Codion Isom planned on using the winter break to move out of the one-bedroom Bayview basement he shares with his four kids and into Shirley Chisholm Village in the Outer Sunset, the city’s only affordable housing project to specifically prioritize educators. 

But the Malcolm X Academy kindergarten teacher received grim news just before the new year. Shirley Chisholm’s management had denied his application for a third time.

The 135-unit affordable housing complex at 1360 43rd Ave. was built by San Mateo-based developer MidPen Housing to keep San Francisco Unified School District employees in the city where they work and improve the district’s bleak retention rates. According to a United Educators union spokesperson, some 400 teachers have left the district each year since the pandemic, a loss communities feel on all levels.

At Shirley Chisholm, SFUSD educators receive priority in the city’s chaotic lottery that awards limited housing spots. Nearly 1,000 district employees flooded the application portal when it opened in April. 

Isom is the exact type of person the project was meant to house. In fact, SFUSD asked him to participate in a local news report last spring to promote the complex. 

In April, he and a handful of colleagues applied for residences in Chisholm. Some already had plans to carpool from the Sunset to Bayview. Fast forward a few months, and Isom’s prospective dream home had turned into a nightmare experience all too common in the city’s Kafkaesque system for affordable housing.

His first rejection notice from MidPen came in October. But conflicting reasons provided by the company just didn’t add up. A representative said Isom’s annual income was calculated to be $102,262.68, and the maximum for a five-person household at Chisholm was $97,100.

Isom is one of more than a dozen educators interviewed by The Standard who have applied to Chisholm and describe a flawed process that keeps out potentially qualified candidates due to issues ranging from miscalculated incomes to disconnected phones to the inability to record child custody agreements accurately. 

“The process was so bad,” Isom said of his months-long application ordeal. “I’m scared to even try to look for housing now, just to feel rejected.”

When Isom received the housing lottery results in August, he breathed a sigh of relief. His priority status as an educator and standing as a U.S. Army veteran helped him draw No. 3 in the sea of applicants. 

Isom has full custody of one child and shared custody of his three other kids. With a five-person household, he was hoping to qualify for a three-bedroom apartment at Chisholm and passed on a one-bedroom in an affordable housing complex closer to his school.

According to tax documents and paystubs viewed by The Standard, Isom earned about $6,700 a month before taxes in 2024. Two of those months included one-time lump sums, bringing his 2024 income to $91,375 gross pay, well within the limit.

“The MidPen workers I talked to said they were temps,” said Isom. “So I tried to not put any of the fault on them.”

Furthermore, the San Francisco affordable housing portal DAHLIA listed Chisholm’s income limit for a five-person household at $105,192 (65% of the area’s median) Isom pointed out this discrepancy to MidPen and received a response that boiled down to: Oops, our bad. 

MidPen executive Leanne Morford wrote in an email that the company was “inadvertently advertising the wrong income limit (65%) on its applicant portal … and they will ensure that the correct income level (60%) is noted on DAHLIA.” The portal still advertises a 65% income limit for three-bedroom applicants.

“This is where it gets really funny,” Isom said. 

Back-and-forth emails between Isom and MidPen showed wildly different income and custody calculations throughout the fall. He was sometimes determined to be at 100% of the city’s area median income (AMI); other times, 80%. Rent for a two-bedroom was calculated at $2,972, then dropped to $2,323 — both figures just under half his monthly take-home pay.

Isom brushed off the messages as miscommunication. He held out hope his family would be comfortably housed by the new year. But further exchanges with MidPen and the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development revealed another reason for his rejection: the custody arrangement for his children.

By MidPen’s estimate, Isom has a two-person household, even though he has 100% custody of Zaire, 5, and 50% or more custody of Amina, 10; Raelyn, 8; and Victoria, 2. Under San Francisco regulations, 30% custody means a child is part of a household; federal officials go by a 50% minimum custody arrangement. 

However, many parents have informal custody agreements made without court orders. This presented a challenge for some Chisholm applicants interviewed by The Standard. Even when court orders existed, MidPen refused to accept them in some cases. For example, MidPen did not accept official court custody orders for Isom’s daughter Amina because the agreement was struck in a different state. 

Isom was told that, without documents proving more than 50% custody of his three other children, only Zaire could be added to the lease — even though Zaire also lacks a formal court order for custody.

Chisholm is financed through a mix of local, state, and federal funds, meaning there’s a complex web of contradictory rules that’s difficult to navigate for MidPen reps and applicants alike. Without clear standards in place, MidPen’s solution for Chisholm has been a patchwork of local and federal rules where it sees fit. In this case, the federal custody requirement applies, but the city’s income cap for an affordable unit does too.

Isom appealed the decision a second time, after which MidPen recalculated his income even higher. Eventually, MidPen wrote that he could take a two-bedroom for $2,323 a month or exit the application process.

“You remain ineligible for any three-bedroom apartment at Shirley Chisholm Village,” Morford wrote in a final email.

“One woman at MidPen told me I should go back in DAHLIA and apply to something else,” said Isom. “I was furious.” He gave up.

After initially telling The Standard that Isom’s family was disqualified because he could not prove custody of his children, an MOHCD spokesperson wrote that “there was one household who did not qualify for a three-bedroom apartment, but was offered other apartments for which they were eligible.”

Shirley Chisholm Village was presented to teachers as a collaboration between SFUSD, MidPen, and MOHCD, a city agency responsible for funding and managing affordable housing. 

However, the intersecting organizations have led to confusing messages and a lack of clarity on who applicants ask for help. When The Standard sought to understand who is responsible for confirming the income of educator applicants, the school district replied that “SFUSD and MidPen are in constant communication to provide detailed income calculations.”

When pressed for those details, SFUSD said they were in the hands of MidPen and MOHCD.

But an email sent to Isom from MOHCD Deputy Director Maria Benjamin said her department does “not regulate income eligibility or income calculation methodology for tax credit projects like Shirley Chisholm.”

The building is MidPen’s first in San Francisco, and a second is around the corner. The developer is entitled to build another teacher housing project near Civic Center that has yet to break ground. But the problems at Chisholm reveal how even a project with the best of intentions can run into a system that hampers the success of those it intends to serve. 

MidPen contacted Paloma Lopez in December to offer the sixth- and seventh-grade teacher the chance to apply to live in Chisholm. 

Lopez, who teaches at Buena Vista Horace Mann in the Mission and has been with SFUSD for more than a decade, said she and many of her colleagues were paid incorrectly for months due to the district’s disastrous EMPower payroll system, and kinks are still being worked out. She suspected that with the district’s notoriously complex pay statements, doing the math on rent would not be easy. 

Lopez explained to MidPen that she and all certified teachers received a lump-sum bonus to paychecks last March, which was meant to make up for a deferred raise. It also artificially inflated her salary when she applied for housing at Chisholm. 

“So far, there hasn’t been a year that accurately reflects what I’m supposed to make in that year,” she said.

A MidPen staffer reassured her that she would qualify. But the company still couldn’t tell Lopez what rent she would be paying. Even without a rent quote, MidPen approved her housing application by email in last month. But the turnaround time to move in was only seven days. She asked again: How much will I be paying? 

“I said I have to give my landlord 30 days’ notice, or I’d be paying rent on two places,” she said. To this day, she’s gotten no response from MidPen. 

“From the get-go, I felt that it was going to be very convoluted,” said Lopez. “These programs aren’t accurately assessing what our needs are. It’s frustrating dangling fake carrots like that.”

Educators without kids have run into roadblocks too. Allyson Grislis, a teacher at Sherman Elementary in the Marina, was surprised to get moved up the waitlist so quickly when MidPen contacted her in December. 

A 33-year-old in a single-person household, she arrived at MidPen’s offices the next day and found herself filling out an application for the next two hours with the help of a string of housing managers. 

Then they told her a studio costs more than $2,000 monthly, more than 50% of her monthly income after taxes, which varies but averages at around $4,000, according to pay stubs viewed by The Standard. 

For Grislis, it meant she wouldn’t be saving any money by moving, while also being subject to an incredibly taxing review — a predicament repeated by district employees, ranging from clerks and healthcare workers to veteran teachers. Grislis ended up leaving without finishing her application, choosing to stay in the home she shares with a cousin. 

“It’s not affordable,” she said. “So why were we told it was for teachers?”