Housing After Dark

Maeve Elise Brown came into my housing life in 2017. I was working with Steve King at Oakland Community Land Trust and Anna Cash, who is now at the City of Berkeley, on what we called Housing Vulnerability Analysis. This was our attempt to develop a way of seeing housing in a city through a simple question: how vulnerable was any given resident to being displaced (for whatever reason). One thing we discovered in this analysis was that low income homeowners were some of the most vulnerable people in Oakland. They had, and still have, few specific legal protections, or outside sources of financial support and even fewer advocates. We knew this in part because Maeve, and the organization she helped found and now directs, HERA (Housing and Economic Rights Advocates) is one of those rare advocates. Since that time, Maeve has always been one of the people that I could count on being clear eyed on the challenges that low income and BIPOC folks face when it comes to holding onto their housing, whether they rent, own, or somewhere in between. I hope you enjoy our conversation, which ranges from remembering the foreclosure crisis to why credit has become so important to housing of all kinds.  Get full access to Where We Go From Here at alexschafran.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to Housing After Dark, I’m your host, Alex Schafran. Today’s guest is Warren Logan, a planner and activist who has worked for city agencies on different sides of the Bay. He is now a candidate for political office, specifically of Oakland City Council to represent District 3, right down the street from where I live. Warren is one of the most thoughtful people when it comes to how our public sector operates, how transportation and housing fit together, and he backs up this thoughtfulness by doing something truly difficult —  showing up consistently. I struggle with electoral politics, but given that 2024 will be an election year unlike any other, I knew I couldn’t ignore it much further. I hope you enjoy our wide ranging conversation which covers everything from his family history in housing, to the transportation/housing nexus, to why city planners should run for office. Get full access to Where We Go From Here at alexschafran.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to an extra special insurance edition of Housing After Dark. I’m your host Alex Schafran. One of the goals of this podcast is to shine light on the full extent of our housing system, pushing beyond the issues that folks think of as “housing.” Today we dig into one of the most important ingredients in housing: insurance. Joining me today are two people from very different corners of the insurance and housing question: Justin Dove, a longtime insurance broker and Area Executive Vice President at Gallagher, and Zac Taylor, Assistant Professor at TU Delft in the Netherlands and a scholar of climate finance who has focused extensively on insurance. We dig into California’s insurance crisis, how it impacts housing production and not just existing homes, and what the public sector and industry need to do to ensure that our housing system has the insurance it needs to operate in a challenging climate. Get full access to Where We Go From Here at alexschafran.substack.com/subscribe

Today’s guest is one of the most interesting and thoughtful housers in the Bay Area. I’ve known Gloria Bruce on and off for many years, as she worked her way to becoming the long time Executive Director of East Bay Housing Organizations (EBHO), the largest housing coalition on this side of the Bay Area. Our relationship, like so many in housing, is both professional and personal. I’m not sure that she knows this, but it was a conversation with Gloria during a housing conference street party in Oakland in 2018 which made me realize that I was done with academia and that I needed to be back home working with people like Gloria on a regular basis. I’m proud to say that I’m now a triple member of EBHO. I’m a member, my company is a member, and I’m a member of an organization that is a member, inspired in many ways by her leadership over the years to make EBHO into an organization that supports tenant protections and affordable housing production with equal fervor. Gloria is now Senior Program Officer at the Crankstart Foundation. This conversation was an opportunity for her to reflect on both her work with EBHO and on new housing challenges she is focused on, in particular the persistent divide between two sides of the housing community - those focused on homelessness and the unhoused, and those focused on the rest of the housing system. I hope you enjoy this conversation with someone who is an esteemed colleague, friend and neighbor and someone always worth talking housing with day or night. Get full access to Where We Go From Here at alexschafran.substack.com/subscribe

In today’s episode, we feature one of the most important sectors in housing, housing journalists. I think it’s safe to say that most people, even semi-grizzled academics turned housing professors like yours truly, get most of their news about what’s happening in housing through journalists. Many of us are also sources for journalists or work for organizations with comms teams trying to influence what gets written and recorded. There has also been a noticeable uptick in the quantity of housing journalism as more media outlets add housing coverage in the growing face of a housing crisis and what I like to believe is a growing interest in all things housing. So what does this mean for housing journalists and for those of us who rely on journalists to make our housing ideas, ideas, and campaigns public. Today’s conversation is with Editor-in-Chief, Miriam Axel-Lute and Investigative Journalist, Shelby King from Shelterforce, a publication that I love, a place I’ve been honored to publish, and a site that’s been holding it down in housing long before it became popular. Join me for a conversation on how they became housing journalists, on the state of the field, and how housing journalism needs to take housing reporting to the next level. Get full access to Where We Go From Here at alexschafran.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to a special birthday edition (my birthday specifically) of Housing After Dark. We’re honored to have inaugural Bay Area Housing Finance Authority Director, Kate Hartley in our virtual studio. I’m a houser through and through, but I’ve spent the past 15 years studying regional government in the Bay Area. It’s very exciting to see housing getting more and more attention at the regional level and more support from local governments who realize that we can only do certain housing things (like housing finance) effectively when we do them together and at scale.I think you will all enjoy this conversation, which includes everything from how Kate got to this point in her career, to where we are all hopefully going with this new agency, which we can all call by its initials, BAHFA. Get full access to Where We Go From Here at alexschafran.substack.com/subscribe

Where We Go From Here is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.About This EpisodeWelcome to a special episode of Housing After Dark. The original episode was recorded in May at a webinar sponsored by my Institute for Metropolitan Studies at San Jose State University (SJSU), SJSU’s Institute for Human Rights, and SV@Home. The event featured a conversation with three of my favorite housers in the Bay including Tomiquia Moss from All Home, Jennifer Martinez from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Regina Williams from our co-sponsors, SV@Home. The conversion was a wide ranging dive into the hopes, possibilities and need for social housing in California. I was honored to moderate the panel, and since it came at the end of a long affordable housing month just before a long weekend, we figured some of you might have missed it. Now you have an audio and written version and I hope you find it as worthwhile as I did. A special thank you to SJSU’s Gordon Douglas and Bill Armaline for helping put this event together. You can find their brief intros on the webinar version. One of the reasons why we did this panel was we felt it was important to talk about social housing in California beyond the state legislature. As I explain in my Substack piece accompanying this podcast, it’s going to be critical for housers in the state to keep building momentum behind social housing as an idea, as an idea of doing real system change for housing in California. I hope that the legislature passes both bills before it, ideally as one compromised bill. I also hope other important bills that can build the backbone of a social housing system make it through this year. But no matter what happens in the state legislature, it will be up to us housers to reimagine, design and build a better housing system in California. That, after all, is what social housing is all about.This Episode’s GuestsThank you for listening to this episode of Housing After Dark. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing.Interview TranscriptAlex Schafran: Social housing is one of those issues where it really helps to take a bit of a deep breath before we start talking. This isn't a today thing or tomorrow thing. This is a longer term vision for transforming our housing system. I think there's a lot of different pathways that we can take, and the willingness to stick with it is really important. I think you can count on me and all the other folks that are here to be part of this issue in these fights moving forward. First, we're gonna start with a bit of a level set, bring folks up to date with the state of things - why we're talking about social housing. Then, we’ll move into why social housing matters, and the question of what is social housing? One of the challenges and beauties of social housing is that it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. There are a lot of different definitions and understandings out there about what social housing is, as a system, as an idea, as a proposal, potentially as a state agency, etc. Finally, we'll move into the types of actions we hope to see, or that we need to see, for a social housing vision to transform our housing system in some of the ways that social housing voices want to see. Let's start with context. If you’ve been following social housing in the state of California, you may know that there have been a few legislative proposals over the years. There were a couple of different social housing bills in the previous legislative session, and currently [as of May 26, 2023] there are two bills that call themselves social housing bills. Alex Lee's AB 309 would [have originally stood] up a social housing developer, a California Housing Authority, to build housing in the name of the people of the state of California. There's also SB 555, sponsored by Senator Aisha Wahab (Hayward) which would ask the State Department of Housing and Community Development to study a possible social housing intervention for the state of California. In particular, to find a way to build 1.2 million units of housing for our lowest income California's. There are also a handful of other bills that many people consider to be social housing bills. There's SB 584, sponsored by the building trades, which would [have] created a new housing fund, using taxes on short term rentals. There is Senator Skinner's SB 440, which would create a framework for all regions in the state of California to have a regional housing finance agency, like the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA) agency that is being built in Los Angeles and the Bay Area Housing Finance Agency (BAHFA) that is being built up here in the Bay Area. You can even go into efforts that the state has made in the previous years, to have teacher housing built, to build housing for students through university funds as part of a social housing shift. This is just a matter of discussion and debate. What's not really a matter of discussion and debate is the fact that more and more people are talking about social housing. One things that really struck me was when I went to an event a few months ago sponsored by our Southern California Associations of Government (SCAG) and San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG). These are the big regional agencies that together represent around 20 million people in Southern California hosting a discussion on social housing that included local elected officials, local government officials from different small jurisdictions, activists, housing policy wonks, you name it, it had over 400 people talking about social housing in California. Something like that would not have been possible or even imaginable five years ago, and a lot of credit goes to folks in those agencies for being willing to sponsor conversations about social housing. A big shout out to Helmi Hisserich and Jennifer LeSar for helping bring a lot of people to Vienna and really starting to get this conversation running. And many of you will have read the most recent beautiful piece in The New York Times by Francesca Mari, that has been buzzing around my Twitter. It's been buzzing around conversations that I have with people who I've talked about social housing with for years, and with people who I've never spoken about social housing with once. And that, to me, is an important context. Jennifer, I know that more people thinking and talking about social housing is something that you have been thinking about, and that you've been part of creating some of this context. I want to get your sense of where you think we are in this current moment of talking and thinking about social housing.Jennifer Martinez: It is an interesting moment. I’ll admit, I was a skeptic. I was a tenant rights organizer for over a decade. I was really focused on rent control and typical affordable housing stuff. When someone came to me maybe seven years ago and said, “Hey, let's go for social housing.” I was like, “You're crazy. What are you talking about?” It was not at all part of the conversation, one could only wish. I'm too busy trying to keep people from being evicted to worry about a 100 year plan. But here we are thinking about a 100 year plan, which is really exciting. CZI has sponsored folks to go to Vienna. These trips are happening out of California, New York and other places. These trips are taking cohorts of people abroad, Vienna being the premier place to look at how social housing (and I hope we're gonna get into what we mean by social housing in a second) might look and function and feel to communities and then bring those ideas back into our local communities and our state legislature for further discussion. We've been part of supporting organizations that ran a ballot initiative last year, the United to House LA ballot initiative, which was passed. What was really exciting about that initiative, among many things (and the fact that it passed at all), was that it included a social housing component. I believe it's the first revenue source that has a specific carve out for the purposes of experimenting with social housing. And on the heels of that, a bunch of folks from LA city, LA, Board of Supervisors and County, are now in Vienna this week doing some more research and now they have the resources to actually try to implement some of those lessons in LA.The other thing that we're supporting organizations to do such as Housing Now and a few other tenant rights focused organizations who are starting to shift into this question of how do we produce housing for extremely low income people using new tools. They're testing this term social housing. So I think that's the other one of the challenges and one of the things to keep in mind. How are folks trying to do public education around social housing even though the term is ambiguous and not always telling the full story that we want to tell. The other part of the work is narrative context as folks try to figure out how to tell the story. Alex Schafran: That's a great pivot. Let's talk about what social housing is or what it could be and what it means to you. Regina, what is it about the idea of the possibility of social housing that made you want to and SV@Home want to host this event? For those who don't know, SV@Home is our affordable housing coalition here in Santa Clara County which includes a lot of affordable housing developers and many other housing organizations and housing advocates. What is it about social housing, what does social housing mean to you and why is it important that we're talking about it? Regina Williams: Social housing, for us, is about housing that is publicly produced, self-sufficient, and serves a mix of household income ranges. One of the reasons we're so supportive and this is so significant, is because housing in general and affordable housing specifically, has been privatized by our federal government. Right n

Every episode of this podcast is special and everybody who appears on the podcast means something to me, either personally or through the work that I do. But this episode is a bit different because for the first time it features work that I'm doing. Not work that I've done in my past, but work that is a current part of Schafran Strategies, my consulting firm, and a partnership that we have been building with California Community Builders for the last year and a half. The subject of the report [Multifamily Homeownership: Pathways to Addressing the California Housing Crisis] is multifamily homeownership. It was released last week and coming in webinar form on May 31st at 10:00 am PT. Please join us!So what is Multifamily Homeownership (MHO)?Sometimes it looks like a condominium, sometimes it looks like a community land trust, sometimes it looks like an intergenerational family living together in a home where the lines of who owns what are sometimes a bit blurry. This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart, something that comes out of a long engagement with housing tenure, which was the subject of the most recent Substack newsletter [Housing Tenure 101]. It’s a real pleasure to work with somebody like Adam Briones, this episode’s guest, and California Community Builders, on a real exploration. We talk in the podcast about how we dug into material that we didn't fully understand and that we still don't fully understand. It's one of those rare research projects where we didn't necessarily know the answer when we started doing the research. Stay tuned for my interview with Adam Briones, one of the nicest, smartest and most dedicated people in California housing (anybody who knows him will tell you that). It’s a real honor to have him not only on the podcast, but as a research partner, and somebody I'm really excited to work with on housing issues in California for many years to come. To read the full transcript, visit: https://alexschafran.substack.com/ Get full access to Where We Go From Here at alexschafran.substack.com/subscribe

I still remember the first time I heard Emeryville Councilmember and Vice Mayor Courtney Welch speak about housing across the lifecycle. I’m used to hearing elected officials talk about housing, often in really inspiring ways, but it’s not often that I feel like they are pushing us housers more than we are pushing them. Welch was a relatively new elected official from a small but important city that I have studied for years, pushing housers in an area that has frustrated me for a long, long time: our tendency to fight over the right kind of housing to be built, rather than embracing the fact that many, if not most of us, will want and need very different housing at different times in our lives.We need a housing system that enables us to change, to grow up, to grow older, to combine families and households and sometimes separate them. This is something I almost never hear from housing leaders and here was an elected official showing a housing group a simple truth we often ignore.It turns out that Councilmember Welch isn’t just an elected official: she’s a professional houser, someone who has worked across the board in our field - in policy, social work, administration, and communications. She’s worked for a truly diverse set of housing organizations, from one of Alameda County’s continuum of cares providers working to assist people struggling with housing instability and homelessness to the Bay Area Community Land Trust and her current work with the California Housing Defense Fund. She’s also someone who’s not shy about sharing her own challenges in housing and struggles with housing instability, someone who knows what it is to look for housing assistance in the Bay Area which seems to be getting more expensive by the day.It also turns out she’s prepared to push us in a lot more than just housing across the lifecycle, no matter how important that is. She’s one of the most complete housers I have ever met, someone who tries to see the whole system, and figure out ways she can make it better no matter which of her many hats she’s wearing.It’s an honor to have her on the second episode of Housing After Dark, the Where We Go From Here podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.To read the transcript of this podcast, please visit Where We Go From Here. Get full access to Where We Go From Here at alexschafran.substack.com/subscribe

It’s hard to overstate how important the Central Valley is to the past, present and future of California. The Valley is urban, suburban and rural California all at once. The Valley is a place where we can truly see the amazing infrastructure and terrifying contradictions that are literally and figuratively built into our state. As someone from Northern California, the Center of that center is the Northern San Joaquin - Merced, Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties, places like Patterson, Manteca, Lathrop, Los Banos and Gustine, or the cities of Modesto and Stockton, the 109th and 59th largest cities in America. There is Tracy, home of both my amazing producer and one of today’s guests, NPH Policy Director Abram Diaz.In Northern California Area Code speak, this is the 209, a semi-legendary place known for toughness, amongst other things. Add all these communities together and you find a place with more than a million and a half people, mostly people of color, living in small unincorporated communities and big cities and sprawling suburbs and everywhere in between.A while back, I was sitting in my yard with Muhammad Alameldin, a friend and policy associate at Terner Center, talking about Stockton, where he is from. I don’t remember whether it was before or after Muhammad went to work for David Garcia, the Terner Policy Director who is also from Stockton, but this interesting coincidence led us to start to play “who else in California housing is from the 209 geography game”? This led us to the aforementioned Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California’s Policy Director, Abram Diaz and to Melanie Morelos, the California Strategy Senior Program Manager at the Greenlining Institute.It was clear to both of us that having key voices in the next generation of California housing policy makers be from the 209 meant something. We weren’t sure exactly why it matters - is it about representation from a historically marginalized and misunderstood part of California, or is it more than that? Is there something about the Northern San Joaquin and how it was built and who lives there that prepares people to see the full California, and perhaps make a more complete and inclusive housing policy?This is the subject of today’s debut of Housing After Dark, the Where We Go From Here podcast. Housers from the 209. What we can learn from them, and housers can all learn by paying more attention to the Central Valley.To read the transcript of this podcast, please visit https://alexschafran.substack.com/. Get full access to Where We Go From Here at alexschafran.substack.com/subscribe