Free Teacher Housing Rises In The Heights

Early childcare provider Paris Pierce arrives to work on time and with a clear headspace — because her employer ensures the single mom has a safe home with two bathrooms, storage space, and a washing machine to care for herself and her three kids at no cost.

The Friends Center For Children is breaking new ground by building free homes for their growing workforce of dedicated teachers like Pierce and, in turn, aiming to confront systemic crises surrounding childcare, housing, and poverty. 

They’re doing so by capitalizing on local partnerships to model one solution for a nationwide problem: Constructing communities in which childcare providers can live rent-free in lieu of government dollars to supplement chronically underfunded salaries and in an effort to avoid raising tuition for parents already struggling to make ends meet.

“I no longer wake up with worries of when and how I’m gonna pay my next bill,” Pierce told the Independent when asked how a year of free housing (excluding utilities) has changed her life. Something as simple as having two bathrooms, rather than just one as was the case in her former apartment, has made the biggest difference in her daily life, she said, by allowing her family the time and space to get ready for work and school each morning.

On Friday morning, Yale architecture students perched on the lip of a bathtub to grout tiles in what will be the first home specifically designed to accommodate more of Pierce’s colleagues and grow a neighborhood of communal care for women who spend their days serving others’ families. The Quaker inspired home is located at 73 Howard St., amid lush green trees and just a five minute walk from the Friends Center’s childcare campus on East Grand Avenue. 

That crew of students plus a collection of generous donors are how the Friends Center is creating high quality housing stock to supplement their employees’ salaries. Over the past couple of years, the center has refurbished and furnished one single-family home and three apartments for staff. Now, they are on track to erect five brand new buildings that will accommodate up to eight more teachers by 2027. Read more about all of that here and here.

The total six houses, including Pierce’s extant home, will all look out on one another across a two acre lot across 73 Howard St. and 40 Eldridge St., forming a net of mostly single mothers navigating the cost of caretaking at work and at home.

“It’s a large investment with a very high rate of return,” Friends Center Executive Director Allyx Schiavone said of the project. 

A major donor has previously provided funds for the Friends Center to purchase on Eldridge and Front Streets, but more recently realized the value in donating undeveloped land to the organization. With two acres under her ownership, Schiavone thought to join forces with Yale School of Architecture’s Adam Hopfner to find a way to develop teacher housing at a low cost. Now, through the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project, which assigns first year architecture students, most of whom, as Hopfner put it, ​“have never swung a hammer before,” twenty-somethings will design and construct one home per year over the next four springs, wrapping up construction on each by the fall. 

The total cost, considering materials and labor of additional construction workers seeing the project through to fruition, is around $300,000 to the Friends Center, paid for through fundraising efforts. Hopfner said such a project would typically cost a client over $700,000, but students perform free labor as a service to the city in which they are studying and in exchange for the opportunity to learn on the job.

In the past, that class has built housing for clients who’d been staying at the homeless shelter Columbus House. As they pivot gears towards teacher housing, Schiavone noted that the issue of homelessness is still relevant; while only one of her staff members owns her own home, at least two are without housing altogether, she said. 

“We’re dealing with teachers who are navigating being unhoused and being priced out of New Haven,” Schiavone said. ​“The underlying issue in regard to the teacher housing is really about how we compensate and value childcare in this society.” 

“We have a mindset that K‑12 is a public good, but scientifically we know that zero to five is the most important time for brain development,” Schiavone said. ​“In the meantime, parents pay too much, teachers get too little, and providers can barely survive. None of the constituents are doing well in this system.”

The average salary for full-time childcare workers in New Haven is $34,260, according to Schiavone. The Friends Center pays their providers $42,000, but has long been looking for ways to up those salaries.

Without state or federal subsidies to support their work, Schiavone said her team started considering other ways to offset the cost of living for staff without needing to find or fundraise more cash to supplement salaries. After surveying her providers, the primary expense and/or source of instability in their lives was housing. 

The Friends Center itself launched in 2007 out of the basement of a Quaker meeting house. ​“That’s what we all do,” Schiavone said of childcare centers, ​“we start in the basement of a church because that’s the only way we can afford it. We’re constantly having to fit into spaces that are not designed for us.”

As Schiavone sees it, the center’s housing initiative is an opportunity not just to find ways to better compensate hardworking and underpaid teachers, but to build out a new system of care that compliments the specific needs and wants named by the people affected by and part of that system. 

While the organization plans to continue buying up housing stock with donor help and the hope of state bonding money to support the undertaking, the center’s latest land acquisition offers a chance to build new housing stock while architecting a micro neighborhood. ​“Let’s design a space, place, and system of how we want it to be,” Schiavone urged. 

The five houses slated for construction in Fair Haven Heights will all face inward towards a shared, forested backyard. Each home will be single-family, meaning they contain just one kitchen, but have enough space for two teachers to live, potentially with their children or a partner. Most are expected to be single moms.

“The idea of sharing space, food, opportunity and childcare is really an ideal situation,” Schiavone asserted. ​“When I was a single parent, I had another mom move in with me,” she said, for both emotional support and split labor.

Hopfner said before starting the project, he asked teachers at the Friends Center, ​“When you come home from work with a child, what do you need there?” Teams of students then came up with 12 different architectural designs, from which the Friends Center selected one. The first home at 73 Howard, for which construction is drawing to a conclusion, features four potential bedrooms, an ​“oversized” laundry room, as Hopfner put it, to deal with the constant churn of children’s dirty clothes, two and a half bathrooms, a basement, ample closets for storage space, and a large kitchen with a dining space and living room attached that leads out to a stone terrace. 

When this reporter visited Friday, two students were digging outdoor steps to create a pathway between the new home and the house next door, where Paris Pierce lives.

“One of my future neighbors wants to come look at the new house today,” Pierce told the Independent. ​“I’ll keep an eye on her son while she takes the tour.”

Before moving into her Howard Street home, Pierce said she lived in a cramped apartment and stressed each month about making rent. ​“Now, we don’t have to go to the laundromat, we’ve got a dishwasher, we don’t have to worry about noise bothering the upstairs neighbors. I’m working on my credit, which is what I need to do to buy my own house, and I can afford to get my kids into extra activities like soccer and dance.”

Pierce’s kids, named Londyn, RJ, and Tatum, are between one-year-old and 11. ​“Mornings are always really hectic,” she said, ​“and consist of a lot of yelling.”

“I am so grateful to have two bathrooms now,” she said. 

She added she is particularly excited for more teachers to move in next door. ​“At our old place, there were a lot of children nearby and they could all go out and play together. When we have more neighbors, my kids will have their own community.”

Hopfner mentioned that same philosophy as guiding design plans for the future six-home complex: ​“Children are really good babysitters for other children.”

Another Friends Center teacher, Karina Rojas, is planning to move into one of the center’s apartments on Front Street this fall. 

Currently, she and her 13-year-old son live together in a basement apartment for $1,000 a month. They share one bedroom, and Rojas frequently comes home to find burst pipes flooding the floor. She said the space is infested with mold.

“It’s unhealthy,” she stated. ​“I have a goal to one day own my own home — and for my son to have his own room.”

When he starts high school this fall, Rojas’ son will have his own room. And Rojas will be paired with a fiscal mentor through the Friends Center so she can sketch out a plan to start saving — a difficult task while living on a limited income and sending money home every month to her family in Venezuela, who she left in 2014 to move to the States. 

Rojas said she’s been searching for a new place for years, but that she hasn’t been able to find another apartment in her price range.

Beyond reducing a major expense, Pierce and Rojas said the housing initiative is just one way the Friends Center seeks to ensure providers aren’t just compensated fairly, but feel respected and cared for in a systemically overlooked industry.

In addition to free rent, the Friends Center provides its employees with groceries from Food Rescue each week, hardship loans and grants, opportunities for tuition reimbursement, and mental health coaches. ​“I definitely feel valued,” Pierce said, a feeling that hasn’t always felt accessible while working other jobs in childcare.

The Friends Center is slated to open new classrooms across the city this year, and as they grow their staff from around 30 providers to 80, Schiavone said she intends to continue offering housing for a third of employees, which would amount to 24 units. Right now, anyone looking for teacher housing has been able to secure it through the center, she said, noting that eligibility is based solely on income relative to family size; single adults making under $38,500 a year, adults with children making under $64,000, or two adults with children making less than $79,000 are all welcome to apply for housing.

But, she said, as more workers coming into the system request more housing, the center will have to find more support — whether from donors, the government, or elsewhere — to keep shelter coming. 

Ultimately, Schiavone said the Friends Center’s unique housing program suggests ​“there are ways to solve this problem,” one of chronic under-compensation and undervaluing of childcare workers. ​“There just isn’t a will.”

“What’s that saying?” she asked, before remembering the line: ​“Necessity is the mother of invention.”