Proposal for affordable teacher housing causes uproar among San Jose parents - Story | KTVU
Parents fear the new site will be too far away and the teacher housing could affect property values, by bringing renters into their Almaden Valley neighborhood.
Braley says, “It’s just frankly not in fitting with the rest of the community.”
Teachers are fine as long as they don’t live in the same pricey neighborhood? What kind of attitude is this?
Selfish?
Those parents better not complain about the quality of teachers their kids get.
What about other local workers? Police, Firefighters etc?
Under a proposal by the San Jose Unified School District, the existing schools would be turned into much needed teacher housing. A vacant site a few miles away would be turned into brand new schools.
Parents like Greg Braley hope the housing won’t be here. He says Leland High School, home to Pat Tillman Stadium, is worth saving.
I don’t fully understand the article (IMO, it is poorly written), but my understanding based on above 2 sentences is “SJUSD identifies Leland High School as one of potential site for teacher housing and parents are against it”.
If my understanding is correct, then I don’t blame the parents.
First of all, why can’t SJUSD turn vacant site into teacher housing instead? High school usually has over 2000 students. In addition, there are so many after school/ weekend activities on top of regular school schedule. In a sense, the whole neighborhood is built around that school site. Why should these 2000 families and neighbors change their existing commute to school when school district can choose vacant site for teacher housing? Seriously, if your school district says that we are going to shut down your neighborhood school to convert it into teacher housing and move the school to farther place, are you going to be happy with it? I won’t.
Other coverages:
It seems the district tries to move two schools to one site and build housing on the old sites? I guess student enrollment is down and they close one down or combine both into smaller ones on a new site?
By searching at google map, 2 schools are located in one combined site today.
Not sure about enrollment issue here but replacing existing middle/high school site with teacher housing and moving them to farther place sounds unreasonable to me.
If the new site is smaller, then, they can start teacher housing there without much noise from parents/neighbors. I guess that can be a reasonable compromise.
If the new site is larger, then, they can happily build larger teacher housing there.
I can give first hand info. I attended the community meeting today evening. Looks like this is one of the potential sites they have chosen to build affordable employee housing, there are totally 9 sites identified.
Although I don’t live there, I suggest that you should pay attention to this the most. CUSD also tried the similar things and gave up eventually. At that time, even teachers were not supporting the plan. The fact of matter was that the builder wants to build the new housing on one of the school site (which is very expensive area, right next to apple park), rent it to teachers at market value with subsidy which expires in 2 years. Then, they call it “teacher housing”.
Really? Why would the school board be OK with that?
That was the question everyone asked to district. Instead of answering it, they cancelled the plan.
Superintendent and some of board members were replaced shortly after that.
I suspect something similar here. It could be they are trying to use the measure V that is on ballot
https://ballotpedia.org/San_Jose,_California,_Measure_V,Housing_Bond_Issue(November_2018)
This just aired on KTVU news. Pathetic, NIMBY parents. What the heck do you want? Do you want good schools and good teachers or not? This is not going to drag down your precious little property values. If anything, it could well be a positive.
Why can’t district build teacher housing at the new vacant site instead of moving 2 existing schools (one middle and high school together probably have about 2500 kids)?
Are parents against teacher housing itself? They are not convinced that teacher housing must be at the combined site of 2 largest existing middle/high school site.
I have no personal interest involved in this discussion.
However, it is also strange that SJUSD chose 2 best performing schools among all schools in their district. Those schools are located at the southern end of SJUSD boundary. Commute from this location to nothern end is horrible. They should have chosen more centrally located site.
Again, it is best to build new housing at the vacant site and leave existing schools as they are. If parents are also against it, they are certainly NIMBY. However, I don’t think that’s what they against.
Come on!!! I didn’t know Almaden Valley people were so uppity… The horror of teachers moving into your neighborhood (gasp)!!!
Read @hvr ‘s post intead of poorly written article. Parents are mostly questioning about the reasoning behind site selection(which requires relocation of 2 largest existing schools) and funding. This information is from the person who attended the hearing.
Local story even reached Virginia…
Its the most nonsensical thing i have ever heard. The schools in question are not low enrollment schools that could be closed. they are top performing and well reputed schools in the school district.
The idea is to demolish and build new less than 2 miles from the current location. Wonder why they don’t want to build employee housing in the newly identified site. The school district has no answer to that. Moreover the newly proposed site is not even owned by the school district. The newly identified site is at the far end of the neighborhood, currently the schools are centrally located. There are ~1800 students in Leland high, they would be disrupting the schedule for ~1500 - 2000 families. The media is also twisting the entire episode against parents as nimbyism just because some people complained that the new high density rental employee housing complex being built does not fit in to the neighborhood.
Um, that is NIMBYism!!! This complex is not going to change the neighborhood character at all. These are teachers for Christ’s sakes, not low income Sec 8 public housing!!!