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Lately, I’ve come across descriptions of San Francisco as experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Each time I read that, I wonder if it was ever so difficult to live in Florence between the 13th through 17th centuries, plague aside.

Several years after the dot-com crash, around 2005, my sister moved into a Marina studio in San Francisco where her rent was about $1,200. That same studio is close to $3,000 today. Around that same time, I recall a classmate say that he’s going to pursue a Masters degree in Education so that he’d end up higher on the pay scale to start. The jump in question was from $35,000 to $45,000 at the Los Angeles Unified School District. Today, the jump would be from about $49,000 to $63,000. (See the Salary Schedule)

Seeing the housing situation in San Francisco from the perspective of a public school teacher is interesting. It’s reasonable to associate the profession with the middle class and given that most people went through the public school system as students, they’ve come to know teachers in a intimate way – that is, as people who aren’t hiding off in some tall skyscraper in a big city running a corporation.

The situation for teachers in San Francisco isn’t as good as it is in Los Angeles. This is the San Francisco Teacher Salary Schedule. It’s not the easiest to interpret compared to some of the others I’ve seen, but the lowest base pay for a new teacher (first year with a Bachelor’s degree) is $46,005. The highest paid for the first year (presumably someone who maxes out on credentials and a Masters degree) stands to make $51,636. The take home pay of someone who makes $46K in California as a single person is in the ballpark of $2,800 a month. Someone who makes $51,636 would probably take home slightly above $3,000 monthly.

Off the bat, I think renting a 1 bedroom apartment is out of the question:

The rent alone is most if not all and more of a teacher’s monthly income, which means that the only viable option for a new and young teacher to share a unit with a roommate. A cursory search came back with a decent deal from the Sunset a 2 bed 2 bath unit for $3,400. Sharing this unit with a roommate will cost the teacher $1,700 a month, which is more than half of their take home pay.

If they don’t want to go the route of sharing a unit, they can get creative by sharing a single bedroom with a partner, a friend, or doing a complete bedroom partition to cut the costs down. But a more reasonable thing to do is just to pick up tutoring gigs or teach summer school during the off months. A more in depth analysis of the rent situation is explored here. The associated Hacker News comment thread had some folks claim that if a single person isn’t earning closer to $200K a year, living in San Francisco is difficult.

I can imagine that many new teachers would say they’ll live in the city a year just for the experience. For a new teacher to earn at least $80,000 a year (supposedly the lower end salary of a software developer in the city), they would have to put in close to 20 years in the system.

So what should a teacher starting a career in San Francisco Unified supposed to do if they haven’t put in over 20 years in the system? The answer is to likely start pushing for a better contract. It doesn’t make sense that Los Angeles Unified pays substantially more while the housing prices, albeit isn’t cheap, pales in comparison to San Francisco.

To answer the question of whether a public school teacher can live in San Francisco, the answer is yes, but only for the short term if they’re single and just starting out if things keep going on the same trajectory.