Expensive housing makes the Bay Area a tough fit for teachers and other government employees

English 11 Honors and MAP teacher Natasha Ritchie wakes just after sunrise in her house in Santa Cruz each school day and is already in her car by 6:20 a.m., ready to start her usual 45 minutes or longer commute to work.

Ritchie is among the dozens of Saratoga High teachers who have to commute from outside of Saratoga. Due to the extremely high housing prices in Los Gatos-Saratoga district, those teachers almost always live in more affordable communities.

A school directory shows that 36 of about the roughly 70 Saratoga High teachers live in San Jose, Santa Clara or Campbell, and at least 18 live in Santa Cruz, Aptos or Soquel. In contrast, only 12 teachers actually live in either Saratoga or Los Gatos. While housing in places like Santa Cruz and Campbell is far from cheap, they cost a lot less than housing in Saratoga and Los Gatos.

On average, teachers in the Bay Area are usually paid a salary of anywhere from $60,000-$100,000 depending on how long they have been teaching and the degrees they have earned. The highest-paid Saratoga High teacher — one with 75 units beyond a master’s degree — will earn  $129,157, according the district salary schedule. The minimum starting salary for a full-time teacher in the district is $65,124.

That puts the price of a home in Saratoga — about $2.3 million — far out of the reach of most teachers, even if their spouses work full time in high-paying jobs. Moreover, with a monthly salary in the range of $5,000-$8,333, most teachers would be unlikely to be able to pay the median monthly rent of $5,225 for a house in Saratoga, according to Trulia.

“There’s no question that my family couldn’t afford to buy or even rent in Saratoga,” Ritchie said. “[But] I lived in Santa Cruz before I started working in Saratoga, and I knew that I would be committing to commuting, since I love both places.”

In general, it has often been easier for teachers who have been teaching here for 10 or more years to have found a home in a commutable location, whereas young teachers often have a more difficult time finding affordable housing in the Bay Area.

While most teachers cannot afford to live in Saratoga or Los Gatos, people with occupations in the medical or technology fields earn wages that give them the opportunity to live here.

In the Bay Area, doctors collect a salary of about $300,000, roughly three times the amount that teachers earn annually, according to TIME magazine. Most computer engineers, according to Sokanu, receive a median salary of $111,730 nationally, and their salaries are often far higher in the Bay Area.

AP Calculus BC and engineering teacher Audrey Warmuth used to be an engineer with greater potential for a high salary. After she graduated from McGill University in Canada with a degree in mechanical engineering, she worked for a company Bonbardier.

After having her second child, however, she decided to give up her job as an engineer and become a teacher. Despite the lower pay, Warmuth said she made the right decision.

“I wanted [a job] that had more [interpersonal] relationships,” Warmuth said. “When the lessons [in class] go well, I can’t imagine a better feeling. I feel like a world is opening up to [the students], and being able to be a part of that and to witness that feels really good.”

Besides teachers, Bay Area firefighters and nurses have also had a hard time trying to find stable housing in the area in recent years.

“The wage gap between industries is frankly astounding at times,” class of 2009 alumna Adela Chang, now a software engineer at Crunchyroll, said. “Many of my classmates would be happy just to make half of what my computer science friends are making, even though their work may be just as challenging in its own way.”

According to the San Jose Mercury News, the median price for a home in the Bay Area reached a new record high of $750,000 in May. With such high prices becoming the new normal, many people are moving inland to communities such as Hayward and Alameda, where the prices are more manageable.

As more people move away from here, schools in the Bay Area are losing highly respected teachers and other staff members.

Monta Vista High School recently lost at least four of its teachers, including the long-time journalism adviser and American Studies teacher Michelle Balmeo, who moved to Albany, Oregon, due to the long commute to work and expensive housing in the Bay Area.

“[Balmeo’s] Writing for Publication course definitely got me and quite a few others really interested in journalism because she had such an interesting way of teaching,” Monta Vista senior Shriya Deshpande said. “When we were learning how to write reviews, she brought in a variety of donuts for us to taste and rate and observe how other critics wrote effective reviews.”

According to SF Chronicle, as housing prices continue to soar, schools have discussed the possibility of building housing specifically for teachers and staff with the hope that it will help retain teachers in the costly area.

“If the [building] is done right, it could potentially be really interesting,” Ritchie said. “But, it’s always hard to have a place to [build housing], someone who’s willing to put forth the money as an investment and actually making sure it solves the problem.”