After almost 10 years of planning and community talks, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) has taken on something new: building housing. They recently opened Shirley Chisholm Village, a 135-unit apartment complex in the Sunset District near the ocean. The project is aimed at helping SFUSD educators find affordable places to live in a city where rent is often way too high. The land already belonged to the district, so they decided to put it to better use by building housing for the people who work in local schools.
This is becoming a more common solution for big city school districts with large pieces of unused or underused land. Teachers and staff often can’t afford to live where they work, and this kind of project helps fix that. It’s also a model that other school districts across the country could follow.
Teachers Helped Design the Building They’d Live In
One of the most unique things about this project is that teachers helped shape it. A group of educators gave input over the course of the decade-long planning process. They shared what they wanted in a home and what would make their lives easier. One of the main requests was to have a space where they could work after school, but not from inside their apartments. The architects listened and created a special lounge on the top floor of the building that faces the ocean. It’s designed as a shared “work-from-home” area that still lets teachers separate their jobs from their home lives.
The units themselves range from studios to three-bedroom apartments, with rents starting as low as $874 per month. They’re open to people making between 30% and 100% of the area’s median income, which helps keep them truly affordable.
Balancing New Housing With the Needs of the Neighborhood
The new building sits in a quiet neighborhood filled mostly with small single-family homes. The lot used to be a big, open asphalt parking area that local residents had turned into a kind of unofficial park. People used it for playing basketball, skateboarding, and other outdoor activities. That made this project more complicated—removing a well-loved community space and replacing it with a large apartment building could have upset neighbors.
To avoid that, the architects worked hard to make the building feel like part of the neighborhood. They designed a small public plaza, a playground, and a seating area along one of the building’s edges to give something back to the community. The building was also shaped carefully to take up as little space as possible, and its edges were lowered to blend in better with nearby homes.
A Thoughtful and Local Design
The building was designed to reflect the area around it, both physically and historically. Instead of just putting up a plain apartment block, the architects made the building in the shape of a stretched-out “H” when viewed from above. This allowed them to include courtyards and green spaces in between the wings. From the outside, the building’s height changes—it’s taller in the middle and shorter at the edges—to make the shift from houses to apartments feel more natural.
Even the roofline and facade were designed with care. The roof has a soft wave shape, inspired by the sand dunes that used to cover this area of San Francisco before homes were built. It also mimics the older homes in the neighborhood, many of which were built in the 1930s to 1950s. A small one-story building next to the main apartment complex is being set aside for a local nonprofit to use, further connecting the project to the community.
More Teacher Housing Projects Are on the Way
Even though they weren’t required to, the developers included some underground parking spots to ease concerns from neighbors and teachers who need to commute. While San Francisco has decent public transportation, this part of the city is farther out, and teachers might work in schools across town.
Overall, this project shows how cities and school districts can find creative ways to tackle the housing crisis while supporting the people who keep their schools running. Shirley Chisholm Village is just the beginning—SFUSD already has plans for three more housing developments on other land it owns. If all goes well, this could be the start of a bigger shift in how cities house essential workers like teachers.
