Housing After Dark Episode 16: Shanti Singh on Prop 33, Social Housing and Productive Disagreement
Description
Shanti Singh is the legislative director for Tenant’s Together, a statewide Coalition of local tenants rights organizations and one of California’s most important voices for tenants rights and housing protections. Shanti herself is one of the most interesting people I know in this business, someone with a diverse background—including time in finance—who understands both the technical and political side of housing. She’s an intellectual and an activist, and someone who I have learned I can trust— a trust that enables us to disagree from time to time, not just in person but on air.
In this episode, we discuss the past, present and future of rent control and tenant protections in California, the challenges and opportunity of Prop 33, and our shared love of social housing as an idea. This is also the first episode where my guest and I talk in depth about somewhere we disagree. I’m grateful to Shanti for coming on board to do this, and what enables this to work is partly that trust that we have built. It also comes from an important fact—we share a vision of a better housed California, where amongst many other things, tenants have real rights. Like with many housing disagreements, the issue is over how to get there, not where we need to go. There is more consensus about the destination than the path, and I hold onto this fact as a key source of hope for California housing.
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