Education Workforce Housing Handbook

Creative site and building design show how California’s Local Educational Agencies can help solve the affordable housing crisis

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School Districts and County Offices of Education can be crucial partners in providing land resources that spur affordable housing production and offer a unique opportunity to reimagine local communities with innovative architectural, urban, and social justice thinking. After looking nationwide for workforce housing projects built on Local Educational Agency owned land, we selected two sites to act as design case studies. The San Jose design exploration pioneers an opportunistic approach that stitches housing into the most widespread of LEA owned lands, an active school campus, and the Berkeley design exploration takes the most common type of education workforce housing development, building housing on an LEA owned parking lot, and pushes it further to include community amenities, a shared parking structure, housing, and open space. These proposals are intended to demonstrate different aspects of housing production, but together they show what can be possible as we look to using Local Educational Agency land holdings to address the intersecting issues of workforce recruitment, workforce retention, educational quality, and lack of affordable housing.

Project Type:    Research, Design
Project Team:    cityLAB Team

Dana Cuff
Kenny Wong
Emmanuel Proussaloglou
Akana Jayewardene
Carrie Gammell

Project Graphics

Xiuwen Qi
Roya Chagnon

Project Partners

California School Board Association
Center for Cities + Schools at UC Berkeley
Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

SLH Advisory Board

Jane Blumenfeld, cityLAB UCLA
Kevin Daly, Kevin Daly Architects
Al Grazioli, Los Angeles Unified School District
Robin Hughes, Abode Communities
Denise Pinkston, TMG Partners
Paul Silvern, HR&A Advisors

Timeline:    2020
Themes:    Activism, Spatial Justice