STORY: San Diego Unified weighs plans for 1,000 affordable homes for school district employees
The San Diego Unified School Board is weighing recommendations to build 1,000 income-restricted apartments on five of its properties across the city, with a goal of housing 10% of its employees within the next decade, in what would mark a significant expansion of the district’s decade-old real estate strategy.
“The time has come for us to set some bold but achievable long-term goals together,” Lee Dulgeroff, the district’s facilities executive director, said at a board workshop last week.
School districts around California are increasingly pursuing the idea of building affordable housing for employees as a way to improve recruitment and retention amid a worsening housing crisis.
That idea has become the hallmark of San Diego Unified’s ongoing real estate strategy, in which it has recruited developers to build housing on district-owned land via joint-occupancy lease agreements.
Under the arrangement, the district gets to keep valuable land under its ownership while it collects a share of the developer’s revenue. And the money it collects is unrestricted — the district can use it for any part of its budget, unlike many kinds of federal and state funding.
About 50 low-income families of district employees are already living in the district’s mixed-income Livia development in Scripps Ranch, which otherwise contains primarily above-market-rate apartments. And in April, the district accepted a developer’s proposal to build 270 rent-restricted units for low- and moderate-income families of district staff, as well as 57 units for seniors, at the former site of Central Elementary in City Heights.
District leaders are hoping to add more units to their housing stock soon.
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