Residents in San Jose, Calif., are fighting a plan the school district is exploring to relocate two schools to a new site and build affordable housing in their place, arguing that the move would hurt home prices.

Meanwhile, teachers in San Jose — and around the country — are struggling with low wages. And fast-rising home prices can make it very difficult to make ends meet, particularly in expensive markets like San Jose.

A petition on Change.org, “Save Leland and Bret Harte,” has gathered more than 4,700 signature since it was started a week ago. The petition criticizes the San Jose Unified School District’s consideration of a plan that would move Leland High School and Bret Harte Middle School in order to construct low-cost housing units for school employees.

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The petition argues that such a move would “negatively impact the aesthetics of the area” and that the affordable housing would cause home prices to drop. “Low-cost housing is not consistent with the surrounding areas,” the petition reads. The petition also raises concerns regarding moving the two schools to the edge of the Almaden Valley neighborhood from their more central location currently.

Many people who signed the petition echoed these concerns. “Taking away two fantastic neighborhood schools to bring in low-income housing is absolutely ridiculous,” one woman wrote. “There are plenty of other places in San Jose to build. This would devalue home prices in the area significantly. This isn’t really a consideration, is it?”

But school district officials argue that affordable housing is a critical need. The school district told local television news affiliate KGO that it needs to recruit roughly 200 teachers each year, but is struggling to do so because teachers are steering clear of San Jose because of the high cost of housing in the area.

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“We’re losing dozens when they find out about the cost of living,” Deputy Superintendent Stephen McMahon told KGO. “We’re losing even more when they want to start a family. Many of our best and brightest teachers, when they want to start a family of their own, are relocating because they can’t afford to buy a house here.”

(In a statement to MarketWatch, a spokesperson for the school district noted that the plan is in “the very earliest stages and nothing, other than the initial thoughts and ideas seen in the plan document, has been created.”)

Teachers’ wages have not kept pace with the rising cost of living

The difficulties faced by the San Jose Unified School District are emblematic of school districts across the country. Home prices and the cost of living are rising steadily, while teacher pay is worsening. San Jose had the highest median home list price nationwide as of Sept. 1, at $1.15 million, according to data from Realtor.com.

While home prices have begun to soften ever so slightly in the San Jose metropolitan area, which also includes Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, by and large buying a home in the city has gotten vastly more expensive. Since May 2012, home prices in the area have risen 129%. (Realtor.com is operated by News Corp NWSA, -0.14% subsidiary Move Inc., and MarketWatch is a unit of Dow Jones, which is also a subsidiary of News Corp.)

Overall, it is now five times more expensive to buy a home in San Jose than the national average, when factoring in the down payment, closing costs and moving-related expenses, according to a recent report from real-estate website Zillow Z, +3.59% .

Renting isn’t much cheaper. The median rent in San Jose is $3,440, which is more than two times greater than the national median rent, per Zillow. And while the cost to rent hasn’t increased at the same break-neck pace as home prices, it still increased 3.5% year over year as of August. The share of residents who rent in the city has also grown from 38.2% in 2000 to 43.1% in 2016.

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Meanwhile, teacher pay nationwide has worsened notably. The average weekly wages of public school teachers actually dropped $27 between 1996 and 2017, from $1,164 to $1,137, according to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute.

And as teachers’ wages have fallen, the gap between what they earn and what other college-educated workers make has grown considerably over the years. Even though California has one of the lowest wage penalties in the country, the average teacher still makes nearly 15% less than the average college-educated individual in the state, the EPI found.

Issues related to teacher pay are beginning to have a cyclical effect on the availability of teachers. Researchers at the Learning Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think-tank focused on educational policy based in Palo Alto, Calif., noted that teacher layoffs and the shrinking education budget in California has created a negative perception of the profession in the public psyche. In turn, that adverse view on teaching as a career could be persuading people to pursue other fields of work who might have otherwise taken up teaching.

With fewer people going into education, the demands on teachers are becoming more strenuous, making it all the more unappealing as a profession.

The turnover in the teaching profession fueled by these forces doesn’t just have an impact on the workers in the field — it has also been shown to negatively affect student achievement, according to the Learning Policy Institute.