This month, millions of students returned to California’s troubled public schools, where, under State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, academic results have kept declining and enrollment has plummeted. The most recent data show that just 31 percent of the state’s eighth-graders were proficient in reading and 26 percent in math. But Thurmond, who is running for governor in 2026 and was elected superintendent in 2018, doesn’t want voters to think about the failing schools that they appointed him to fix. Instead, he has unveiled a plan to build teacher housing that, one suspects, is designed to win the political support of public-sector unions.
The superintendent proposes building 2.3 million housing units on 75,000 acres of developable land currently owned by school districts. Thurmond’s initiative relies on a research report by several California think tanks, whose housing-expansion plan he hopes to implement statewide. Under the plan, districts would lobby for state and private funding, solicit bids from developers to build the units, and oversee the development and construction process.
Previous attempts to build state-sponsored teacher housing have faced significant challenges. Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, approved an educator-housing project in 2008 that ran into headwinds. Because the project used federal subsidies that imposed income-eligibility requirements on eventual tenants, the majority of those who qualified were not teachers, whose salaries exceeded the eligibility threshold, but instead were teaching assistants, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and janitorial staff. While SiliconValley.com reports that “state salary thresholds have been shifted to allow projects that cater to moderate income households,” housing projects in California today face a bevy of other issues, including regulations, local zoning laws, potential lawsuits, and cost overruns. As a result, only five districts statewide have completed educator housing projects, with three more in progress—just a fraction of Thurmond’s goal.
While the superintendent has directed districts to apply for some $500 million of available tax credits, this will fall well short of the needed financing. To get an idea of how much his scheme would really cost, consider Governor Gavin Newsom’s expensive quest to address homelessness. The first round of Newsom’s Homekey program helped to convert buildings into affordable housing, for an average cost of $144,000 per unit. In large urban areas, building affordable housing units is much more expensive, and can cost more than $500,000 dollars per unit. Even with the generous assumption that building Thurmond’s project would cost $144,000 per unit, the total bill for 2.3 million housing units would exceed $330 billion. That’s likely a lowball estimate, too, since, as the think-tank report concedes, “the cost of construction continues to rise each year.”
Thurmond’s proposal is further hampered by the California Environmental Quality Act, which imposes on developers a laundry list of regulatory hurdles and expensive environmental-impact studies, which drive prices up and make it harder to build new housing. Indeed, at Thurmond’s recent “Housing Summit,” both Jennifer Barrera, president and CEO of the California Chamber of Commerce, and Tom Grable, chairman of the California Building Industry Association, cited CEQA as a longtime obstacle to California housing development.
If the superintendent really wanted to kickstart housing construction, he would leverage his influence with unions to lobby for deregulation. Instead, his proposal turns local school districts into housing developers, a role they have no business filling. If those districts have surplus land, they’d be better off selling it to help pay down the massive pension debt most of them owe for teacher retirements.
Thurmond’s proposal seems to have much more to do with politics than with improving housing—let alone improving schools, which, it bears reminding, is his actual job.
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