All housing theories are for education.

The starting salary for a fully qualified teacher in San Francisco is $66,918. It sounds pretty good. And that's everywhere but San Francisco. The problem is that the average two-bedroom apartment in that city costs $3,840 per month. This means that even if a new teacher finds a roommate and moves into an average apartment, it will still cost $1,920 per month. This is just less than half of the teacher's monthly after-tax income and far more than his financial advisor would tell him to spend.

And remember, this is not a teacher who wants to have their own apartment or live somewhere fancy. This is living in an average apartment with a roommate. And it's not affordable.

This exercise can be repeated in multiple major metropolitan areas. And, as pointed out over the weekend, new york timeseven in smaller cities and towns.

Fast forward to 2021, Sam Bowman, John Myers, and Ben Southward. work in progress They called it the “Housing Theory of Everything” and argued that almost all of today's problems in policy and society can be traced back to problems in accessing affordable housing. They wrote:

“Where you live affects almost everything in your life, including where you work, how you spend your holidays, who your friends and neighbors are, how many children you have and when you have them, and even how often you get sick. The most valuable asset for most people is by far their home. And housing is extremely important to the overall economy because it determines the location and supply of people, the most important “resource” of all. is. ”

They argue persuasively that there are too many places, making it extremely difficult to build new housing. This will cause housing prices to skyrocket, forcing people like San Francisco's teachers, who we hypothesize, to spend more and more of their monthly budget on housing or be locked out of America's most productive and prosperous places. I no longer get it. It was a terrible choice to force on people.

This in-depth post on Market Urbanist explains how San Francisco became so expensive. Zoning regulations that limit the size and number of housing units that can be built. A culture of NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard). Encourage people not to build new structures to keep their home values ​​high. And the process builds up over time, creating hurdle after hurdle that home builders must clear to get their project across the finish line. It's a mess.

It obviously affects education. I think most people would have hesitated when they first saw what her first-year teacher, fresh out of college, would be doing in San Francisco. That's nearly double the average salary for a 20- to 24-year-old in the United States, and nearly $10,000 more than the national average salary for an adult with a bachelor's degree. However, their salaries are too low considering the cost of living!

Let's play the tape. Restrict housing. Artificial operating costs. Force schools to raise teacher salaries. Teachers pay the increase directly into rent or mortgages, so their lives aren't made any easier. Try to raise property taxes to pay salaries. The homeowner has to pay a higher rate for the higher appraised value, refuse. I can't keep up with my salary. There are no new teachers.

So what can you do?

On one level, this is not a problem that our education system created, but a problem that our education system can't really solve. Restrictive zoning and NIMBYism are a scourge that state and local officials must address, either by opening up zoning, cleaning up the approval process, curbing the ability to object to new housing construction, or some combination of the three. be. The school can't do much there.

Dedicated efforts have been made to provide housing for teachers. Meredith Coffey of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently wrote an appropriately skeptical assessment of such programs.

Of course, there is also school choice. Allocating schools based on where children live and limiting the number of homes built there would drive up costs and exclude poor and middle-income families. If we don't do anything to lower housing costs, we can also do our best to sever the connection between where students live and where they go to school. If they can live in a low-cost area while attending a school in a high-cost area, they can help their families make ends meet.

As time has passed since The Theory of All Housing was published, we have discovered more and more wisdom within it.why X Is it very expensive? So how much do we have to pay those who live where they can afford? Why do people delay getting married and having children, even as they accommodate growing families? Can we afford a house big enough? Maybe not all roads lead back to homes, but it sure seems like a lot of them do.

They say the first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have a problem in the first place. Artificially high housing costs are a problem that makes it difficult to establish good schools in some of America's most dynamic communities.