Furnishing Day Readies Rent-Free Homes For Early Ed Teachers

“No light bulb,” a volunteer called out on a recent afternoon at a two-story, one-family home in Fair Haven Heights. 

The lamp that needed a bulb was among the community donations at the first-ever Furnishing Day, which saw a revolving group of 60 friends, neighbors, and board members assembling furniture, hanging pictures, and stocking the pantry in the newly-built structure.

They were preparing the house for two early childhood educators at Friends Center for Children to move into, and live rent-free, with their children later this month. While sharing the kitchen, each family will live on one floor.

It’s the realization of an idea initiated by executive director Allyx Schiavone to help solve the problem of chronically underpaid early child educators – and the first of its kind in the country.

“This is the result of an ongoing question that’s universal to all early care institutions, which is how to pay our teachers more without charging parents more and without raising the tuition,” said Schiavone, amid the bang of hammers and the aroma of fresh paint in the light-saturated children’s bedroom in the second-floor living area. 

“We are around $46,000, which is $11,500 above the state average, and it’s still not enough for them, for anyone, for their value,” she said. 

She cited a United Way ALICE (Asset Limited Income Constrained Employed) report showing a salary of $41,000 to live comfortably in New Haven. 

“That’s to survive, and that’s even more crucial now,” she said, referring to the steep dropoff in federal child care investment with the expiration of Covid-era funding on Sep. 30.

At some point it struck her. ​“We needed to change the way we were looking at the problem,” she said. ​“Instead of trying to add money, was there a way to take away expenses, and could we do that with housing?” A board retreat followed. Everyone was in agreement. On their return, they surveyed the teachers.

Of the 29 teachers, ranging in age from 22 to 65, only one owned their own home. ​“That’s a symptom of the problem,” Schiavone said, as a drill squealed downstairs amid the lively strains of the Beatles’ ​“Ob-La ‑Di, Ob-La-Da.”

“If you’re unable to earn a liveable wage, where you can put money aside, invest in yourself, you can’t purchase property,” she said. ​“That was when we made the commitment to create space for teachers to live rent-free, so they could begin investing in themselves while being adequately compensated for the amazing work they do.”

In late 2020, Friends Center board member Greg Melville and his wife Susan Fox stepped in, acquiring and refurbishing two properties — a total of four units with a value of $750,000 — that they gifted to Friends Center. One was a three-family residence. The other, a single-family structure, was on just under two acres of undeveloped wooded property. 

That meant, Schiavone said, ​“overnight a teacher’s salary benefit went from $46,000 to $66,000 because that’s the rent situation in New Haven.” Even better, ​“it’s a one-time investment. You can use funds once to buy housing stock and they have the salary raise forever.” 

Regarding the then-undeveloped two acres of property on the single-family residence, ​“we had always envisioned a campus where up to 15 teachers, mostly single moms, could live and share community and parenting,” she said. ​“We just had to figure out a way to make that happen.” 

She was contemplating an organization like Habitat for Humanity when she heard about the Yale School of Architecture Jim Vlock First-Year Building Project, which gives architecture students the opportunity to design and build a structure in a low-income New Haven neighborhood. 

“It just so happened that the program had just finished a five-year project and was looking for a new client,” Schiavone recalled. 

To design the first of four homes, each of which will house two families living on separate floors and sharing a kitchen, the architecture students used feedback from the teachers who will be living there. 

To accommodate strollers, for example, they enlarged the entrance space and added large closets. To make room for two refrigerators and two sets of cabinets for each family, they expanded the kitchen. They installed glass sliding doors looking onto the patio so the mothers could watch their kids play. 

The plan, Schiavone said, is for the houses to face inward and cluster around a sprawling evergreen bush — a natural jungle gym — that forms a campus on the lot. ​“We want to offer housing to 30 percent of our expanded teacher workforce of 80 by 2027,” she said, with priority given to those who need it most, and each resident paired with a fiscal mentor to guide them in saving up for their own homeownership. 

That might all seem like pie-in-the-sky thinking. Not to Schiavone, who cited a New York Times piece in late September focused on the Friends Center housing initiative. Since then, she’s received phone calls from as far away as Australia. A woman traveled from North Carolina to visit the school. She and Schiavone are putting together a webinar to share the housing initiative.

For Steffi Frias, poised to hammer a nail into a drawer in the second-floor living room, the project is ​“life changing.” 

“I learned about what they were doing, and I’m like ​‘I’m in,’” said Frias, co-chair of Childcare for Connecticut’s Future. (Schiavone is the other co-chair.) ​“It takes a burden from these educators and mothers. It’s just absolutely beautiful.” 

Stacey Smith, a member of the development committee, sounded a similar refrain. 

“This is a model that needs to be shouted from the rooftops,” she said, as she puzzled out the assembly of a child’s dresser with volunteer Eva Bermudez Zimmerman. ​“Early ed is the basis of human development and if we want to make New Haven — no, everywhere — a better place for all people, it has to start with creating the best conditions for these teachers to thrive.” 

Bermudez Zimmerman, executive director of Childcare for Connecticut Future, made the one-and-a-half hour drive from New Milford to lend support. 

“It’s really hard to stay in this profession if you don’t have support systems, and I see this model as a way to retain educators with sustainable salaries and a liveable wage,” she said.

Schiavone, alighting from the stairs, agreed. 

“There is a pathway forward for this initiative to have a profound impact on the way that we compensate early child care educators,” she said, as peals of laughter and animated conversation rang out from the lower level. ​“It’s radical and simple and it’s everything.”