A ramen noodles diet for teachers after buying a house in San Jose

A teacher in San Jose buying a median-priced house with a median teaching salary would have about $7.50 per day to live on after the paying the mortgage, the lowest on a home affordability scale for teachers anywhere in the United States. That adds up to  $2,750 in spending money annually after spending $87,612 on housing, according to a study by the online broker Redfin.

Of course, that’s really theoretical, since a single teacher earning the $90,300 median salary in San Jose wouldn’t be able to get a mortgage on a median $1.2 million home – at least not without having another source of income, family help or personal savings. Instead, new teachers are doing long commutes, renting rooms in a house or sharing apartments with other teachers for a few years, then migrating to more affordable districts.

Like Merced, about two hours to the east. It’s the most affordable of the 157 metropolitan areas that Redfin studied. In 2020, the median salary for a teacher in Merced was $99,637, and the median annual homeownership cost was $35,051, leaving teachers with a median disposable income of $64,586. Fresno was ranked #2.  Riverside, Modesto and Bakersfield were also designated among the most affordable areas.

The high cost of living has been the main factor driving teachers out of San Jose, San Jose Teachers Association President Patrick Bernhardt, a math teacher, told the Mercury News. He said that San Jose Unified and the city of San Jose have been exploring subsidized housing programs, such as building on school-owned properties, but it will be years before a development would be built.

San Francisco and the East Bay are the second least affordable areas, according to Redfin, with $14,900 per year left after paying the mortgage.

The typical U.S. teacher could buy a home and have more than 10 times the disposable income as a home-owning teacher in San Jose, Redfin calculated.