ON THE TOWN:Get on board or get out of the way

Anyone who wants to poke a stick in the spokes of the idea of local affordable housing for teachers is going to have a very tough time of it.

The truth is that across the country over the past several years, school districts and municipal governments large and small have developed a variety of ways to attract and keep teachers.

Some examples.

Last April, “New York City began offering housing subsidies of up to $14,600 to entice new math, science and special education teachers to work in the city’s most challenging schools, in one of the most aggressive housing incentive programs in the nation to address a chronic shortage of qualified educators in these specialties” (New York Times, April 6, 2006).

The goal was to use the incentives to hire 100 new teachers by last September.

And get this. “City education officials said they planned to market the new program forcefully on recruiting trips to the Northwest, the Southeast and especially California, where housing costs are also high” (New York Times, April 6, 2006).

In Raleigh-Durham, N.C., “The state legislature passed a law this year opening the way for Hertford County school land to be used for teacher housing. It is one of two struggling school districts that were allowed to take a more a direct role in providing housing. Neighboring Bertie County is the other” (News & Observer, Aug. 22, 2006).

Right up the road in Santa Clara County there is a program “available to Teachers, Administrators, and other Credentialed School Staff who work in any of the County’s public K-12 Low Performing Schools. The Teacher 10K is a $10,000 loan from the County as a 0% interest deferred loan” (Santa Clara County Office of Affordable Housing, undated).

And closer to home, from a newsletter issued sometime after 2002 by Beautiful Santa Barbara Real Estate: “Fearing an exodus of teachers headed for less expensive homes, a Santa Barbara schools committee is moving forward on a plan to use district-owned land to build affordable housing for faculty.

“The site the committee has in mind is 23 acres in the unincorporated Goleta valley, west of San Marcos High School and just east of El Camino Junior High School. Under one scenario, school faculty would be able to purchase market-rate homes at half price with no down payment.”

There are many more examples across the country, including San Francisco, San Jose, Arkansas and Louisiana.

The failure of your school board and-or the city council to test a program that is already in effect in many places across the country is a clear example of a continuing lack of leadership and a lack of vision.

The only official response heard so far was a comment Costa Mesa Councilman Eric Bever made on the Pilot website claiming that an affordable housing program for teachers would violate housing laws.

“Dedicating housing to any specific group such as teachers would violate housing laws,” Bever wrote.

Bever did not specify exactly which laws would be violated, but if that’s true then we’d better form a posse to round up the scofflaws in the areas I just cited.

It seems to me that if they can do it in several other California cities, we can do it here in Newport-Mesa.

The larger issue here is the tendency of bureaucracies to work in silos, that is, to fail to see the importance of working closer with other departments to improve the quality of life in a community.

The easy thing to do is to say that truancy and teacher salaries are a school district problem, or that gangs are a city problem while failing to understand that these issues affect everyone.

The hard part is to take some ownership of these issues, to work together to resolve them.

And I’ll state it again: The Newport Beach City Council does not get a pass on this. Newport Beach and Costa Mesa share a school district, and Newport Beach has as much responsibility to attract and keep good teachers as does Costa Mesa.

So to those who think affordable teacher housing can’t be done, please get out of the way of those who think it can.

By the way, I may or may not disagree with Bever on issues, but I sincerely appreciate his willingness to voice his opinion. Perhaps the members of the school board could learn something from him.