By admin 
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.
Read more The new meaning of staying put as job tenures rebound
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 in a conversation with The 74. “It was out of my budget. It was like, for monthly rent, 40% 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 is scaling 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.
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 graduate 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.”
Read more Newsom vetoes bill calling for student feedback on campus protest rules
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. 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 – now ages 4, 8 and 14 – have more room than before.
Gil moved into Friends Center housing about two years ago. He lives in a home that was built by students through the partnership with Yale University.
The Yale houses are worth about $750,000, and Friends Center is getting them for about $300,000. These homes are all constructed on one large property that was donated to the housing initiative. Today, five Friends 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.
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.”
Read more Sacramento’s most avid baseball fans campaign for MLB at last A’s game of 2026
This story was co-published with Mother Jones.
This story was produced by The 74 and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
Copyright 2026 Stacker Media, LLC
This story was originally published September 28, 2026 at 3:30 AM.