California Aims to Put Housing on Surplus School District Land

California’s Department of Education (DOE) is launching a statewide plan to develop millions of new housing units on land owned by the state’s school districts.

Tony Thurmond, the state’s superintendent of public education, announced the new plan this week at the department’s headquarters in Sacramento, SiliconValley.com reported.

According to the state DOE, California School districts own 75,000 acres of developable land, which is enough to create an estimated 2.3M new housing units.

Data from the Golden State’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment has found that the housing shortage in California totals more than 2.5M new homes for the next eight-year planning cycle, a shortfall that would need to be addressed by an average of 300,000 units per year.

Thurmond is convening a panel of housing experts on August 15 to identify policy recommendations that can boost housing development throughout the state, with a focus on housing for lower-income households.

“California’s housing crisis is undeniable, but it is not unsolvable,” Thurmond said, in a statement. “I believe that California has enough resources and ingenuity to solve this, and the data shows that California’s schools have the land to make this happen. As school leaders, we can get this done for our communities and restore the California Dream.”

The DOE has identified more than 7,000 school properties encompassing 75K that are suitable for development.

“If each district that we identified as having surplus property developed 30 units, that would result in 2.3 million new units available for the California workforce,” Thurmond said.

According to Tristan Brown, legislative director for the California Federation of Teachers, a housing program using school property will help with teacher shortages and retention.

Brown said most starting salaries for teachers qualify them for housing assistance, ABC10 reported.

Residential housing development has not been keeping pace with the goals of eight-year housing plans that have been mandated by the state.

Last year, the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) approved San Francisco’s eight-year housing plan, which requires the city to add 82,000 housing units between 2023 and 2031, or about 10,500 new homes each year.

According to preliminary data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the city is off to a bad start: San Francisco issued 1,136 residential building permits in 2023, the lowest total since the Great Recession that followed the global financial crisis when only 779 permits were issued.

The number of permits issued last year is less than half of the annual average since 2001 of 2,476 units, based on HUD data reported by the San Francisco Business Times.

In 2018, when borrowing costs were low, demand was high and construction costs weren’t skyrocketing, residential building permits peaked at 5,200 units. During a construction boom that lasted until 2022, an average of 4,500 homes were delivered annually in San Francisco, the report said.