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The Mountain View Whisman school board is mulling the path ahead for the district’s subsidized staff housing development, as it faces a deadline for a major decision about the project’s financial structure and continued criticism of the initiative from some community members.
The school board spent more than two and a half hours discussing the project at a Thursday, March 6, meeting, with three separate agenda items dedicated to the topic.
Mountain View Whisman’s yearslong effort to provide affordable housing for its teachers and other staff is at an important moment. The first tenants are starting to move into subsidized apartments that the district built, and trustees are considering whether to purchase the land beneath the building.
The school district constructed 144 apartments at 699 N. Shoreline Boulevard using roughly $88 million in funding from the Measure T bond that voters approved in 2020. A sizable majority of those units, 123, are set aside for district employees. City of Mountain View employees get first dibs to 20 apartments and one unit is set aside for a property manager.
While the district owns the building itself, it doesn’t own the land beneath it. Instead, the district planned to pay $1.9 million annually to a private developer to rent the land.
Now, the district is considering whether to buy out the land, but faces a June 30 deadline to make a decision under the terms of an “option to purchase” agreement that the school board entered into in January. The purchase price is subject to negotiations with the developer.
At last Thursday’s meeting, the school board discussed whether to pause any planned school construction projects to free up money to buy the land. The board also received a summary of the history of the project, and heard from experts the district has brought in to advise on the land purchase.
Parents and community members attended the meeting both in person and virtually to express opposition to the project, with many of the speakers arguing that it poses a substantial financial risk to the district.
No formal votes were taken because all of the items related to employee housing were agendized for discussion, rather than action. Votes could occur at future meetings.
Deciding whether to pause school improvement projects
At Thursday’s meeting, the board discussed whether there was appetite to pause any of the bond-funded upgrades that are planned at local schools, in an effort to have more money available for the potential land purchase.
Chief Business Officer Rebecca Westover went through a detailed list of Measure T projects, noting which ones district staff believed could be paused and which should continue. Some projects, like a $15.5 million roofing project, are necessary to prevent costly problems in the future, Westover said.
She also noted that an initiative to add trees and green spaces to schools was no longer on the list of possible projects to pause, after parents strongly objected to that idea at a board meeting last month.
All of the board members except President Bill Lambert generally expressed reticence to the idea of large-scale pausing of bond projects. Lambert was alone in advocating for a broad pause on Measure T projects, so that the district doesn’t constrain its options to purchase the teacher housing land.
In contrast, the other four board members only suggested pausing or changing smaller projects, including a lighting project, projector upgrades and work on fleet electrification.
There’s also roughly $2.3 million set aside to add covered walkways at Castro Elementary School, which isn’t likely to be undertaken until well after the district makes a decision on purchasing the teacher housing land.
Changing the existing bond funding allocation would require a supermajority vote with at least four members in favor, Interim Superintendent Jeff Baier said.
Devon Conley noted that it looked like the district had roughly $25 million that it could pull together without cancelling any projects. These came from sources including unallocated bond funds, expected savings from current bond projects and fees that the district charges developers.
Conley said she was interested in whether using that $25 million, plus a potential loan, to buy the housing land would be enough to allow the district to lower rents for the project and provide a “comfortable cushion” to avoid the prospect of using the district’s operating revenue.
“My goal is to get the rents down without touching our general fund. Nobody up here wants to touch our general fund,” Conley said, referring to her fellow board members.
Concerns over affordability of staff apartments
One question that came up multiple times at Thursday’s meeting was whether the rents that the district is charging its staff for the new apartments are truly affordable for teachers.
At a recent meeting of the district’s staff housing committee, the teacher representative on the committee expressed disappointment that the units haven’t turned out to be affordable for her and many of her colleagues. In particular, she raised concerns about the rents being charged for units set aside for staff members earning up to 120% of the median income locally.
The 144 apartments that the school district built are split into two buckets. Roughly one-quarter of the units are set aside for those earning up to 80% of the area median income, with the remaining three-quarters set aside for those earning up to 120% of the AMI.
There is a substantial gulf between the rents for the 80% and 120% units. A one bedroom apartment at the 80% tier costs $1,450 per month, compared to $2,900 at the 120% tier. Due to their income, Mountain View Whisman teachers who have been in the district for more than roughly six years wouldn’t qualify for the 80% tier.
Multiple board members expressed concern about these rates and interest in ensuring that the units are affordable for district teachers.
“At the end of the day, this is an affordable housing project for teachers. We need to make it affordable for teachers,” Lambert said. “It can’t be an unaffordable housing project for teachers, which it sort of is in that realm right now.”
Baier acknowledged the concerns and said that district staff was already working to address it. He added that these are the kind of issues the district expected it would have to deal with as the project rolled out.
At the same time, Baier also noted that the district is ahead of the schedule it set for renting out units. In just the first couple of weeks since the building opened, Baier said that 36 units are already rented and 23 staff members have already moved in. The 36 units are all rented to district employees, spokesperson Shelly Hausman confirmed.
That pace puts the district roughly where it expected to be by the end of April, Baier said.
Some of the public speakers at Thursday’s meeting questioned how many of the tenants were teachers, versus other district employees. However, board members Charles DiFazio and Ana Reed pushed back on that framing, noting that there are a lot of employees other than teachers who help children.
As a teacher herself, Reed said that the work of many other staff members – including instructional assistants, custodians and office staff – are necessary for her to do her job well. She added that at the beginning of her career, below market rate housing in Mountain View allowed her to live close to where she worked and save money.
“That was a game changer for me,” Reed said. “I don’t know that I would still be an educator here in the Bay Area had I not had that opportunity.”
Community members raise continued concerns
Community members turned out to Thursday’s meeting to raise a range of concerns about the project, including that it could be financially risky for the district, wasn’t actually affordable for teachers, took money away from projects that would more directly benefit students, and distracted the district from its educational mission.
Ling Wang asked the board to acknowledge that mistakes had been made, and asked for more clarity on the district’s financial plan.
“What is our contingency and risk mitigation plan?” Wang asked. “Because right now, this project feels like a money pit and I fear it will continue to be the albatross around our children’s education.”
Many speakers explicitly asked the district to avoid buying the land and to exit the project entirely.
Rakhee Kaushik argued that it would have been easier to just directly give teachers money towards a housing allowance.
“From listening to this discussion, it is hard to tell that we are in a school district board meeting. It sounds like we’re a property developer talking about our latest project,” Kaushik said. “Here we are, spending hours and hours not talking about student learning, which is the very reason for MVWSD’s existence.”
Experts urge patience
In contrast, two experts that the district brought in to offer advice on the project urged the board to have patience and stick with the project as it comes to fruition.
Real estate consultant Dominic Dutra argued that the district has tools at its disposal to mitigate concerns with the project, and that offering teacher housing puts Mountain View Whisman ahead of other districts in recruiting key staff members.
Peter Ingram, who advised the Los Altos School District on its acquisition of a 10th school site, similarly told the board that it will take time to find the best ways to leverage the housing development to the district’s benefit.
“It’s going to get better and you have an amazing thing that you’ve started,” Ingram said. “We just need to finish it with the respect that it deserves.”
Lambert continued to express concerns about the project, as he has done in past meetings. In response to Dutra and Ingram arguing for patience, Lambert said that he shared the public’s impatience and thanked the community members for speaking up.
Lambert said that he’d felt “gaslit” during his first two years on the board, when he said that he was assured everything with the project was going okay. Lambert argued that there is urgency to getting teachers into the units and that the district was facing a deadline to decide whether to purchase the land.
“We’re on a moving train – and that doesn’t mean we rush and make the wrong decisions,” Lambert said. “It means we put the resources (in place) to address the needs as soon as we possibly can.”
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Good article. Instead of offering subsidized housing that doesn’t work out as this article explains (as most of the teachers who would need it still can’t get it affordably), how about a simpler solution that would actually work? Pay the teachers more. That way you can get teachers who can afford to live where they work. And you may even get higher quality teaching.
“There is a substantial gulf between the rents for the 80% and 120% units. A one bedroom apartment at the 80% tier costs $1,450 per month, compared to $2,900 at the 120% tier. Due to their income, Mountain View Whisman teachers who have been in the district for more than roughly six years wouldn’t qualify for the 80% tier.”
80% AMI for a household of 1 is $103,200 income per year
120% AMI for a household of 1 is $154,800.
Do teachers really make that kind of money in Mountain View???
Please use Google. This is all public information.