk could hardly hold back her grin as she outlined Dignity Moves’ theory of change. Instead of buying expensive land for tiny houses, she told me, they “borrow” it from developers who aren’t yet ready to use it.

Leveraging emergency building codes and word-of-mouth networking, “we take advantage of under-utilized assets,” she said. Maybe the shelters will go on a plot of land for two or three years, and then get transferred via forklift to another location when the developer needs their property back. (There are certain tax breaks available for landowners interested in making this deal.) The San Francisco village I visited on Gough Street rests on such borrowed land.

Sometimes Dignity Moves encourages faith-based groups or local governments to pony up their vacant property — like parking lots or land reserved for future infrastructure projects. In Santa Barbara, leaders countywide have jointly committed to finding locations for tiny houses in their neighborhoods and giving shelter priority to those sleeping outside in the surrounding areas. Funk’s group is spearheading this, and envisions the future playing out similarly in cities all over the country. By erecting many villages at the same time, Funk thinks it’ll be possible to get people off the street at once, a strong incentive for housed residents who are tired of seeing individuals living on sidewalks. “Then we can harness NIMBYism, which is a very powerful force,” she said.

There are at least some encouraging signs that local opposition to tiny house shelters wanes. When researchers at Portland State University surveyed housed neighbors who lived around various Portland “tiny homes” villages, they found the neighbors’ concerns about crime and decreased property values significantly diminished over time. “Some of the biggest initial opponents became some of the biggest champions,” Todd Ferry, a lead researcher of the study, told me. “I genuinely think it became beloved to many people in the neighborhood.”

Perhaps no politician has been more enthusiastic about the potential of tiny house shelters than San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who proposed this past summer to divert more than a third of his city’s housing funds to increase village production. Up for reelection in March, Mahan has made moving unhoused people quickly off the street a major part of his pitch.

San Jose started opening “tiny home” shelters about four years ago, originally to reduce the risk of contagion during the pandemic. About 500 units currently exist now in the city across six locations, and hundreds more are in the pipeline. Mahan credits their growth with reducing San Jose’s unsheltered homeless population by 11 percent in the last year, though he laments that new units seem to be taking longer to build than they did during Covid-19 and coming with new requirements.

“We were standing these up in six months at a cost of $80,000 or less all-in, including the utility hookup and common space, and now it’s taking progressively longer and costing more,” he told me, pointing to a new village project that cost the city $250,000 a door. Another San Jose village that took a year and a half to build saw costs go from originally $100,000 per unit to more than $175,000.

In September, Mahan urged his colleagues to quit making excuses for why they couldn’t build more units faster, and led a successful push to adopt a shelter crisis emergency declaration so San Jose could bypass certain building rules. Mahan says he’s motivated not only by a desire to help the homeless but to improve local neighborhoods generally. Calls for crime, fire, and blight in the immediate areas of the villages went down a year after they were built, according to a city analysis.

Each tiny house village in San Jose costs about $15 million to launch, and $3-4 million annually thereafter to operate. In June, the city’s budget director said funding roughly 1,400 of these shelter units will cost upward of $60 million by 2030, a “difficult” figure for San Jose to manage. The mayor, for his part, remains optimistic that external funding sources will come through.

Out of sight, out of mind?

Another reason some have grown excited about “tiny home” shelters is often left unsaid: to no longer have to witness homeless people outside on a daily basis.

Tiny houses provide elected officials with faster and cheaper alternatives to building permanent housing or congregate shelters, and may provide cities with the legal authority to then clear out any remaining tent encampments. This has roused city elites anxious about their increasingly visible homeless crisis.

A federal lawsuit led by Los Angeles business leaders frustrated with their city’s lack of action around tent encampments resulted in LA pledging to construct up to 16,000 new shelter beds by 2027, to house 60 percent of the homeless population in each of the fifteen council districts. These can include “tiny home” shelters, and in exchange, LA officials can sweep remaining tents and resume enforcing anti-camping bans.

“We are now getting much more excited about this 60 percent thing,” Funk, of Dignity Moves, told me. “I’m going to be working privately, quietly, but [to] give you a little preview, [we’re] thinking about doing this for San Francisco specifically as well in San Jose.” If San Francisco has about 4,500 people sleeping outside, according to the last Point In Time count, then Funk believes leaders can confidently estimate how many shelter beds will be necessary to build to start enforcing anti-camping laws again. “Let’s be clear,” she said, “one of the big motives here is Martin v. Boise, and people being concerned about getting sued.”

Funk’s legislative partner in the California state Senate, Josh Becker, plans to reintroduce a bill that would make it easier for cities to build tiny house shelters, and potentially even allow cities to count them toward their state-mandated housing production goals. Given that the tiny structures are much cheaper to build than both traditional housing and permanent supportive housing, a state green-light to include them in production targets could prove to be a major incentive. But that’s worrying news for those concerned the units may be less of a temporary, emergency solution after all.

Outside a tiny home, a painter works on a project.
Bryant Akers works on repairs at 33 Gough Street.

“We’re definitely seeing some cities focusing on this model as more than what I would call an interim solution and a gap solution,” said Amy King, the CEO of Pallet Shelter, a Washington-based company that produces tiny houses between $7,500 to $12,000 apiece.

When Becker’s bill was first introduced earlier this year and included the possibility that shelter units, including those produced by Pallet Shelter, could one day be considered permanent housing and even accept rent or housing vouchers, King’s company came out against it. “There’s just so much opportunity for people to take advantage,” King said of the idea.

Homeless advocates worry about a scenario where cities start to invest in lower-quality shelters that aren’t suitable for everyone, reduce investments in permanent housing, and grow more aggressive about fining or arresting those resistant to shelter offers. “We see sweeps and tiny homes going hand-in-hand,” said Alex Visotzky, with the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

A senior official with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told me the agency has no hard-and-fast policy yet on tiny houses, but is currently “evaluating whether there’s a place for them” in their efforts to end homelessness. As part of that the federal housing agency is investigating whether communities have been abiding by fair housing and civil rights laws as they expand the units.

“Not just segregation, but are people put there by choice?” the official asked. “Are there potential consequences if you don’t go there — like subject to arrest or other penalties? We’re considering all of that.”

The line between housing and shelter

In 2020 a fire broke out within a Pallet Shelter community in Banning, California — destroying 19 prefabricated homes, and displacing 38 people. Two years later another fire broke out within a Pallet Shelter community in Oakland, California, burning down three of the structures. One resident told Curbed she barely made it out as “the walls were melting” around her.

Pallet has denied responsibility for these fires, though the company did make changes to the building materials it uses. The two incidents loom large as leaders debate how cheaply they can build these structures and how tightly together they can pack them together on high-priced land.

Some housing advocates say the challenges cities are running into with building tiny shelters now mirror the same issues that often derail producing more housing at all. Proponents fear that as more pandemic-era emergency codes expire, and if more accidents like those in Banning and Oakland occur, such “quick-build bridge housing” will be built far less quickly.

“Our biggest challenge is the regulations, the code compliance to make sure everything meets all the parameters of the building code,” said Viken Ohanesian, CEO of Boss Cubez, which manufactured the prefabricated units used at the San Francisco shelter village. “It’s kind of like you can never have too much insurance, you can never be too safe in this world that we live in because it’s a litigious world.”

One option is to try and convince state lawmakers to pre-empt cities from tacking on new regulatory requirements. California lawmakers already took this step last year in banning mandates for fire sprinklers in “temporary sleeping cabins.” Funk says she’s “really, quite frankly, tempted to take the 10 other things that cities are starting to ask for, take them up to Daddy and say, ‘Can you break this rule?’” The costly rules and regulations, she believes, are a big part of how we got the housing crisis in the first place.

“I think our definition of housing with a capital ‘H’ is causing homelessness,” she said. “So we can either solve it or we can be stuck to our like, you know, our principles.”

Beyond worrying about building requirements and the practical longevity of tiny shelters, a broader, more existential set of criticisms have emerged around the policy idea.

One major concern is that investments in “tiny home” structures actually sustain homelessness, by diverting needed investments from permanent housing. Many people living in temporary shelters of all kinds end up returning to the streets after their allotted time to stay ends, not having anywhere else to go.

“Until there is more affordable housing, this ‘solution’ leads nowhere,” argued Josh Kruger, a formerly homeless journalist in Philadelphia. “Instead, these are just feel-good boondoggles so middle and upper class people can feel like they’re doing something … They’re storage sheds for human beings who otherwise remind us all of our society’s failure to care.”

In 2021 the Washington state’s Lived Experience Coalition — a group of current and formerly homeless individuals — issued a statement lambasting the “dehumanizing conditions and lack of services” some experience in tiny house villages, and warned of lawmakers who avert focus from more permanent solutions. In Seattle, for example, some residents lived in tiny wood huts that lacked heat and electricity, where school children had to do their homework with flashlights.

Barbara Poppe, the former executive director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness during the Obama administration, said while some models are better than existing congregate homeless shelters, some are “far worse.” What really alarms her, she told me, is the “corporate investor model, for-profit industry” that’s cropped up, naming companies like Tuff Shed and Pallet Shelter as examples.

“Some of these are quite inhumane, and some of those cost studies — Pallet will say it costs $12,000 [per door], but that’s a sleight of hand, it’s very deceiving, because there’s all the site preparation cost on top,” she said. “It seems like what the public wants and by extension what the elected officials say they want is an easy answer and a cheaper answer to the fact that we have an extreme affordable housing crisis that sits on top of growing inequality.”

For advocates like Visotzky with the National Alliance to End Homelessness, conceptualizing housing and shelter as distinct categories remains important. “If we start calling [tiny homes] housing then folks are going to potentially lose eligibility for a lot of key services and resources,” he said. “We need to make commitments and not shortcuts.”

Supporters of building more tiny houses say their critics are stuck in the status quo, implicitly accepting that thousands of people will remain outside. They say it’s a false choice that cities can’t invest in both permanent and interim solutions at once, and that the crisis demands vision and urgency.

“One of the biggest hurdles that’s blocking us from ending unsheltered homelessness is lost optimism,” said Funk. “Dignity Moves’ value-add can be to come in and say, ‘Oh, no, it’s very possible, here’s exactly the paint-by-color map of how.”

What does a real dignified investment look like?

The Connect Homes factory in San Bernardino, California, located about an hour outside Los Angeles, had homeless shelters on the assembly line the day I visited in mid-October. The company was working to fulfill a contract for Long Beach, California, which plans to open its first village of tiny house shelters in early 2025.

Originally founded in 2012 to produce factory-built houses, Connect Homes leaders realized during the pandemic they could use virtually their same industrial tools to develop shelters, too. The company now wants to build shelters nationwide.

A worker talks next to a partly finished wooden tiny house being built inside a factory.
A bearded man in a black shirt and glasses points at architectural plans on a large monitor screen.

Gordon Stott, co-founder of Connect Homes, explains new homes in various stages of production. These will be used as interim housing in Long Beach, California.

“Is it housing, or is it shelter? Well I think what we’re seeing is it can be both,” said co-founder Gordon Stott. While at a higher price point than some of his competitors — units can be sold to cities at $80,000 per door — Stott believes his products are more durable investments, and prove homeless shelters don’t have to be ugly or stigmatized.

The shelter units set for Long Beach will be between 110 and 185 square feet (the larger ones will be ADA-accessible) and the city specifically looked for vendors who could build units with en suite bathrooms. The city used part of a $25 million state grant to finance the construction and expects to spend about $930,000 per year annually in operating costs.

Three doorways lead to three rooms as tiny homes are being made.

“We’re in a moment where cities are having to step up and do things they haven’t done before,” Rex Richardson, Long Beach’s mayor, told me. “We’ve had a big history of dealing with homelessness and providing housing but we weren’t prepared for the crisis — the way it manifested — with a 62 percent increase between 2020 and 2022.”

Models with private bathrooms might deter some local governments, tempted to spend as little as possible. But if the structures are likely to stick around for years in a city, and if people are likely to live in them for extended periods of time, then investing in nicer units with higher standards makes more sense. Ferry, with Portland State University, said he tells municipalities considering tiny house villages “to think really carefully about” their request for proposals, or RFPs. If you put out a contract for a non-congregate shelter between 70 and 150 square feet with no other specifications, then you’re generally obligated to go with the cheapest bidder.

For now though, most leaders have been drawn to companies that offer cheaper upfront products. While most players on the market say their relocatable shelters can last at least a decade if not more, none have been operating long enough to really put their claims to the test, to truly see if “tiny home” units can last, bouncing around from plot of land to plot of land.

Patrick Monahan, a 42-year-old resident of the shelter village in San Francisco, had been sleeping outside off and on for almost 10 years before he moved into his tiny cabin on Gough Street.

Wooden garden boxes are filled with black soil and a variety of green growing plants.
Volunteers plant gardens for the residents at 33 Gough Street.
A man with long dark hair, a cap, and glasses, stands in the doorway of a tiny house.
Patrick Monahan is a resident at 33 Gough Street.

Monahan never wanted to stay in traditional homeless shelters, and he’s appreciative of what the village offers him: a “fairly safe” environment that’s “very pretty and clean” and where the “food’s not great, but it’s free.” He doesn’t love using a porta-potty but thinks it’s better than going on the street.

Still, Monahan holds out hope that one day he’ll have something more. “I can’t have visitors here,” he said. “I rather have my own place, that’s mine.”

But Where Can We Shelter?

Originally published in The Nation on June 16, 2020.
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After the fifth debate of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, The Washington Post published one of its infamous fact-checks highlighting those moments when, in the paper’s estimation, someone got too loose with the truth. Among the 10 claims flagged by the Post was Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s remark that the United States has “500,000 people sleeping out on the street.” This statement was “exaggerated,” the Post admonished, because while it’s true that in 2018 the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimated that there were 553,000 people experiencing homelessness in America, not all of them were technically on the streets; some 360,000 were in shelters or transitional housing.

Putting aside that many experts believe HUD grossly undercounts the homeless, the Post’s finger-wagging exemplified some of the peak absurdities of America’s housing crisis. The United States is the richest country in the world, but millions of its people struggle to afford housing or find it at all. Instead of ensuring that there are enough units in areas where people want to live, we’ve dawdled for decades and made excuses for why things can’t be different—or even claimed they really aren’t so bad.

Golden Gates, a new book on the housing crisis by New York Times reporter Conor Dougherty, dives straight into these problems, skillfully exploring everything from the yes in my backyard (YIMBY) movement, which promotes more housing development, to anti-gentrification activism, the normalization of homelessness, and the factors that have made it so prohibitively expensive to build anything new. It’s the latest addition to a slate of books on housing that have come out over the past few years, including Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, Ben Austen’s High-Risers, Matthew L. Schuerman’s Newcomers, and P.E Moskowitz’s How to Kill a City. These books have explored various aspects of housing discrimination, especially the burdens borne by the nation’s poor and people of color, but Dougherty’s is among the first to look squarely at the politics of trying to respond to this disaster. By examining the inertia and ineffectiveness of political leaders who largely agree on what needs to be done, he makes a sobering case for how and why our politics have failed. While not so much a book of specific policy prescriptions, Golden Gates helps clarify why we have a housing crisis in the first place.

As suggested by the title, Golden Gates focuses on California, especially on San Francisco, where the housing troubles are particularly extreme. California has the distinction of having one of the highest housing costs in the nation and some of the highest-paying jobs. It also has, using HUD’s metric, more than 150,000 people experiencing homelessness—far more than any other state in the country. But California’s problems, Dougherty insists, are not anomalous: They are merely “an exaggerated example of the geographic inequalities” that we see in almost every American city as urban centers grapple with the increasing concentration of economic opportunity and the rising cost of living near it. As higher-paying industries like tech and consulting consolidate in and around a few dense areas and as lower-paying retail and health care jobs replace those in manufacturing, the competition to find housing near the good-paying jobs has grown more acute.

To tell this story of housing scarcity and political inaction, Dougherty focuses on a diverse set of people, including Jesshill Love, a longtime Bay Area landlord wrestling with how to raise rents, and Rafael Avendaño, the director of a youth center who tries to teach teenagers in Redwood City how to fight their evictions. We hear from housing developers like Dennis O’Brien and Rick Holliday about the byzantine barriers they face to build more homes and from state Senator Scott Wiener, who has struggled to get his housing reform bills approved. And we hear quite a bit from leaders in the YIMBY movement, like the teacher turned housing activist Sonja Trauss, who moved to the Bay Area in 2011. Since then, the Bay Area has created roughly eight new jobs for every new housing unit, far beyond the 1.5 jobs per new unit recommended by planners. Trauss and her fellow YIMBYs want more homes built, arguing that the shortage in metro areas with highly sought-after jobs has led to soaring rents and home prices and justified fears of displacement.

One of the most sobering aspects of Dougherty’s narrative comes from his historical findings. Many people are familiar with the current affordability crisis in San Francisco, which is often blamed on greedy tech CEOs and venture capitalists. But fewer are aware of its deeper roots. Digging through the archives, Dougherty shows just how long California leaders have been aware of the housing crisis that the state faced if it didn’t alter course. “Changing San Francisco Is Foreseen as a Haven for Wealthy and Childless,” read one New York Times headline in 1981. Two years earlier, an MIT urban planning professor blasted the Bay Area for its “arrogant” and “self-serving” land-use policies and traced how developers were routinely stymied by environmentalists and homeowners opposed to new people moving in. Delivering a 1981 commencement speech at UC Berkeley, the university’s top economics student warned that the Bay Area’s housing shortage would result in sharply rising prices and that homeowners were likely to keep fighting any efforts to address that.

The commencement speaker was right, yet too little was done in the years that followed. This lack of reform around land use was largely rooted in the failure of leaders to take on entrenched interests who profited from the status quo—from the investors, developers, and building trades to the homeowners who were fortunate enough to move to a desirable area first.

Today politicians are trying to tackle these structural problems more directly. Policy analysts say California needs to build 3.5 million homes to get serious about solving its housing crisis, and in 2017, California Governor Gavin Newsom committed to reaching this goal by 2025. But this is a tremendous task that would necessitate building roughly 500,000 units a year, when over the past decade, on average, fewer than 80,000 homes were built in the state annually. And there are, as Dougherty observes, considerable impediments that stand in the way, including soaring costs for construction and land. The cost of building a 100-unit affordable housing project in California had increased from $265,000 per unit in 2000 to almost $425,000 by 2016. And that’s an average. In cities like San Francisco, it can cost upward of $850,000 to build a single subsidized unit. When California’s legislature passed a $4 billion bond to build affordable housing in 2017, it was hailed as a serious step forward, one that would amount to a nearly $12 billion effort when paired with private money. But $12 billion divided by $425,000 equals just 28,235 units, or 0.8 percent of the 3.5 million goal. As Dougherty writes, “This sort of math could make a joke of any new funding effort.”

Voters across California have been more supportive of new funding packages for affordable housing over the past few years, but the quiet dread among advocates is that once the public realizes how little effect each influx of money has on the crisis, their appetite for new taxes might wane. “Behind each new affordable housing bond and the additional billions for homeless services was a public who thought they were being generous, when really the new taxes were nothing in comparison to a problem that was getting worse faster than cities could deploy the money,” Dougherty writes.

While the political leaders in Sacramento and on city councils continue to squabble, renters are doing what they can to organize, and Dougherty gives voice to their experiences too. In particular, we hear from teenager Stephanie Gutierrez, who studied every Tuesday night with other community members how to protest gentrification and eviction. One day, Gutierrez returned home to discover that her family’s rent would be jumping by 45 percent.

Gutierrez and the activists she worked with did their best to raise hell. “No hay peor lucha que la que no se hace,” another tenant insisted—there is no worse fight than the one that isn’t fought. But Dougherty doesn’t sugarcoat the hurdles that renters face. “Protests could make [housing] flips more expensive, but not nearly by enough,” he writes. Despite the occasional bad headlines, developers saw easy opportunities to make more money, and landlords were well within their legal rights to raise rents.

Dougherty also follows the YIMBY activists as they mobilize for new subsidized and market-rate housing. Their build-everything philosophy often pits them against anti-gentrification groups, which view new for-profit development as housing policy moving in the wrong direction. But activists like Trauss insist that more housing will help reduce prices for everyone by relieving pressure on strained markets. Dougherty is sympathetic to this argument, but he also notes some of the real limits faced by these mostly white, highly educated activists as they struggle to build a multiracial and cross-class movement.

Perhaps one reason Dougherty is more sympathetic to the YIMBY movement is that unlike many others, it has been more willing to confront the reality that you can’t stop people from moving to dense, crowded cities, no matter how much you wish they’d stay away. As Wiener, who is aligned with the YIMBYs, once vented, “There is a strain of self-described progressive politics in San Francisco that says: ‘Lock down the city’…. Don’t build more housing—just lock it down, and maybe if we dig a moat around the city and put crocodiles in it we can just stop people from coming.”

Despite finding some hope in local activism, Dougherty doesn’t end his book on a particularly optimistic note. The rising costs to build, the increasing polarization, and the failure to take on entrenched special interests, he suggests, could leave California in much the same place it has long been. And yet he writes that there is growing momentum on the legislative level, not just in California but across the country. Since 2017, rent-control bills and ballot initiatives have cropped up in roughly a dozen states, and in February 2019, Oregon became the first to pass rent control statewide. In June 2019, New York legislators beefed up rent control for nearly 1 million apartments in New York City, and California approved statewide rent control a few months later. Meanwhile, the Minneapolis City Council voted to end single-family zoning, a measure intended to boost the housing supply, and Oregon shortly followed suit. In the DC area, where planners say at least 320,000 new units are needed in the next decade to accommodate demand and population growth, lawmakers are considering measures to expand rent control and reduce barriers to construction.

Yet a crucial question in Golden Gates remains unanswered: What can governments do to help those who need housing now without enacting policies that could make the situation worse in the long term, whether by exacerbating displacement and segregation or by contributing to an even more severe shortage down the road?

Some new housing ideas have emerged recently on the left, such as building more housing that would be kept off the market for speculation and profit entirely. The homes guarantee movement, launched in September 2019, seeks to do for housing what Medicare for All would do for health care. While some homes guarantee advocates object to the idea of expanding Section 8 vouchers because they’d like to reduce reliance on the private rental market, others maintain that these policies are not necessarily in conflict with each other. In fact, Sanders campaigned on both a homes guarantee and making Section 8 vouchers available to all who are eligible. “Mixed solutions can feel like a cop-out,” Dougherty writes, “especially in polarized times. And yet, over and over, in city after city, it’s always where people end up and what seems most likely to work.”

He has a point. To move forward, movements will have to find ways to break out of their particular communities and build strength across class lines. In other cases, activists and political leaders might need, as was the case with Medicare for All, to find new language to address existing policy demands. One think tank in Seattle tested YIMBY messaging and found that the word “homes” worked better than “development” and the phrase “walkable and convenient” was more appealing than “density.” In Minneapolis a YIMBY group has opted for the warmer name Neighbors for More Neighbors. These are all worthwhile steps, but the politics won’t be solved by friendlier rhetoric alone. To build more housing, we’ll need to build more power.

Why Subsidizing Teacher Housing with Tax Credits Is Bad Policy

Originally published in The American Prospect on October 24, 2016.
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Late last month California Governor Jerry Brown signed the Teacher Housing Act of 2016—a bill (as its preamble states) that will “facilitate the acquisition, construction, rehabilitation, and preservation of affordable housing restricted to teachers and school district employees.” Critically, the legislation allows California to use its federal Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) to finance teacher housing—making it the first state in the country to do so.

The law has been sold as a win-win for everyone, and certainly on its face, it sounds appealing. There’s broad recognition that housing is increasingly expensive —especially in exorbitantly pricey cities like San Francisco. Americans strongly support their public school teachers—77 percent say they continue to “trust and have confidence” in them. Moreover, California is grappling with teacher shortages, and champions of the new law believe that providing housing assistance could help attract and retain quality educators, strengthening local communities to boot.

But make no mistake: There are some real losers here.

The LIHTC was established as part of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, and today it is the country’s largest federal program to support place-based, affordable rental housing. The Internal Revenue Service runs it, but individual states get considerable freedom to decide how to distribute their tax credits, so long as they meet federal requirements. One such requirement is that units must target households earning 60 percent or less of the area median income.

This 60 percent threshold is notably higher than other federal affordable housing programs, like Section 8 vouchers and public housing. While LIHTC units built in high-poverty neighborhoods house extremely poor tenants, plenty aren’t built there, which is why tax-credit tenants tend to have higher incomes than recipients of other federal rental assistance programs.

Given that federal housing subsidies are in limited supply, the allocation of tax credits to fund teacher housing merits more scrutiny that it’s received.

“The low-income housing tax credit is meant for single mothers who didn’t graduate from high school, not those people with college degrees and masters degrees,” says Keren Horn, an economist at University of Massachusetts Boston who studies the LIHTC. “Tax credits are targeted at 60 percent of AMI, and if teachers in your metropolitan area are earning less than that, I think the answer is you have to raise their income.”

And then of course, how do we justify giving housing subsidies to some public workers but not others? Why subsidize teachers’ housing but not nurses’? Or trash collectors’?

“It’s a bad idea, and it gets people competing with each other over who is the most oppressed,” says Peter Dreier, an urban policy professor at Occidental College. “A lot of colleges provide housing subsidies for their employees, and if an employer wants to do that as a benefit, or something negotiated through collective bargaining—sure. But the government shouldn’t be in that business.”

Nationally, nearly 20 million renter households have incomes low enough to qualify for federal subsidies, but fewer than one out of four of these households receive anything at all. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that the number of unassisted renters with “worst case” housing needs—meaning they pay more than half of their incomes for housing, or live in severely substandard conditions—rose by 30 percent between 2007 and 2013.

These trends hold broadly true in California as well. In 2016, more than 1,590,000 poor California households paid more than half their incomes on rent, a 28 percent increase from before the recession. The budget for public housing in the state shrank by more than $56 million between 2010 and 2014. More than 113,000 Californians live in shelters, or on the streets.

California’s new teacher housing law does not make more money available for developers of affordable housing; it allows developers to amend the list of eligible recipients. The result is potentially fewer resources available for deeply impoverished families.

The law also carries racial implications. During the 2014-2015 school year, 65 percent of California public school teachers were white; four percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic. By contrast, a 2012 HUD report says that roughly 56 percent of the residents in California’s tax credit units were black or Hispanic, and only 28 percent were white. It’s realistic to worry that this new law will facilitate the transfer of resources away from poor people of color to (oft-struggling) middle-class white professionals.

The federal government used to prohibit states from awarding LIHTC to specific occupations. There’s an IRS rule that all residential units have to be available for “general public use.”

But in 2008, as Congress was working on a new housing bill in the wake of the housing market collapse, a group of developers who build housing for artists successfully lobbied for a “general use” exemption. Since then, LIHTC-funded housing complexes restricted specifically for artists have increased considerably.

In May, the Prospect covered a new report on these artist housing complexes, which were found to have far whiter and comparatively more affluent tenants than one typically finds in LIHTC projects. Coining these developments “Politically Opportune Subsidized Housing”—or POSH—the report’s authors noted that such projects carry great political appeal, since using tax credits to support redevelopment and urban revitalization—in this case, supporting the arts—is far less divisive than building new housing for poor black and Latino families.

Myron Orfield, the director of the Institute of Metropolitan Opportunity, which published the artist housing report, says teacher housing feels an awful lot like artist housing. (In fact, California’s new teacher housing law was passed precisely to legislate the same kind of statutory exemption that Congress carved out for artists in 2008.)

Orfield also notes the lucrative opportunities these projects offer developers, who often struggle to use affordable housing tax credits in more affluent communities. The prospects for LIHTC construction in suburban areas become much more favorable if the developments would go towards housing middle-class public school teachers, who are disproportionately white.

“If you build housing in whiter, suburban neighborhoods, those projects would be worth more to the developer, they would appreciate faster, and there also would be more incentives for developers to turn the units into market-rate rentals as fast as they can,” says Orfield. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to build higher-value housing, but what you should do is build true affordable housing for low-income people, instead of taking a political short cut by making it only for teachers.”

The teacher housing idea is already spreading to other states, including areas that do not face acute struggles to afford housing. In Baltimore, where some teacher housing developments recently cropped up, developers say they built it not because affordable housing was hard to find, but because they wanted to reward educators with “Class-A apartments.” In Newark, developers touted the urban revitalization potential of teacher housing. Others say teacher housing will lead to stronger relationships between students and educators, fortifying communities more broadly.

It’s worth noting that while a growing number of researchers have explored how housing instability negatively impacts student achievement, there is no real evidence that says teachers living in the same school district where they work improves public education, student-teacher relationships, or local communities. And as The Learning Policy Institute, a Palo Alto-based education think tank noted last month, housing incentive programs have never even been studied to determine if they’re effective at recruiting or retaining teachers. (An LA Times investigation found that local teachers earned too much to even qualify for the affordable housing complexes the Los Angeles Unified School District recently built for its educators.) Plus, while research does suggest that teacher turnover negatively affects student learning, plenty of workers take on longer commutes in exchange for higher salaries.

Evidence of a national teacher housing crisis is also thin: A report issued last month by the National Housing Conference found that high school teachers earning median wages could rent a two-bedroom home in 94 percent of the 210 metro areas they studied, and teachers could purchase a median-price home in 62 percent of the metro areas. The report did not even take into account whether the teacher had a second income-earner in their household, suggesting the homeownership statistics are likely much higher.

Rather than carve out exceptions for certain jobs, Dreier says his state must tackle the housing crisis afflicting all middle class Californians, which means building more permanently affordable mixed-income housing, and protecting and preserving the affordable housing that already exists. In an era of tight resources, the public must find ways to prioritize supports for the most disadvantaged families, while also identifying new ways to improve the lives of the middle class. That’s the only real win-win.

 

Can Affordable Housing Help Retain Teachers?

Originally published in The American Prospect on November 18, 2015.
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On December 1, Allison Leshefsky, an elementary school gym teacher in San Francisco, will be evicted from the rent-controlled apartment she’s lived in for the past ten years. She and her partner pay $2,000 a month in rent, but if their place were put on the market, it would likely go for at least $5,000 a month—far more than any public school teacher could afford. As of August 2015, one-bedroom apartments in San Francisco rented for an average of $2,965 a month, and two-bedrooms for $3,853. Leshefsky’s landlord, who manages and partially owns nine San Francisco properties, has gained notoriety for evicting or allegedly forcing tenants out, in order to rent their units for more money.

Leshefsky has decided to finish out the school year teaching in San Francisco, even if that means paying jacked up prices for an air mattress she finds on Craigslist. “I’m making a commitment to get through the rest of the year regardless of whose couch I’m on or whose overpriced house I’m in,” she says. “I’m making a commitment to my students to finish this out.” But then, she says, she’ll have to leave.

In recent years, a growing number of researchers, policymakers, and philanthropists have directed their attention to the relationship between housing instability and student achievement. A great deal of evidence has shown how homelessness and housing insecurity can negatively impact a student’s behavior, which creates problems not only for them but for their classmates and teachers as well. A host of educational interventions are being tried in conjunction with local housing authorities, and some cities are even tying housing vouchers to specific struggling schools—in the hopes that such requirements will reduce student turnover and increase school performance.

Yet despite the perennial quest for top-notch teachers, less attention has been paid to the relationship between educators and their housing. It doesn’t require a great stretch of the imagination to think that teachers’ instructional capacities could be impacted by conditions they face outside the classroom, such as high rents, or unsafe housing. “There is no possible way the city can recruit talented people and maintain them with the housing crisis here,” says Leshefsky. “Students deserve teachers that are secure in their homes, and when a teacher is not secure, they can’t be the most effective educator.”

The city of San Francisco seems to agree. Last month, San Francisco’s mayor announced a new plan, formed in partnership with the school district and the teachers union, to provide housing assistance to some 500 public school teachers by 2020. Elements of the plan include forgivable loans, rental subsidies, housing counseling services, and the development of affordable housing specifically for teachers. This month, 73 percent  of San Francisco voters approved a ballot measure that will help make this plan a reality.

Across the country, other variants of teacher housing developments have cropped up, or are in the works—though the motivations for them, and allies behind them, differ from city to city. From San Francisco, to West Virginia, to Philadelphia, the efforts to attract, or retain, teachers through subsidized housing is growing more pronounced, and debates over how such projects impact their surrounding communities are likely to intensify in the coming years.

MATTHEW HARDY, the communications director for the San Francisco teachers union, says the union has a three-pronged strategy to deal with the city’s housing crisis. The first involves fighting for higher wages. In December 2014, the union negotiated a substantial salary increase for teachers and aides—a raise of more than 12 percent over three years. “But if we just limited ourselves to that, we’re not going to be successful,” says Hardy, which is why the union has also been pushing for teacher housing—using surplus district property—and for broader affordable housing policies for all city residents.

“Of course San Francisco is a wonderful place, and some people are willing to make immediate sacrifices to get their foot in the door, but it gets to a point where teachers start to wonder if they should continue paying $1,500 a month for a tiny room or move to the suburbs [where salaries are higher and housing is cheaper] and make $15,000-$20,000 more,” says Hardy. “We need to find ways to support teachers early in their careers, but also those who are more experienced and might want to start a family or buy a home.”

“If affordable brick-and-mortar teacher housing were actually here right now, and not several years in the future, then there would be no doubt in my mind that I would have continued to stay in the district,” Leshefsky said, wearily.

A very different sort of housing crisis plagues McDowell County, West Virginia—a poor, rural area, with a population that’s fallen by 80 percent since the 1950s. Teachers aren’t being priced out, but few want to move there, and those who might be so inclined struggle to find attractive housing options.

In 2011, former West Virginia First Lady Gayle Manchin asked Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), to help her figure out a way to improve McDowell’s school system. They started to organize a coalition of public and private organizations to tackle not only educational issues, but also regional poverty. In a speech given in 2012, Weingarten called this effort “solution-driven unionism.” Rather than shut down a school that’s struggling, she argued, unions can push to strengthen them with wraparound services. Then “learning improves, the school improves, community schools become more attractive than private or charter schools, people return to them with new confidence, home values increase and communities are renewed.”

Part of the McDowell plan includes not just wraparound services for community members, but also new apartments to attract teachers who might not otherwise want to move to McDowell County. As the lead coordinator involved in the teacher housing complex told Governing, “You can’t expect someone to leave life on a college campus for an isolated area where they live in the middle of nowhere and don’t know anybody.”

“What we’re constructing is the first multiple-story building in the area in decades,” said Weingarten in an interview. “The housing will address three big issues: the high teacher vacancy rate, the dearth of available housing, and the need for economic development.”

WHILE McDOWELL COUNTY’S “teacher village” won’t be the nation’s first, others are generally found in urban areas, and have been constructed largely without the involvement of the local teachers unions. In fact, partners more closely aligned to the educational reform movement have led them—those with ties to charter school networks and organizations like Teach for America.

In 2012, then-Mayor of Newark Cory Booker, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, leaders from Google and Goldman Sachs, and others gathered to break ground on the Newark Teachers Village—a downtown Newark development that houses three charter schools, a daycare facility, more than 200 subsidized teacher apartments, and nearly two dozen retail shops. The project received tens of millions of dollars in tax credits. (The Wall Street Journal reported on the event with the headline: “Viewing Newark as a ‘Blank Canvas’”.) The real estate development group that spearheaded the project, RBH Group, is listed as a Teach for America corporate sponsor, and one of RBH’s founding partners, Ron Beit, is the chairman of the board of TFA’s New Jersey chapter.

The Newark Teachers Union, an affiliate of the AFT, originally backed the Newark Teachers Village—though Newark teachers say that their now-deceased president, Joseph Del Grosso, did so without consulting union members. The AFT is an affiliate member of the AFL-CIO, a federation of labor organizations that includes construction unions, and some think Del Grosso supported the plan because it carried the potential to create new construction jobs, not because it was actually in the teachers’ interest. However, despite Del Grosso’s initial support, the union was ultimately uninvolved with the project.

“They basically shut out the public school teachers and the public school union,” said Weingarten in an interview. “Just like they shut out the community from their reform efforts, they shut us out too. Initially we had conversations [about the Teachers Village], and then we were stonewalled.” Had the AFT been involved, then the union likely would have invested pension funds into the project, which may have broadened, and diversified, the project’s mission, and given more stakeholders a say in shaping its development. The union could have also pushed to bring on different types of asset managers, like the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust, which they used in West Virginia and San Francisco. Ron Beit did not return repeated requests for comment.

Over the past couple years, similar teacher housing projects have opened up in other East Coast cities. In 2009, the Seawall Development Corporation established Miller’s Court in Baltimore, using millions of dollars in local, state, and federal tax credits—and another, Union Mill, a few years later. The lead developer, Donald Manekin, was a former board member of Teach For America, and said he originally got the idea to build teacher villages when he saw 100 new TFA members arriving in Baltimore each year. “We’d sit at the end of these board meetings and say wouldn’t it be great if there was a great place for teachers new to the city?” He made these remarks to Newsworks in 2013, as his company prepared to build another teacher housing complex in Philadelphia.

Teach For America’s vice president for administration, Matt Gould, told The New York Times that his organization backs the projects because they “allow [teachers] to have safe, affordable housing. It’s a recruiting tool.” Teach For America is also reportedly looking into New Orleans and Washington as additional cities to expand teacher housing.

I spoke with Thibault Manekin, Donald Manekin’s son, and co-founder of Seawall Development Corporation, about his work building teacher housing. “Really our goal was to provide Class-A apartments and space for teachers doing the most important work in our city, which is helping kids get an education,” he said. To do this, the Manekins provide teachers with a free fitness center, free parking, reduced rent, lounge space, and other amenities that one might find in a more expensive apartment building. (Their website describes the buildings as “an urban oasis”.) Manekin says his company is in the middle of a similar project in Springfield, Massachusetts, and helping others think through comparable developments in other cities. “Yeah, I think you’ll start to see this spread more,” he said.

I asked him if he thought Baltimore teachers had struggled to find safe or affordable housing before he and his father embarked on their projects. “I think the challenge was that teachers, often new to Baltimore, and new to the classroom, weren’t living with like-minded people, and so might be making bad decisions on where to live,” he said. “As a result of that it makes the job that much harder. We just wanted to provide them with a world class space at a significant discount.”

While safe and affordable housing was available, he went on, “you wouldn’t really be living with people in the same boat as you.” They wanted to establish a space where teachers could lean on one another outside of the workplace.

Weingarten says the union was not included in the Philadelphia project, and was only cursorily consulted with for the Baltimore developments.

BRANDEN RIPPEY, a Newark public school teacher who has been working in the district for 18 years, said he acknowledges that Newark needs to build better housing to attract high-quality teachers. “Newark isn’t San Francisco. You do need to work to draw people in, and some of the housing we have here is in bad neighborhoods, and there is crime,” he says. As well, most of Newark’s teachers live outside of the city, so the idea of enabling teachers to establish roots as residents within the community is something he also likes. “I support the idea of creating good, affordable housing for working class people. The problem is that [the Newark Teachers Village] is clearly designed for white, young professional types, at a time when we desperately need more housing for poor people of color.”

Rippey notes that the Teachers Village is located close to other redevelopment projects in downtown Newark. “It’s just becoming a little yuppie commercial district,” he says. “The reality is they have a vision for gentrifying the whole downtown.” Rippey believes that these projects serve as a way to easily import TFA teachers, and by extension, weaken union power. Whereas developers like Beit and Manekin see the teacher housing complexes as positive ways to build communal spaces for local educators, Rippey thinks they can serve as a vehicle to isolate new and relatively young teachers from the union and the broader community. “It’ll keep those teachers residentially, and almost culturally, segregated,” he says.

IN A WAY, these Teachers Villages function as sort of a camp experience. You may be making a two-year commitment to live and work in an unfamiliar city, one that perhaps you, or your family, worry is unsafe. You know that you’re going to be working hard, long days—and so living in close quarters with people going through similar experiences might be quite comforting. All in all, it appears to be a pretty good deal—you’ll be afforded lots of amenities and discounts, you’ll live in a place you know is secure, and you’ll have the chance to develop friendships with other “like-minded” individuals.

In 2013, Mark Weber, a public school teacher and an education policy doctoral student, wrote some strong critiques about these new teacher housing projects.

It’s the perfect scheme: Beit and his private investors get tens of millions of dollars in tax credits to finance the development. He then turns around and rents his commercial units to charter schools, which drain tax revenues away from the neighboring public schools (which could sorely use the money to shore up their crumbling infrastructures). Those schools then pay their young teachers, recruited from TFA, who then turn around and pay rent to Beit. So Beit’s managed to develop three revenue streams—tax credits, charter school rents, and teacher residence rents—all made possible by the proliferation of charters and TFA.

And here’s the real beauty part: If the neighborhood gets gentrified and property values rise, the increases accrue to the property owners—like Beit—but not the people who actually live in the neighborhood. Think about it: If these teachers were buying brownstones and condos, the rising property values would accrue to them. But, because they’re renters, and not owners, they don’t see any of the increase. Their presence will raise the value of the neighborhood’s properties, but they’ll get none of the reward (assuming everything goes according to plan).

I called Weber to discuss some of his thoughts in greater detail. He sounded skeptical that these subsidized projects had much value at all: Will they really help attract lifelong educators into the profession, or will they just serve as a nice perk for young teachers who wouldn’t stay in the classroom beyond a few years anyway?

“If these charter schools need young people who are willing to work long hours and do the career for just a couple years, then things like teacher villages are almost custom-made, because you’re not going to be buying condos, and it’s close to your work,” he said. “Is that sustainable? I would argue no if we’re trying to build a workforce that sees teaching as a lifetime career. We could continue to build, or we can ask ourselves if we’re paying teachers enough money. If you can’t comfortably live here without staying in subsidized housing, maybe that’s a problem.”

Others have also questioned whether this whole subsidized housing deal isn’t just a misplaced way to avoid paying teachers significantly higher salaries. An individual used to feel more comfortable entering the teaching profession—despite its lack of prestige or big paychecks—given the relative stability if offered: a middle-class life, solid health care benefits, and a stable pension to live on during retirement. Today, however, those sorts of guarantees are beginning to fall by the wayside.

“If you’re not going to offer good health care benefits, what are you going to offer to get people to join the profession?” asked Weber. “Some modest rent control in hip neighborhoods? That’s not going to help the neighborhood much, and that’s not going to be much of an incentive to go into teaching.”

MAYBE SUBSIDIZED HOUSING that targets young professionals won’t be what it takes to help attract career educators, yet it’s clear that cities do want to help recruit and retain educators who actually live in the communities in which they serve—an effort that may require more than just a salary increase (though that would help.) Whether it’s a Teach for America participant looking for a supportive communal space, or a mid-career educator with a family who wants to live closer to his or her workplace, thinking about the intersections between housing and teaching is something that even the most progressive unionists, like Rippey, believe we should be doing more of.

Weingarten defended the AFT’s McDowell and San Francisco projects, and contrasted them with the ones in Baltimore, Newark, and Philadelphia. “We’re not looking to create a boutique pipeline for some people to work in different communities, it’s not that,” she said. “It’s about creating affordable housing so people can establish roots in the cities in which they live.”

Still, even teacher villages more closely aligned to the reform movement are helping young teachers, and local nonprofit organizations, forge better ties with the communities in which they serve. “The amount of teachers that have actually stayed in the classroom and in Baltimore, and then gone out and bought homes has been really inspiring to see,” said Thibault Manekin. Of the 30 homes he and his father have built in Baltimore, he says 20 have been sold to former tenants of Miller’s Court and Union Mill.

Would Leshefsky be willing to live outside San Francisco and continue working at her school with a longer daily commute?

“No, I would not be willing to do a two-hour commute just to serve a community that I don’t belong to,” she said. “I’m one of the most constant people in my students’ lives right now, and I don’t think someone who lives outside the city can necessarily connect with their students in the same way. We’re all going through very similar struggles.”