Cupertino housing project is part of a growing trend as expensive Bay Area cities want teachers to live near their schools

When the time came for Gabriela Flores to apply for a new teaching job in the Bay Area, the Scotts Valley resident had her heart set on one place: Cupertino.

The city is not only home to Apple headquarters, but also boasts some of the best schools and students in the state. Flores said she felt drawn to the neighborhood, and soon landed a job teaching seventh grade Social Studies and Language Arts at Hyde Middle School on Bollinger Road.

But due to the city’s skyrocketing housing costs, Flores opted to stay in her family’s Scotts Valley home. She currently commutes about 45 minutes to an hour each way to get to campus.

“I love working there,” Flores said. “I would love to call this place my home.”

In Cupertino — where the median income household is more than $200,000 and the average price for a house falls between $2 million to $3 million — it can be difficult for educators to secure housing within their budget. A starting salary for a teacher in Hyde’s Cupertino Union School District is reported to be around $80,475.

But perhaps one day, Flores can live out her dream.

Plans are underway to create a new 220-unit teacher housing site at 10333 Wolfe Road by 2028. The lot is located behind the site of the old Vallco Mall, which is currently being developed into a 2,669-unit housing development called The Rise.

It’s the latest effort by school districts around the Bay Area to help educators afford to live where they teach.

In the South Bay, the Mountain View Whisman School District, with help from the city, built a 123-unit teacher housing development. The project was completed in fall 2024, and teachers moved in during February of this year. In Los Gatos, a four-unit below-market-rate development for teachers opened in 2023.

Daly City last year welcomed a 122-unit apartment building for teachers, faculty and staff from the Jefferson Union High School District. The Palo Alto City Council recently greenlit a proposal to build 55 units of housing for teachers in the Palo Alto School District.

Over in the East Bay, the Berkeley Unified School District is breaking ground on a new project to create 110 units of affordable housing for district staff.

Santa Clara County is overseeing the Cupertino project, which was proposed by Supervisors Joe Simitian and Otto Lee in 2022. Last year, the county hired Hayward-based Eden Housing to be the project developer and Architects/Engage Fora to design the site.

The entities recently completed a yearlong effort to collect residents’ input on the site’s design and what amenities will be included. The results will be submitted alongside a formal planning application to the city, according to the project’s website. It’s expected to take a year to get city staff’s approval and subsequent building permits.

But more specific details, including how much the project will cost, how it will be funded and when construction will begin, are still being worked out.

The completed project will house around 75 to 100 educators and support staff, providing them with the opportunity to live where they work. If Flores gets the chance to move in, Hyde will only be a seven-minute commute.

“I would never move if I don’t get help from teacher housing,” Flores said. “I would never be able to afford living (in Cupertino).”

Carley Stavis, a teacher at Cupertino High School and president of the Fremont Union High School District’s teachers union, said many educators, especially newer ones, opt to live outside of Santa Clara County because of expensive housing. Some of her colleagues commute from as far away as Santa Cruz, Oakland or Hollister.

“It’s expensive to live around the school districts,” Stavis said. “There are (teachers) with families who have lived there for generations, or bought a home decades before Cupertino had a spike in real estate prices. But for new teachers, that’s really hard. The expenses are so high.”

Cupertino Union is a feeder school for Fremont Union, which serves thousands of high school students across Cupertino, Sunnyvale, San Jose and Saratoga.

Conversations about adding teacher housing near Cupertino have been held on and off for almost a decade.

In 2016, the Cupertino Union School District  intended to build 200 affordable housing units for teachers and staff at a closed-down elementary school in Santa Clara. The project was cancelled that same year and faced fierce opposition from many community members, who questioned the need to add teacher housing in the area and accused the district of making decisions on the matter behind closed doors.

Stavis said it’s important for teachers to be active members of the communities where they work and take part in city or community decisions that impact their schools and students.

“Having the ability to say we are a part of the same community, and a part of the same community decisions, goes a long way,” she said.