To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
You're not wrong but this is too simplistic and avoids holding up a mirror that really ought to be held up. Zoning was the "we're gonna regulate our way into utopia" of their time. The class of useful idiots who made it happen and the class of useful idiots who will go to bat for it's continuance because they make a buck on it is far broader than that.
Once again, the race thing is a distraction because it lets the useful idiots who are peddling stuff that's just as short sighted claim that it'll work out simply because they're not peddling racist policies this time.
Nobody has the balls to put their foot down and say that your neighbors have the right to build stuff you don't like and you can move if you don't like it.
More people. Same amount of land, and features people want to live by - cities (which in the past often meant rivers but always meant jobs)/in my area, lakes. It’s really that simple. Everything else is missing for forest for the trees.
Peasant farmers didn't sign up for and get given random plots of land by their lord for temporary holding that gets taken back later. They lived and died in the homes they themselves built on land they managed and worked in basically perpetuity down their family line, provided their family survived or wasn't driven off by or killed by war.
I don't mean to be shitty, and I fully understand that contrary takes are what HN is great at, but I genuinely fail to see what the point of your comment is other than a knee jerk nothing?
Truly, though, we did used to own many things in common that are now privately enclosed.
This can never be solved until we resolve the public pension crisis.
Lawmakers in my state of Oregon are soon going to debate how the state invests in hedge funds but the simple truth of the numbers says that there's no possible way Oregon can meet its pension obligations without their stated returns.
The benefits are huge in terms of time available and costs, and not needing childcare before or after school.
It’s hard to solve couples having two jobs in different places, but having at least one person get to work basically instantly and for zero cost is a massive boon to society.
The issue I saw is that the government department in charge of education is not the one in charge of housing and infrastructure, and there are no incentives to hire locally or make it easier to move locally. Instead you get teachers in suburb A travelling to suburb B and vice-versa, and no way that they can choose to swap roles. We lucked out.
Disclosure: I was one of those teachers for a semester, many years ago.
Also, teacher pay is not as rigid as it seems. In my state, the good teachers advance by moving to better paying districts. Very few teachers stay in rural districts for more than a year or two.
One thing that is truly bonkers about K12 education is that they can get tenure in just a few years. This is much faster (and easier) than a professor getting tenure. But they both result in the near-inability to be fired.
My mom was a public high school teacher. When I described the conditions of working as an adjunct, her knee jerk reaction was: "That's why teachers have a union."
I’m not sure if the pay increase of moving the city balances out anyways with the increase in housing costs.
This is an unhelpful, anti-union sentiment with no actual relevance to the problem of teacher recruiting.
How would it be easier to recruit new, potentially-effective teachers if we had incentive pay based on meritocratic pay scales? There is no rational way to credit someone from a different area for their ability to run a classroom effectively until there's evidence on how that person runs a classroom.
First, the issue with teacher pay is that it is low. OP and you would instead say that the issue is that it's not low enough for some low performers, and that such a correction would lead new teachers to enter the market. Is there an economics study that shows a similar phenomenon occurring?
> I would be more likely to go into teaching if I thought it could be a good place to work and I would be paid fairly.
I doubt this, because if you cared you would get enough of the mostly-useless degrees in order to get to a pay level that makes sense for you.
Anyway, there are private institutions you could go teach for; instead I hear you saying that you could do better than these unionized public school teachers if your assured brilliance were recognized monetarily.
I'm not sure the point of your last comment. Of course everyone wants to be paid fairly for what they accomplish, which is not just based on intelligence, but also hard work. I have done a very good job educating my own children and have seen enough laziness in our public schools that I'm certain I would be more effective than a great many of the teachers.
But more importantly, if the incentives were aligned then even better teachers would enter, perhaps leaving me in the bottom part of the distribution. Nothing would make me happier than if schools were filled with teachers who were so effective!
A few of the rural school districts here offer this incentive to move out there. Sometimes they include a car too. Note they tdo not do repairs though.
The issue with taking one of these rural offers is that it's a dead end. Your schoolhouse of many grands gets smaller and smaller over time until they don't need you anymore. And then what? Your career as a teacher is essentially useless for any larger district as they do not care at all about teaching multiple grades at once and barely (or not) making state standards. And then you don't even have a house left over to sell (likely for a loss), it's the district's.
I know it's the reverse of the article, but the incentives are the same and they don't make sense for any of the parties.
Changing the tax structure doesn't remove that restriction.
On the other hand, once you remove the zoning restrictions, the existing economic incentives will produce densification without LVT, tbat's the whole thing the zoning restrictions exist to stop.
That is an irrelevant counterargument, since the idea of dense housing leans towards tall apartment buildings, not trailers. No one should have to live in a trailer.
The township of the Fairhope Single-Tax Corporation near Mobile, Alabama was originally conceived as an artist's colony but is now occupied by families with a median income of $95K. Density is almost exactly 1 housing unit per residential acre. The feds have built 140 Section 8 subsidized units, but there do not seem to be any privately built high density tall apartment buildings of the type you want to see.
Can you point to an LVT place in the US where developers have chosen to build large numbers of actual NON-LUXURY high rise apartment buildings for the benefit of non-rich people? That would be a big newsworthy success story if it actually happened.
There are developers that make their money building high rise apartment blocks. Are any of them lobbying for an LVT so they can build more low cost housing?
There exist plenty of old buildings in urban centers that meet this criteria. There is nothing in principle that is stopping their construction. It's in the same imaginary league as LVT for that matter, meaning that if one can manifest, so can the other.
Luxury buildings are made because of a profit motivation. Even so, once the supply is increased by 10x or 20x, their prices too will come down. China is a supreme example of having cheap apartments.
(That doesn't mean they aren't impacted by housing scarcity in ways that disrupt the administration of school systems; they are. But the problem isn't compensation, the problem is corrupt regulation written to prop up homeowner assets.)
https://www.cps.edu/media/community-updates/2025/january/neg...
The areas losing the most students are also the areas that have historically been underserved or down right biased against by local governments.
So when it becomes time to consolidate schools it falls disproportionately on poor neighborhoods, which at the very least looks a lot like punishing the victims.
So there is a lot of community push back. So I wouldn’t say they don’t feel any pressure to deal with school land use, it’s a generally contentious problem with pressure on both sides.
It is not that hard to do outcome-based pay over a multi-year period, but this is the main criticism. You can either track kids over a number of years and track their relative growth in each year, or you can use bargaining up-front whereby teachers can vote on a "multiplier" for each class before they know who will end up with which class.
At least teacher housing provides a way for teachers to obtain secure housing closer to work without having to directly compete against highly-paid corporate workers with RSUs.