Eighth Grade SF Housing Analysis

As part of Burke’s Education for Sustainability initiative, Upper School Math Teacher Hudson Dougan challenged eighth-grade students to apply mathematical thinking within the context of housing sustainability in San Francisco. In collaboration with Upper School Math Specialist May Wong, who helped structure and refine the project’s goals, this two-week project called for students from both math classes to use their systems thinking and problem-solving skills to reimagine a more sustainable future. They analyzed linear and exponential relationships between household income and median rent before proposing solutions and presenting their ideas in advocacy letters to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. 

During the first week, eighth graders compared median rents across different cities and years and analyzed trends in rent, homelessness, and income in San Francisco. With this data, they charted and solved linear systems of equations, visually representing the increase in median income, as well as the simultaneous increase of people experiencing homelessness over time. Through comparing the data, they came to conclusions about its correlations. In the second week, students made a discovery—the relationship between household income and median rent seemed to be exponential rather than linear! Though it was challenging, they incorporated an exponential curve to the data. 

Their last activity included researching and writing advocacy letters to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. Together in groups, students penned letters to the officials about the findings from their data, analysis, and research, in addition to proposed solutions, some of which included implementing programs that ease the burden of high rent on citizens, encouraging alternative forms of ownership (such as community land trusts or housing cooperatives), and transforming surplus and underutilized lands for housing. One student explained, “Homelessness is a major real-world issue, and it’s one that we can see in our daily lives in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area. This issue was displayed clearly through mathematics.”

The housing crisis presented through systems of equations is not the only real-world problem to approach with math. Another student saw the value of the project and its potential: “We could apply this mathematical thinking to problems involving climate change, inflation, and food insecurity by thinking about both our history and where we’re headed.”