For much of the 20th century, teaching was a stable, middle-class job in the U.S. Now it’s becoming a lot harder to survive on a teacher’s salary: Wages have been stagnant for decades, according to a study from the Economic Policy Institute, and teachers earn 5% less than they did a decade ago when adjusting for inflation.

That’s one reason why there’s a widespread teacher shortage, with tens of thousands of positions going unfilled. At the same time, according to a 2022 report from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, there are more than 160,000 underqualified teachers in the classroom, meaning they don’t meet full certification or credentialing standards.

This issue has become particularly acute as housing costs have risen sharply across the country over the past decade. Why become a teacher if it means you’ll struggle to put a roof over your head?

In response, many states and cities, from California to Cincinnati, are exploring ways to attract and retain teachers by developing education workforce housing – affordable housing built specifically for public school teachers and staff to make it easier for them to live near where they work. In doing so, they seek to address aspects of both the teacher shortage and housing crisis.

Fertile land for housing

As professors of architecture and education and as directors of an urban teaching program at Miami University in Ohio, we work to make it easier for students to pursue teaching careers – and that includes addressing affordable housing issues in communities where they work.

A key element of this work involves collaborating with local education agencies to either build, subsidize or find housing for teachers.

Local education agencies are tasked with the administrative functions of a school district, and they often own large tracts of land.

This land can be used to build new school buildings or community health clinics. But it can also be used to build housing – a particularly attractive option in cities where land can be scarce and expensive.

California has been at the forefront of these efforts. The state’s school districts own more than 75,000 acres of potentially developable land. Meanwhile, more than one-third of the state’s public school employees are rent-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing costs.

California’s Teacher Housing Act of 2016 set up a framework for local education agencies to build and develop housing on their land. Since then, education workforce housing complexes have been developed across the state, ranging from San Francisco’s Shirley Chisolm Village to 705 Serramonte in Daly City, California.

The nuts and bolts of education workforce housing vary.

It can be financed by traditional sources, such as private philanthropy and government funds. But it can also be funded through financial tools such as certificates of participation, which allow outside investors to provide funding up front and later receive a return on their investment through rental income.

In some cases, teachers are offered reduced rents for just a few years as they start their careers. In others, they’re given the opportunity to purchase their home.

Third party management companies often oversee the projects, since local education agencies usually aren’t interested in property management. This also reduces the potential for any direct disputes between employer and employee. Many programs require only that residents be employees of the school district when they enter the program, meaning if someone leaves their job, they will not be displaced.

In April 2025, UCLA’s CITYLab and the Center for Cities and Schools published a study highlighting some of the benefits and challenges of nine educator workforce housing projects built in California.

The complexes ranged in size, from 18 to 141 dwelling units, with heights that ranged from two to six stories. The researchers found that tenants were largely satisfied with their living situations: They paid rents at far below market rate, and they praised the apartment design. They also highlighted their shorter commutes.

From tiny homes to factory conversions

Since 2020, educator housing has been proposed or developed in Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Nevada and South Carolina.

In Fort Stockton, a small, rural town in West Texas, the school district bought a motel in 2022 and converted it into teacher housing. In Arizona, the Chino Valley Unified School District built tiny homes for its teachers in 2023, renting them at US$550 per month.

In Baltimore, more than 775 teachers have recently been housed thanks to initiatives such as the Union Mill project, an 86,000-square-foot historic building converted into teacher apartments that range in price from $700 to $1200 per month.

Teacher housing does more than give educators an affordable place to live. It can forge lasting relationships. A recent assessment of teacher housing in Los Angeles found that the community spaces and programs offered on site strengthened bonds among the residents, leading to friendships and working relationships that lasted for years.

Building community in and out of the classroom

Here in Cincinnati, our own graduates now working in schools also benefit from affordable housing options.

Through a partnership between Miami University and St. Francis Seraph, early career teachers from our TEACh and Urban Cohort programs have access to affordable housing.

In 2024, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati converted an old church property in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood into teacher apartments, which recent graduates can rent at a reduced rate. Most young teachers otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford living in this area.

“I wouldn’t be able to spend my beginning years as an educator in the community without access to affordable housing,” Nicholas Detzel, a graduate teacher now living in the converted space, told us in an interview.

“Living in the community has been an amazing experience and helps you know your students on a completely different level,” he added. “It has also helped me relate to students about knowing what is going on in our community.”

Teachers like Detzel who live in Over-the-Rhine can walk or take public transportation to the local schools where they work.

Perhaps more importantly, they can better understand the world of their students. They can learn the streets that students avoid, the parks and community spaces that become popular after-school hangouts, and what community organizations offer summer programming. Ultimately, teachers grounded in the life of the community can build relationships outside of the walls of school that contribute to more trust in the classroom.

Providing affordable housing for teachers and staff also helps retention rates, particularly as many younger teachers leave the profession due to low pay and burnout.

Teacher housing programs are still in their infancy. There are roughly 3.2 million public school teachers nationwide, and there are probably fewer than 100 of these developments completed or in progress.

Yet more and more districts are expressing interest, because they help alleviate two major concerns affecting so many American communities: affordable housing and a quality education.

While the need for affordable housing spans both lower- and middle-class families, teachers or not, forging alliances between schools and affordable housing providers can serve as one path forward – and possibly serve as a model for other trades and professions.

Jeff Kruth, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Miami University and Tammy Schwartz, Director of the Urban Cohort, Miami University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Every year, millions of people sing the beautiful carol Silent Night, with its line “all is calm, all is bright”.

We all know the Christmas story is one in which peace and joy are proclaimed, and this permeates our festivities, family gatherings and present-giving. Countless Christmas cards depict the Holy Family – starlit, in a quaint stable, nestled comfortably in a sleepy little village.

However, when I began to research my book on the childhood of Jesus, Boy Jesus: Growing up Judaean in Turbulent Times, that carol started to sound jarringly wrong in terms of his family’s actual circumstances at the time he was born.

The Gospel stories themselves tell of dislocation and danger. For example, a “manger” was, in fact, a foul-smelling feeding trough for donkeys. A newborn baby laid in one is a profound sign given to the shepherds, who were guarding their flocks at night from dangerous wild animals (Luke 2:12).

When these stories are unpacked for their core elements and placed in a wider historical context, the dangers become even more glaring.

Take King Herod, for example. He enters the scene in the nativity stories without any introduction at all, and readers are supposed to know he was bad news. But Herod was appointed by the Romans as their trusted client ruler of the province of Judaea. He stayed long in his post because he was – in Roman terms – doing a reasonable job.

Jesus’ family claimed to be of the lineage of Judaean kings, descended from David and expected to bring forth a future ruler. The Gospel of Matthew begins with Jesus’ entire genealogy, it was that important to his identity.

But a few years before Jesus’ birth, Herod had violated the tomb of David and looted it. How did that affect the family and the stories they would tell Jesus? How did they feel about the Romans?

A time of fear and revolt

As for Herod’s attitude to Bethlehem, remembered as David’s home, things get yet more dangerous and complex.

When Herod was first appointed, he was evicted by a rival ruler supported by the Parthians (Rome’s enemy) who was loved by many local people. Herod was attacked by those people just near Bethlehem.

He and his forces fought back and massacred the attackers. When Rome vanquished the rival and brought Herod back, he built a memorial to his victorious massacre on a nearby site he called Herodium, overlooking Bethlehem. How did that make the local people feel?

And far from being a sleepy village, Bethlehem was so significant as a town that a major aqueduct construction brought water to its centre. Fearing Herod, Jesus’ family fled from their home there, but they were on the wrong side of Rome from the start.

They were not alone in their fears or their attitude to the colonisers. The events that unfolded, as told by the first-century historian Josephus, show a nation in open revolt against Rome shortly after Jesus was born.

When Herod died, thousands of people took over the Jerusalem temple and demanded liberation. Herod’s son Archelaus massacred them. A number of Judaean revolutionary would-be kings and rulers seized control of parts of the country, including Galilee.

It was at this time, in the Gospel of Matthew, that Joseph brought his family back from refuge in Egypt – to this independent Galilee and a village there, Nazareth.

But independence in Galilee didn’t last long. Roman forces, under the general Varus, marched down from Syria with allied forces, destroyed the nearby city of Sepphoris, torched countless villages and crucified huge numbers of Judaean rebels, eventually putting down the revolts.

Archelaus – once he was installed officially as ruler – followed this up with a continuing reign of terror.

A nativity story for today

As a historian, I’d like to see a film that shows Jesus and his family embedded in this chaotic, unstable and traumatic social world, in a nation under Roman rule.

Instead, viewers have now been offered The Carpenter’s Son, a film starring Nicholas Cage. It’s partly inspired by an apocryphal (not biblical) text named the Paidika Iesou – the Childhood of Jesus – later called The Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

You might think the Paidika would be something like an ancient version of the hit TV show Smallville from the 2000s, which followed the boy Clark Kent before he became Superman.

But no, rather than being about Jesus grappling with his amazing powers and destiny, it is a short and quite disturbing piece of literature made up of bits and pieces, assembled more than 100 years after the life of Jesus.

The Paidika presents the young Jesus as a kind of demigod no one should mess with, including his playmates and teachers. It was very popular with non-Jewish, pagan-turned-Christian audiences who sat in an uneasy place within wider society.

The miracle-working Jesus zaps all his enemies – and even innocents. At one point, a child runs into Jesus and hurts his shoulder, so Jesus strikes him dead. Joseph says to Mary, “Do not let him out of the house so that those who make him angry may not die.”

Such stories rest on a problematic idea that one must never kindle a god’s wrath. And this young Jesus shows instant, deadly wrath. He also lacks much of a moral compass.

But this text also rests on the idea that Jesus’ boyhood actions against his playmates and teachers were justified because they were “the Jews”. “A Jew” turns up as an accuser just a few lines in. There should be a content warning.

The nativity scene from The Carpenter’s Son is certainly not peaceful. There is a lot of screaming and horrific images of Roman soldiers throwing babies into a fire. But, like so many films, the violence is somehow just evil and arbitrary, not really about Judaea and Rome.

It is surely the contextual, bigger story of the nativity and Jesus’ childhood that is so relevant today, in our times of fracturing and “othering”, where so many feel under the thumb of the unyielding powers of this world.

In fact, some churches in the United States are now reflecting this contemporary relevance as they adapt nativity scenes to depict ICE detentions and deportations of immigrants and refugees.

In many ways, the real nativity is indeed not a simple one of peace and joy, but rather one of struggle – and yet mystifying hope.

Joan Taylor, Professor Emerita of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism, King's College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.