A Connecticut nonprofit is giving early childhood educators something many low-paid teachers struggle to afford: a home.
Friends Center for Children in New Haven provides free housing to select teachers, helping them cut one of their biggest expenses while staying close to work. The initiative has already housed 10 teachers, with two more expected to move in this fall.
The program was born out of a difficult reality. Early childhood educators are among the lowest-paid professionals in the U.S., while housing costs in Connecticut continue to put pressure on workers’ budgets. For Eric Gil, an assistant preschool teacher at Friends Center, renting a home in nearby Waterbury or New Haven was out of reach.
A few years ago, 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 move out. But rental prices in Waterbury currently average $1,600 a month. That was too expensive for him. Housing costs in New Haven were even higher. Gil works there as an assistant preschool teacher at Friends Center for Children, a nonprofit early education program.
“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.”
Gil and other early childhood educators are among the lowest-paid professionals in the United States. They often earn less than dog walkers. Without major changes to the early care and education system, that is unlikely to change soon.
Gil stayed at his uncle’s house and faced a long daily commute. He saw no clear way out. Then Friends Center offered him a place of his own, just minutes from work. The organization provided the housing free through its teacher housing initiative. The program covers the full cost of housing for select staff.
Friends Center is a high-quality early learning program with four locations across New Haven. It currently employs 47 teachers. Many face situations similar to Gil’s. Local housing costs have forced some to live in less-than-desirable conditions
Free Housing Helps Early Childhood Teachers
Friends Center has tried to solve the issue for years. In 2019, Friends Center wanted to address the problem by raising salaries, said CEO Allyx Schiavone. Months of budget discussions, however, revealed a challenge. The organization could not afford higher salaries without more public funding or higher 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.”
Today, Friends Center provides free housing to 10 teachers, including Gil. Two more teachers are expected to move in this fall. Schiavone said the nonprofit is on track to house 30% of its teaching staff by 2028. Over the next three years, the center expects to double its housing inventory.
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Friends Center Expands Its Teacher Housing Program
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, donors gave Friends Center its first two properties — a three-family home and a single-family home — creating four housing units for staff members. Friends Center also partners with the Yale School of Architecture. Graduate students design and construct about one home each year for an early childhood educator. Friends Center owns all the properties involved in the initiative, making the organization both the landlord and employer of its teacher residents.
The benefit of free housing can be a game-changer for teachers. In Connecticut, early childhood educators earn about $31,000 per year on average. That is according to the latest Early Childhood Workforce Index data. Meanwhile, Zillow reports that median annual rent in the state is about $24,000.
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 moved into the housing in 2020. She was a single mom. The next year, another single mother, Paris Pierce, moved into a single-family home with her young children. Donors.
Pierce said she loves the charms of her old house, including its stained-glass windows. The home also gets plenty of natural light, while her children — now ages 4, 8 and 14 — have more room than before. She recently enrolled in a program to earn her bachelor’s degree so she can become a lead teacher.
Yale Students Help Build Affordable Teacher Housing
Gil moved into Friends Center housing about two years ago. Yale students built his home through the university’s partnership with Friends Center.
Each Yale house is worth about $750,000, while Friends Center gets them for about $300,000. A donor provided one large property for the housing initiative, where the homes sit today. Today, five Friends Center teachers live as neighbors in the area, known as “the Village.” It is about a five-minute walk from the program where most of them work.
Gil lives with one of his teaching colleagues. Although they share a kitchen, each has a separate space throughout the house. For Gil, the home feels spacious, with “huge, beautiful” windows. Those windows are his favorite feature. Those windows are his favorite feature. Over time, the two colleagues have also become friends. 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 she loves the charms of her old house, including its stained-glass windows. Natural light also fills the home, which she enjoys. Her children, now ages 4, 8 and 14, have more room than before. Pierce recently enrolled in a program to earn her bachelor’s degree so she can become a lead teacher.
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.”
Other Communities Adopt the Free Housing Model
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 serves about 130 children from birth to age 5 at a single location. This year, the nonprofit launched a pilot program offering free housing to staff. The model closely follows Friends Center’s approach. Two teachers were selected for the first two homes.
Zarina Militello, an infant-toddler teacher at Urban Sprouts, moved into a two-bedroom house in April. With help from partner organizations, the center furnished every room except her bedroom. “Everything down to kitchen utensils was provided,” she said. “It was very, very nice.”
Urban Sprouts Launches Free Housing Pilot
Until the move earlier this year, Militello lived with her parents and younger brothers. A studio apartment in University City, where the center is located, costs between $1,400 and $1,600 per month on average, Saunders said. Rather than spend most of her paycheck on rent, Militello chose to live with her parents. Student loans were another concern. The arrangement, however, meant a 45-minute commute each way.
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 the 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.
“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.”
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Battle Creek Creates a Teacher Housing Initiative
In Battle Creek, Michigan, a group of seven community partners has come together to form a version of Friends Center’s housing initiative — which is now named First Home, First Teacher — that aims to provide rent-free housing as a salaried benefit to 30% of the area’s childcare workforce over the next 20 years.
Battle Creek has a population of about 55,000. The city lacks a large center-based early care provider like Friends Center, said Kathy Szenda Wilson, co-executive director of Pulse. The initiative grew from work by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research to improve early childhood development in Michigan.
Pulse also helped design and launch the First Home, First Teacher initiative in Battle Creek. Instead, the city relies on many smaller programs. Wilson estimates that about 550 employees work 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 in Battle Creek 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 two single mothers from different childcare centers became the first teacher residents of First Home, First Teacher in Battle Creek.
Free Housing Is Not a Fix for Low Teacher Pay
Urban Sprouts, the Battle Creek initiative and an early childhood program in Georgia are all working closely with Friends Center. The Georgia program launched about a year and a half ago and has housed two teachers so far. 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, public funding must support the work, and childcare providers should no longer own the properties.
“We don’t think that model is the best way to move forward at scale,” 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.
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Free Housing Gives Teachers More Financial Stability
“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.”
Main Image: Fayola Maria Jack, founder of Resolution
Written By: Emily Tate Sullivan for The 74 and co-published with Mother Jones.
This story was produced by The 74 and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
