Mother Jones
Can’t Pay Preschool Teachers More? Try Giving Them a Free Place to Live.
This story was co-published with The 74_,_ a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on education in America. Sign up for their early learning Substack.
A few years ago, Eric Gil was living at his uncle’s place in Waterbury, Connecticut, where he shared a bedroom with his brother and cousin. With eight people in the house, it was crowded.
He was trying to get out, but rental prices in Waterbury—which currently average $1,600 a month—were prohibitively expensive. Housing costs in New Haven, where he works as an assistant preschool teacher at Friends Center for Children, a nonprofit early care and education program, were even higher.
“I was looking everywhere,” Gil recalled. “It was out of my budget. It was like, for monthly rent, 40 percent of my monthly income. It was outrageous, basically.”
He and other early childhood educators are among the lowest paid professionals in the United States, often earning less than dog walkers. But short of a complete overhaul of the current early care and education system, that seems unlikely to change anytime soon.
Thus, Gil remained in his uncle’s house, with a long daily commute to his teaching job and no clear way out. That is, until Friends Center offered him an opportunity to move into his own place just minutes away from his job—for free—through its teacher housing initiative, which covers the full cost of housing for select staff.
Friends Center, a high-quality early learning program with four locations across New Haven, currently employs 47 teachers, many of whom are in situations that resemble Gil’s. On their salaries, the area’s housing costs have left many of them in less-than-desirable living arrangements.
It’s an issue that Friends Center has been trying to solve for years. Back in 2019, the organization wanted to get to the root of the problem and raise salaries, said CEO Allyx Schiavone. But after months of trying to figure out how to budget for salary increases, Schiavone realized they couldn’t cover them without more public funding or raising tuition for families.
So they tried to do the next best thing and reduce what was overwhelmingly the biggest expense for employees.
“At that moment,” Schiavone said, “we decided, as an organization, we were going to tackle that: We were going to figure out how to give teachers free housing.”
The teacher housing initiative formally kicked off in 2020, when the first teacher moved into a three-family home. Today, 10 teachers, including Gil, live in free housing provided by Friends Center, with two more slated to move in this fall. The nonprofit has set a goal of housing 30% of its growing teaching staff by 2028, which Schiavone said it is on track to do; the center expects to double its housing inventory over the next three years.
As the teacher housing initiative scales up in New Haven, the work is catching on elsewhere too. Early childhood educators in Missouri, Michigan and Georgia are also getting free housing now, with inspiration and support from leaders at Friends Center.
Friends Center for Children kicked off its teacher housing initiative in 2020, when a single teacher with three young kids moved into a three-family home. Courtesy of Friends Center for Children
When the initiative began, the first two properties—a three-family home and a single-family home—were donated to Friends Center, creating four housing units for staff members. In addition to donated properties, Friends Center also has a partnership with Yale School of Architecture, in which college students design and construct about one home per year for an early childhood educator. All the properties involved in the initiative are owned by Friends Center, making the organization both the landlord and employer of all teacher residents.
The benefit of free housing can be a game-changer for teachers. In Connecticut, early childhood educators earn, on average, about $31,000 per year, according to the most recent data from the Early Childhood Workforce Index, and the median rent in the state is about $24,000 per year, according to Zillow.
Friends Center pays its staff well above the state average, Schiavone said, but it’s still “not a livable wage.”
When the organization decided to provide free housing to its teachers, it intentionally started with those who needed it most—typically the lowest-income earners with dependents.
The first tenant, housed in 2020, was a single mom of three children under age 7. The next year, another single mother, Paris Pierce, moved into a single-family home with her young children. Both homes were purchased by donors for Friends Center.
Pierce said she loves the charms that come with her old house, like the stained-glass windows. She loves all the natural light that floods in, too, and the fact that her kids—nowages 4, 8 and 14—have more room than before.
Paris Pierce, a single mom with three children, is among the 10 teachers at Friends Center who currently live in free housing.Courtesy of Friends Center for Children
Gil moved into Friends Center housing about two years ago. He lives in a home that was built by students through the Yale University partnership.
The Yale housesare worth about $750,000, and Friends Center is getting them for about $300,000.These homes are all constructed on one large property thatwas donated to the housing initiative**.** Today, fiveFriends Center teachers live as neighbors in that area, which is known as “the Village” and is about a five-minute walk from the program where most of them work.
Gil lives with one of his teaching colleagues. They share a kitchen, but otherwise have separate spaces throughout the house, which Gil said is very spacious with “huge, beautiful” windows—his favorite part of his new residence. The two colleagues have since become friends, Gil said; they often read, watch movies, play video games and work out together.
Every teacher who receives free housing meets monthly with a financial coach to help them set and reach goals. How much do they want to be saving each month? How can they improve their credit scores?
Pierce said her goal is to save money, and already she’s been able to put her two older children in extracurricular activities—dance for her daughter and soccer for her son—that she wasn’t able to afford before. Pierce recently enrolled in a program to earn her bachelor’s degree so she can become a lead teacher.
“I can show up being my best self, not worrying about making ends meet. I can pursue other things.”
The free housing, Pierce said, has made her a better mother and a better teacher.
“I can show up being my best self, not worrying about making ends meet. I can pursue other things,” she said. “Children pick up on everything, [so] me being able to show up and be my best self is a great feeling.”
Through a partnership with the nearby Yale School of Architecture, many Friends Center teachers now live as neighbors in homes built by Yale students, in an area known as “the Village.” Courtesy of Friends Center for Children
It didn’t take long for word of the housing initiative to travel far. Many early care and education programs across the country heard about Friends Center’s approach and wanted to learn more. Since 2020, more than 1,000 visitors have traveled to New Haven to see it for themselves, and some have taken their observations back home and begun to act.
Leaders at Urban Sprouts, a nonprofit early learning program in St. Louis, visited Friends Center in August 2025. They thought it was a clever approach to the teacher shortage in the field, even if it wasn’t directly remedying the issue of teachers being “woefully underpaid,” said Joey Saunders, chief of strategy and advancement at Urban Sprouts.
Urban Sprouts, which serves about 130 children from birth to age 5 at a single location, launched a pilot program this year to provide free housing to staff in a model that closely aligns with Friends Center’s. Program leaders identified two teachers for the first two houses in its pilot.
Zarina Militello, an infant-toddler teacher at Urban Sprouts, moved into a two-bedroom house in April. Urban Sprouts, with the help of some partner organizations, had furnished every room in the space except her bedroom. “Everything down to kitchen utensils was provided,” she said. “It was very, very nice.”
Militello had been living with her parents and younger brothers until the move earlier this year. The average cost of a studio apartment in University City, the neighborhood in St. Louis where the center is located, is between $1,400 and $1,600 per month, Saunders said. Militello preferred to save money by living with her parents over spending most of her paycheck on rent, especially with student loans hanging over her. But she was commuting 45 minutes each way, often arriving to work late, and spending way too much of her income on gas, she said.
Now, living in employer housing, she can walk to work in about 5 minutes—and is showing up on time every day.
Jenyne Woodruff, a longtime pre-K teacher at Urban Sprouts, learned in June that the center had purchased a three-bedroom house for her, her daughter and her granddaughter. Seeing the house for the first time, she was very emotional. When she moved in earlier this summer, it became the first time in her entire life that she’s had her own bedroom. Even in the rental property she just left, which she shared with her daughter and granddaughter, Woodruff didn’t have a room with a door—and for that she was paying about $1,700 per month.
Zarina Militello, an infant-toddler teacher at Urban Sprouts, became the first teacher in her center to receive free employer housing when she moved into a two-bedroom home in April.Courtesy of Urban Sprouts
Jenyne Woodruff, a pre-K teacher at Urban Sprouts, was among the first staff members selected for the center’s free housing. Courtesy of Urban Sprouts
“It is a literal dream come true,” she said of the new house. “It has been rough. I’ve been on my own since I was 19 years old. It’s been a struggle. When I walked in [to my new house], I just felt like it was my home. I am very grateful.”
“It is a literal dream come true.”
In Battle Creek, Michigan, a group of seven community partners has come together to form First Home, First Teacher, an initiative that aims to provide rent-free housing as a salaried benefit to 30 percent of the area’s childcare workforce over the next 20 years.
Battle Creek, with a population of 55,000, lacks a large center-based early care and education provider like Friends Center, said Kathy Szenda Wilson, co-executive director of Pulse, an initiative of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research focused on improving early childhood development in Michigan. (Pulse is one of the groups that helped design and launch the First Home, First Teacher initiative.) Instead, Battle Creek has lots of small programs. By her count, there are about 550 employees across 34 center-based programs in the city.
The model builds on an earlier community effort to provide short-term rental assistance to childcare workers during and after the pandemic. “From that, at least we know the ground is tilled,” said Szenda Wilson.
After traveling to Connecticut and seeing what Friends Center was doing, a team of early childhood advocates from Battle Creek wondered what it would take for their community to offer something more transformational than rental assistance.
The First Home, First Teacher initiative is still young. This summer, the partner organizations are working to establish a trust and a governing board to oversee the initiative. But they’re not letting the process hold up progress.
On June 8, the partners had a “furnishing day” with the two inaugural teacher residents of First Home, First Teacher—two single moms from two different centers in Battle Creek, living with their kids in a two-unit duplex.
The pilot at Urban Sprouts, the initiative in Battle Creek, and an early childhood program in Georgia that started a year-and-a-half ago and has so far housed two teachers are all working closely with Friends Center. Schiavone, at Friends Center, is glad to see communities building on the model she established in Connecticut.
“What we’re doing here in New Haven is version 1.0,” she said.
To truly scale, she added, the work needs to be publicly funded, and the model needs to move away from having the childcare program as the property owner.
“We don’t think, at the scale version, that is the best way to move forward,” she said. “Childcare providers don’t want to be owners and landlords.”
That’s why she’s especially interested to see what comes of the work in Battle Creek.
Schiavone and the other program leaders are clear, though, that free teacher housing is not a solution to the systemic problems that face early childhood educators.
“Early childhood education is only as strong as the people who provide it,” Schiavone said. “We’re paying women to be in poverty. It is completely unacceptable.”
Saunders, at Urban Sprouts in St. Louis, emphasized that the housing initiative there is in pilot stage and will hopefully scale, but that it’s not meant to distract from the larger issues in the field. “We’ll continue to ring the bell that this is a real crisis across our nation,” he said.
“If we want high-quality early care and education, then we need educators to be stable and feel secure and be their best selves,” Schiavone said. “We believe you can’t wait for public funding. If you wait, ideas will die. You need to move forward.”
Furnishing day in Battle Creek, Michigan, for the “First Home, First Teacher,” initiative on June 8. Two single moms working at early childhood centers moved into a duplex. Nick Buckley