Because I’m a commuter teacher myself, I know how this feels. A few months into my current teaching job, a coworker and I were discussing a challenging student. “Well, he’s a Peacock Gap kid,” my coworker said. I didn’t know what that meant, so he suggested I drive through town during my planning period. He knew I lived in West Oakland and didn’t know much about San Rafael, a Marin County outpost not far from the Richmond Bridge in the San Francisco Bay Area. And he knew it’d be to my advantage if I knew more—teachers ought to be familiar with the communities whose children they’re serving.

So I took that drive a few times to acquaint myself with the area—from Peacock Gap to downtown to the Canal to Terra Linda. But I knew it wasn’t enough. After all, some of my classmates from graduate school had rented apartments in low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods to embed themselves in the unfamiliar environments affecting the lives of the students they’d soon teach. The logic wasn’t faulty: Research supports the idea that better relationships between teachers and students lead to better learning—and that such relationships are easier to hone when teachers know their students’ home turf.

Yet embedding myself in San Rafael has never been an option. The city’s home prices average $1 million and have increased by nearly 9 percent in the past year.

My small school district is evidence that even a comparatively high teacher pay scale (with a starting first-year annual salary of over $50,000, roughly $15,000 more than the average starting salary nationally) is far from enough to live comfortably the Bay Area. At an April board meeting, one young teacher reported that she lives with relatives in a town 43 miles away because she can’t afford her own rent. At the same meeting, a veteran teacher my school can’t bear to lose admitted he was being headhunted by a better-paying district close to his girlfriend’s house in Silicon Valley. Whether these anecdotes and the countless others like them will convince the school board to approve a raise to reflect the skyrocketing cost of living isn’t clear; my union has been negotiating with the board to improve the teachers’ contract to little avail. In my district, which unlike most others in the state is funded mostly by property taxes, ever-growing revenue from residents’ expensive real-estate have filled district coffers—yet teacher salaries have essentially stagnated since the beginning of the decade. Whether or not the contract dispute is resolved in teachers’ favor, the San Rafael superintendent has taken a page out of Mayor Lee’s book and floated the possibility of a “workforce housing” plan.

When I moved to West Oakland in 2014, I turned down offers from San Francisco Unified School District because San Rafael City Schools offered $15,000 more a year. That boost, of course, comes with sacrifices: Each weekday, I spend an hour-and-a-half driving 40 miles to and from school, and each month, I spend a total of $240 on tolls and gas. My insurance is higher thanks to the thousands of miles I drive.