Hacker News Reader

Comment by AvAn12 | Hacker News Reader

Could just, you know, pay more…

Teachers in major metro school systems already have quite a good deal. Rural schoolteachers really do have the deal everyone heard about in 1990s politics, but urban schoolteachers are generally economically privileged.

(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.)

I genuinely need to see what data you're citing with this statement. Until recently, I worked in education and often worked with urban schools. Starting salaries of 55-60k/year living in a major metropolitan area is not what I would call economically privileged.

The average CPS salary is somewhere around $75k, with 10+ weeks of vacation, but that undercounts it dramatically because CPS teachers get defined-benefit pension plans and often earn tens of thousands in additional cash comp for extracurricular work, and that's before what happens when you get a masters.

> the average is around $96,000

https://www.cps.edu/media/community-updates/2025/january/neg...

What are you trying to say by posting this link?

(The commenter responded to me inline in their original post, I think; I now understand why they posted the link.)

Yeah sorry I was in a hurry. I’d originally vouched for your comment (it was dead/flagkilled), then threw up that link as a quick support for your numbers.

The other half of this is that with declining enrollment city school districts are finding themselves with a lot of land. They don't feel any pressure to sell the land. Nor do they feel any pressure to use it for other government services.

In Chicago at least land use and closing of schools is extremely contentious.

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.

Sure there's some pressure but as you note it comes from the communities that couldn't stop their school from being closed. So ultimately it's a lot of noise that doesn't lead to much action.

Why not make housing cost less instead?

They're not mutually exclusive goals. Wanting a more affording salary and scalable housing both are valid goals.

Governments may be uniquely positioned to offer housing incentives as they often own the land, and control the zoning.

Because we’ve been sold the story that your house has to appreciate in value 2-3 times over the period you live in it, consequently, homeowners vote against anything that lowers housing costs.

Except it's not much of a lie. The actual return on housing is basically not much higher than inflation

The only way that works is to build more housing. Austin has shown the way.

You could also cut back on the number of people who own multiple properties.

In some areas like the San Francisco Bay Area, schools would have to pay astronomically more in order for teachers to compete against software engineers. I’m a community college professor in the Bay Area making a low six-figure salary, but even a townhouse in the neighborhood my college is in is easily $1 million for a two-bedroom, and rent for a two-bedroom apartment is easily $3500/mo. A modest salary boost can help me rent a two-bedroom apartment, but if I hope to buy closer to work, my salary would need to double, and there’s still the challenge of saving for the down payment, since there’s no such thing as RSUs in a not-for-profit institution.

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.

Around here, similar to the Bay Area, community college and K12 pay is around $65k, and your typical new mortgage is $45k annually.

Or allow pay that is not lockstep/tied to mostly-useless degree completion. Unions fight this stuff like hell because the people in charge have gone through the current system and therefore benefit from it.

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.

On net, that's no improvement - just more money handed to landlords since it's chasing the same limited supply.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com