The housing part never 'decayed', it was actively blocked by the people who already had homes. That's why you see things now like California actively overriding local zoning.

Well states need home prices to increase because the majority of their pension funds for their employees is invested in hedge funds seeking outsized returns that use single family homes as an investment vehicle.

This can never be solved until we resolve the public pension crisis.

Lawmakers in my state of Oregon are soon going to debate how the state invests in hedge funds but the simple truth of the numbers says that there's no possible way Oregon can meet its pension obligations without their stated returns.

This is quite a new deal and not one enjoyed by most people for most of history.

Maybe we could use college teaching as a model. College teachers are for the most part non-unionized.

Disclosure: I was one of those teachers for a semester, many years ago.

Also, teacher pay is not as rigid as it seems. In my state, the good teachers advance by moving to better paying districts. Very few teachers stay in rural districts for more than a year or two.

> Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).

This is an unhelpful, anti-union sentiment with no actual relevance to the problem of teacher recruiting.

How would it be easier to recruit new, potentially-effective teachers if we had incentive pay based on meritocratic pay scales? There is no rational way to credit someone from a different area for their ability to run a classroom effectively until there's evidence on how that person runs a classroom.

I know the Georgism joke here, but we don't need an LVT to fix this; we just need states to override home rule on minimum density requirements for residential and mixed-use zoning. The core problem here is in fact very simple!

A land value tax without changes in non-tax land use regulations would not fix, and a land value tax would not be necessary after removing the non-tax land use restrictions which this responds to.

Not on its own. You also need to relax or remove direct (and indirect, eg parking minimums) restrictions on residential density.

How?

In some areas like the San Francisco Bay Area, schools would have to pay astronomically more in order for teachers to compete against software engineers. I’m a community college professor in the Bay Area making a low six-figure salary, but even a townhouse in the neighborhood my college is in is easily $1 million for a two-bedroom, and rent for a two-bedroom apartment is easily $3500/mo. A modest salary boost can help me rent a two-bedroom apartment, but if I hope to buy closer to work, my salary would need to double, and there’s still the challenge of saving for the down payment, since there’s no such thing as RSUs in a not-for-profit institution.

At least teacher housing provides a way for teachers to obtain secure housing closer to work without having to directly compete against highly-paid corporate workers with RSUs.

Teachers in major metro school systems already have quite a good deal. Rural schoolteachers really do have the deal everyone heard about in 1990s politics, but urban schoolteachers are generally economically privileged.

(That doesn't mean they aren't impacted by housing scarcity in ways that disrupt the administration of school systems; they are. But the problem isn't compensation, the problem is corrupt regulation written to prop up homeowner assets.)

Why not make housing cost less instead?

Or allow pay that is not lockstep/tied to mostly-useless degree completion. Unions fight this stuff like hell because the people in charge have gone through the current system and therefore benefit from it.

It is not that hard to do outcome-based pay over a multi-year period, but this is the main criticism. You can either track kids over a number of years and track their relative growth in each year, or you can use bargaining up-front whereby teachers can vote on a "multiplier" for each class before they know who will end up with which class.