They’d Love to Teach There. They Just Can’t Pay the Rent.

San Jose State U.

Last summer, as Vanessa M. Fernández prepared for a new job as an assistant professor of Spanish at San Jose State University, she took a hard look at her finances. There were student loans to pay off, living expenses to account for, and one big problem: Her $70,000 salary would leave her with barely enough to give her a foothold in the expensive Bay Area rental market.

A few months earlier, after she’d accepted the position, Ms. Fernández considered applying to work in a new program at the university that gave faculty members almost-free housing on the campus in exchange for a minimum of 10 hours a week organizing student events, holding office hours in dormitories, and taking part in other student-centered activities. It seemed like a lot to take on in her first year, so she decided to pass. But now the cheap housing was looking more appealing.

“I thought, Maybe I should look at this again,” she said. The deadline had passed, but the university allowed her to submit an application. She was admitted soon after.

The faculty-in-residence program at San Jose State was started almost a year ago, with the main goal of improving students’ college experiences. But it has a huge side benefit: Faculty members get an inexpensive place to live.

That can be crucial in an area where the cost of housing has risen so much so fast that some would-be faculty hires are now turning down jobs because of it. The high cost of living in the Bay Area is not affecting just San Jose State. Administrators at San Francisco State University and the University of California at San Francisco also said job applicants had cited housing prices when turning down offers in recent years.

“We’ve certainly had people who would have loved to come here,” said J. Michael Parrish, dean of the College of Science at San Jose State. “They look at what we’re able to offer. Particularly if it’s a single person supporting a family, they say, Sorry, we can’t make the numbers work.”

The Silicon Valley story has been told often: High-paying technology companies have brought thousands of jobs to the region, employing young people who pay the nation’s highest rents to live in urban areas, and so price out people in other professions. From 2015 to 2016, almost 46,000 jobs were added to Silicon Valley, though residential building was slow, a report by the public-private partnership Joint Venture Silicon Valley showed.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, a family of four is now considered “low-income” in San Francisco if it earns $105,350 a year. In Berkeley and Oakland, “low-income” families make as much as $80,400, and in Santa Clara County, where Palo Alto and San Jose are located, they make $84,750.

Colleges are among the other employers feeling the squeeze. “It’s definitely a major concern of people on all ends,” said Sacha Bunge, dean of faculty affairs and professional development at San Francisco State. “It’s a concern of the applicants, and it’s a concern of the department chairs.”

‘Worried Up and Down the Chain’

It’s also not something colleges have been able to do much about. San Francisco State has university housing near its campus that’s available to faculty and staff members, but Ms. Bunge said opinions differ as to whether it’s cheaper than the market rate.

The University of California at San Francisco offers home-loan assistance for certain faculty members, but since the general home-loan market has low interest rates at the moment, the program is less popular than it used to be, said Elena Fuentes-Afflick, vice dean for academic affairs at the School of Medicine.

In the past two years, Ms. Fuentes-Afflick said, not only new faculty and staff members but also prospective residents have been asking for the first time about how to afford to live in San Francisco. Ms. Fuentes-Afflick said the institution’s employees were far from the only professionals facing a housing dilemma.

“What about the artists? What about the firefighters and the teachers?” she said. “We’re worried all up and down the chain.”

Mr. Parrish said he and others now encourage job applicants to do some research into the housing and rental market in and around San Jose at some point during the application process. Since the California State University system has a collective-bargaining agreement with its faculty, individual universities do not have much wiggle room when it comes to negotiating salaries, he said.

As a result, faculty members live farther and farther away from their campuses. It’s not uncommon to commute one and a half to two hours to a university in the area, administrators and faculty members said.

Ms. Bunge noted that the region’s universities do have substantial hiring advantages that can mitigate the problem of housing and rental costs. Between Stanford University and the University of California campuses in Berkeley and San Francisco, many highly qualified doctorates are already in the area. San Francisco has strong rent-control laws, so applicants who have rented for a long time in the city can often afford to stay. And the Bay Area is expensive, in large part, because it’s seen as a desirable place to live.

The faculty-in-residence program at San Jose State now has only nine faculty participants, six of whom are new to the university. But the current participants hope it will grow, said Steven Del Chiaro, a psychology lecturer who is in the program. Mr. Del Chiaro has worked at the university for 12 years, but was drawn to the program because his long career in student counseling and support made the service component appealing.

“We put on a lot of programs, especially with the election happening,” he said. “We were there to be supportive as faculty, both to those students that felt outcast as Trump supporters, and others that felt scared.”

The low rent was a draw as well. The rent for Mr. Del Chiaro’s one-bedroom apartment in San Jose was about to go up to $2,600 a month before he moved to the campus. When he moved into the apartment eight years ago, it was a more-reasonable $1,250 a month, he said.

The faculty-in-residence positions last only two years, so faculty members like Mr. Del Chiaro may find themselves on the hunt for housing again in 2018. He said he hoped the university would provide financial-planning advice to new faculty members who participate.

Ms. Fernández said the program works well for her because bringing students into the community and connecting with them outside the classroom are parts of her teaching strategy. It’s time-consuming and sometimes tough to host a social in a residence hall or bring a group to San Francisco in the evening after a full workday, but since she doesn’t have children, she can make it work. And not having a commute helps.

Despite the cost of living, she loves the area and feels lucky to have the position. “It’s a dream job,” she said.

It just won’t come with a dream home in the near future. When her faculty-in-residence position ends, she expects to head back out to the rental market.

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.