When Housing Costs Threatened Essential Workers, These Communities Built Their Own Solutions

Last summer, the nonprofit tied to the Provincetown Independent found itself stuck in a familiar conversation: How do you recruit the best reporters when they've been priced out of the local housing market?

“Every single meeting began and ended with, ‘Well, that looks like a good opportunity, but where will they live?’” Janet Lesniak, executive director of the Local Journalism Project, the nonprofit backer of the Independent, tells Realtor.com®.

Their dilemma reflects a broader crisis taking hold across the country: As housing costs continue to outpace wages, communities are finding it harder to house the workers they depend on, from journalists and teachers to firefighters and even doctors.

In Provincetown, MA, the strain became “really an existential problem for the paper," Lesniak says.

But rather than wait years, even decades, for the housing market to right itself, the Local Journalism Project and similar organizations took matters into their own hands, stepping into a role they never expected to take on: landlord.

On one hand, it’s just good business.

“Housing affordability becomes a workforce problem when it is no longer feasible for workers to live near where they work,” explains Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com. “Either wages in these areas need to accelerate dramatically, or some kind of affordable housing option needs to be introduced.”

But it also hints at something deeper.

“Civic pride is part of the equation too,” says Kyra Mungia, CEO of Oakland Fund and co-founder of Rooted, one of the organizations working to provide affordable housing to local essential workers. “People see this as Oakland stepping up to invest in itself and in the people who make the city work.”

That same sense of local stake is showing up in different places.

When a newspaper had to become a landlord

The award-winning Provincetown Independent is a perfect example of a point of civic pride—a trusted and award-winning local paper that residents have rallied around as both a newsroom and a community asset.

And for a while, the Local Journalism Project could patch around the town's housing crunch. There were winter rentals to be found, at least sometimes, and temporary arrangements that could carry a reporter through a season. But as the market tightened, even those stopgaps began to disappear.

Today, the median listing price in the area is $1.4 million, according to Realtor.com data—far beyond the reach of a staff writer earning about $45,000 a year, or even a managing editor making $80,000 to $100,000.

That left the paper confronting a harder truth. Home prices in Provincetown had climbed so far beyond what a journalist could reasonably afford that the usual fix—pay a higher salary—had stopped being a real fix at all.

“Paying people enough to be able to afford the median home price right now in Provincetown is well over a million dollars, and there is just no way, on a long-term basis,” Lesniak says.

So the organization changed the equation and made an offer on a three-bedroom, three-bathroom condo in the center of Provincetown. After some back and forth, the offer was accepted, but the group had just 45 days to raise $500,000 to cover closing costs.

“It surely felt like a high hill to climb,” Lesniak says. But the local community stepped in, and they were able to raise the money from what she describes as a wide mix of people, from year-round residents to seasonal supporters who spend much of the year elsewhere.

It's "a testament to the value that this community places on the work that we’re doing," she adds.

Now, three reporters live there, paying roughly 30% of their salaries toward housing while the nonprofit absorbs the rest.

‘Oakland owning Oakland’

In Oakland, the same housing math is playing out in public schools.

Median rent in the city now sits just below $2,700 a month, while the median list price is $650,000, according to Realtor.com data. A teacher with five years of experience, by comparison, earns about $70,000 under the district’s most recent salary schedule.

That gap has become a staffing problem.

“Someone making $70,000 and renting the median 0-2 bedroom unit in Oakland would be severely cost-burdened, spending over 46% of their paycheck on rent,” says Berner. The target is usually 30% for affordability.

“If they were paying a mortgage on the median home for sale, they'd be spending 62% of their paycheck,” he adds.

Oakland loses about 400 teachers each year, according to the teachers union, churning through educators in a district where continuity matters.

“While affordability is the top factor, what we’re hearing from educators isn’t just about numbers—it’s about whether staying in Oakland feels possible,” Lydia Yamaguchi, program manager for Rooted, tells Realtor.com.

When teachers leave, Yamaguchi says, schools do not lose just staff. They lose experience, relationships, and stability.

“The schools that can least afford instability are often the ones experiencing it the most,” she adds.

Rooted, a project of the Oakland Fund, is trying to intervene before that cycle hardens. Rather than wait years for new workforce housing to get approved and built, the nonprofit is buying existing apartment buildings and converting them into educator housing.

It recently acquired a 33-unit building in Temescal and says it has raised $14 million toward a goal of securing 150 educator housing units over the next three years, with rents generally capped at 30% of household income.

“Our Rooted program is about making it possible for educators not just to work here, but to stay, grow, and build long-term roots in the communities that need them most,” Yamaguchi says.

Why waiting isn’t an option

Oakland is far from the only California community trying to use housing to support its schools. San Francisco Unified School District opened a 134-unit educator housing building last fall and broke ground on another project last June. Jefferson Union High School District, also in the Bay Area, has a 122-unit development for school staff.

What distinguishes Rooted is not the idea itself, but the speed of its approach.

While many educator housing efforts depend on years of planning, approvals, financing, and ground-up construction, Rooted is focused on buying existing apartment buildings and converting them into educator housing over time. The model may lack the visibility of a brand-new development, but it is built around a different advantage: getting teachers housed sooner.

“The reality is that educators need housing now,” says Jack Woodruff, Rooted’s housing director. “By acquiring existing buildings, we can deliver homes in months instead of years, while longer-term projects continue to move forward.”

That difference is especially important in a state like California, where even widely supported housing projects can take years before a single resident moves in.

The response, Mungia says, has been immediate.

“Educators are expressing their eagerness to live in the building, and policymakers from Oakland all the way to the United States Congress attended our ribbon cutting to express their belief in the power of educator workforce housing.”

That enthusiasm reflects something larger than one building.

“People understand that when educators can afford to stay, there are positive ripple effects to students, schools, families, and whole communities,” Mungia says. “Stable educators mean more continuity in schools, stronger relationships with students and families, better outcomes over time, and a more connected community overall.”

That may be the larger lesson running through both Oakland and Provincetown: In housing markets where wages can no longer keep up with the cost of housing, the ability of schools, newsrooms, and other local institutions to function depends on whether workers can still afford to stay.