Episodes
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When you work in the nonprofit sector in the US, philanthropy is everywhere, even when it’s sometimes trying to pretend it's just following the expertise on the ground. One of the many reasons for which I like and respect Ruby Bolaria Shifrin, the VP for community at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI, is that she’s not afraid to lead. As we discuss today, Ruby has a background as both an organizer and developer, and has now spent the past six years funding a who’s who of Bay Area and California housing orgs. It’s given her a unique eye for housing politics, and for what she thinks philanthropy can and cannot do, in housing. It’s also made her one of the smartest and most thoughtful people we have in the business, someone who is unafraid to nudge us all forward, and to support a wide range of housing ideas and organizations, including some who may think they are on different sides of the housing fight.
Thanks as always for tuning in, and if you like the show, please give it some love on social media or pass it along to someone who needs to hear Ruby or any of my other amazing guests.
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Today’s guest, Paul Fordham, is doing something that is so much harder than it should be—housing the unhoused in one of the wealthiest counties in America. As the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Homeward Bound, he helps lead one of Marin County’s most important homelessness organizations, a group which provides a wide range of housing and services to the County’s most vulnerable residents.
His work for me is both personal and professional. Marin is where I’m from, a place of incredible beauty, wealth, and privilege. It’s also a place that has been hostile to housing for generations, and as a result it is one of the most segregated places in the Bay Area. It’s also not entirely rich—one third of Marin-ites rent, and there are people all around the county barely hanging on to the roof over their heads. But Marin is showing signs of change on the housing front, in part because of the work of people like Paul and organizations like Homeward Bound.
I will do more to feature people doing transformative work in Marin in coming episodes, including some of the projects I am honored to be a part of. I will also feature much more about the professionals working on the homelessness side of housing, part of my own long overdue effort to bridge the homelessness / housing divide, a divide which is still very real, even if most of us in the business know it shouldn’t be.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this conversation with this smart and savvy Mancunian, a person who has become an important leader and a critical voice in housing in a place very different from where he grew up. Thanks as always for tuning in, and if you like the show, please give it some love on social media or pass it along to someone who needs to hear Paul or any of my other amazing guests.
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Episodes manquant?
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Today’s guest, Nikki Beasley, is someone I first came across during a pandemic era webinar. I listen to a lot of webinars about housing and Nikki, the Executive Director of Richmond Neighborhood Housing Services, is a frequent contributor to the world of housing ideas. If you haven’t heard her, she’s great live, but her intelligence and charisma are not the only reasons why I am a card carrying member of her fan club. She also keeps it real, and too often she’s the only person in a housing space talking about homeownership, even when many of the folks in the room are homeowners too.
Our conversation gets into this dynamic and talks about how and why she is willing to stand up for a housing system which gives BIPOC households a real choice in whether to own their housing in one way or another. I hope you enjoy listening.
Thanks as always for tuning in, and if you like the show, please give it some love on social media or pass it along to someone who needs to hear Nikki or any of my other amazing guests.
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Today’s episode is about housing innovation, or really about the women and the organizations who help support innovation wherever it happens. My guests, Jenna Louie from Ivory Innovations and Michelle Boyd from Terner Labs, work to identify, nurture, support, and build a wide range of innovative approaches to housing. They support new companies, new orgs, new people, new policies and new ideas. They help others help themselves, and roll up their sleeves and build stuff directly.
They also were a ton of fun to talk about housing, and if you like nerds talking about off-site construction, ADU policy, capital, scale, climate and more, and all in under an hour, this is definitely the episode for you. Thanks as always for tuning in, and if you like the show, please give it some love on social media or pass it along to someone who needs to hear Michelle or Jenna or any of my other amazing guests.
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Welcome to the latest edition of Housing After Dark. I’m your host, Alex Schafran. Today’s guests, Jill Shook and Phil Burns from Making Housing and Community Happen (MHCH) in Pasadena, came to me by either happenstance or divine intervention, depending on your perspective.
Jill is the co-founder of MHCH, someone with a background in ministry who became a houser because people in her community needed her to be. She’s the editor of Making Housing Happen: Faith Based Affordable Housing Models and a contributor to Gone for Good: Negotiating the Coming Wave of Church Property transition. Philip Burns is a practicing planner and the principle at the Arroyo Group, and one of the leaders of the Congregation Land Committee at MHCH, a group whose work we will discuss at length today.
I met Phil Burns in a line at Housing California, when he introduced himself with the greatest line possible, “Hi, I listen to your podcast.” It turns out that Phil not only listens, he happens to be working on one of the most important housing issues in California, one I have been hoping to feature on the show—the implementation of SB4, the recent bill which many, myself included, hope will launch a historic wave of affordable housing development on land owned by churches, synagogues, mosques, ashrams, temples and other religious communities.
SB4 is important on so many levels—it is part of a wave of streamlining legislation, and a good test to see to how and where streamlining really works to produce affordable housing at scale. Along those lines, it’s a test of our ability to really implement legislation, and to build the kind of implementation coalitions which often get forgotten after the bill is signed. For SB4 to be successful, it will require intermediaries—like Making Housing and Community Happen—who can work effectively and ethically with religious organizations to help them build housing in a way that makes sense to them, and to help them avoid the many pitfalls and predators which can undo any housing development dream. And it is a bill that can and hopefully will be different on a moral or ethical level. SB4 is not just another streamlining bill—one can hope, perhaps naively, that by bringing more institutions with morals and ethics and community service in their DNA deeper into the housing system, we can nudge a system that is too often cruel and exploitative into a space that lets us all sleep better at night, literally and figuratively.
Thank you to everyone for joining us. I hope you enjoy today’s conversation. If you enjoy it, please give us some love on social media or pass it along to other housers in whatever way you can.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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About This Episode
Welcome 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 Guests
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Interview Transcript
Alex 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 now, we have affordable housing and housing in general that's driven mostly by offering incentives or tax breaks. When we're talking about tax breaks, we're talking about benefits that go to the wealthy to disrupt the market or push the market in the ways that we want it to go to make this human right (housing is a human right) available to all of the humans who live in this country. We’re trying to incentivize the market to provide housing for everyone.
We know that our government has not been great at regulating or directing the market to take care of us all. That's what we see today. A lot of folks who don't have access to homeownership. A lot of people don't have access to stable housing in general. There are a lot of ties between wealth building/wealth creation and housing/homeownership, which drives people's decisions about where they live, how much they invest in housing, and drives their desire to exclude others from having access to housing. For me, social housing is really about the government and the public being more invested in making sure that everyone has a home. It’s about decommodifying housing, and the government going as far as to carry out implementation to make sure that everyone has a home.
This is not the first time that the public has been directly involved in making sure that everyone has a place to live in this country. The US Housing Act in 1937, established the United States Housing Authority, which went on to become HUD, and subsequently, in the 80s, we went through an effort of privatizing this public benefit/public good that everyone should have access to. For us at SV@Home, it's really about recognizing the ways that we produce housing for those who are most vulnerable to displacement and most vulnerable to becoming unhoused and to disrupt that with a different model. Large tax credits produce 95% of affordable housing in this country. So really disrupting that and making sure that it's not all about profit motivated individuals (private companies and private equity) delivering the public good and making sure that there's an alternative.
The challenge is the distrust of the government. There’s a reason why we pivoted as a country from public housing and housing production for low income populations. And so there's a true distrust that the government can execute and provide housing for all.
Alex Schafran: Thanks, Regina. I think that last point is so critical, and one that I think we have to really confront especially if we do define social housing in part through the role of the government. I heard you use the phrase “publicly produced housing.” In order to get there, we have to think about the perceptions people have about public housing and social housing. This is a super important question for how to move forward, and I want to come back to that.
Andrew [in the chat] asks how we rebuild faith in the ability of government, not just the federal government, but state and local governments to be effective actors in providing housing. Tomiquia, what for you is the animating force behind the possibility, the idea, the hope, the dream, the vaguely defined world that is social housing?
Tomiquia Moss: I feel like Regina said some really important nuggets that really resonate for me, particularly around the importance of housing in everyone's lives. We have to define housing. Some folks call it a human right. We call it a foundational basic need. Every person who lives in society actually needs a safe and affordable place to live if they're going to be able to reach their full potential in their lives and in our communities writ large.
This idea that the system that we've created in the United States relies so heavily on a market driven solution around housing production discounts the public responsibility to provide that basic need – like education – in order to self actualize in our society. When I think of “social”, that piece to me is the driving definition of what we mean when we say, everyone, regardless of your income, needs that foundational piece. Building on that, our current housing market, policies, [and] the status quo is not producing adequate housing supply for everyone who needs it. Straight up, full stop, that's part of our problem. What's interesting about social housing is that it actually subsidizes supply, not demand. You’re not subsidizing the people, you're subsidizing the asset, the public good. To me, that’s the innovation of social housing. When you actually think about making supply abundant, then people of all incomes can compete for housing. If the government is able to really produce that scale of housing, then that is the institution that should be responsible for financing our housing.
I worked in government for a really long time before I came to the nonprofit sector. I understand the historic barriers to government's leadership around housing, both in their structural, racist roots, and frankly, in the skewed investment (those who have resources getting access to housing benefits, and those most in need do not). I think that there is a paradigm that exists (Vienna being the best example) where this is possible at scale. One of the things I think is important for us to think about is: overlaying social housing concepts and perspective over a housing system that is so inequitable that it's producing the outcomes that our California Housing market produces, I think is a challenge.
I think if we are really going to look at social housing, we have to look at it in the context of a new paradigm, the tax credit environment, the commodification of housing, all of the incentives that real estate investors and hedge funds have and all the things that have a demand side priority. Overlaying a social housing framework on top of that kind of infrastructure will limit the utility of the idea. I'm really interested in thinking about what else paired with some of these concepts and infrastructure would need to change in our broader housing policy in order for Californians to actually get the benefit of having enough housing for all.
I just was looking up a stat around how many renters in the state of California there are, 44% of all Californians rent, and most of those households are rent burdened, meaning they are paying more than 30% of their income to rent. So when I look at social housing models, like the one in Vienna, where renters are not stigmatized, they get stable housing and their full participation in the housing market is acknowledged and they're not demonized for not being a homeowner, I think is dope. So I think we should really be thinking about that piece as well.
Jennifer Martinez: I'm excited about this concept for a couple of reasons, much of which has already been said so I'm going to try to build off of it and not repeat. It’s a concept, to Tomiquia’s point, that's not just nipping around the edges and trying to tweak the current housing system. But it's really trying to reshape a whole paradigm of how we go about fixing a problem that is out of control. It used to be that it was just San Francisco with the problem, then it's Oakland, now it's the Bay Area, maybe sometimes LA. Now across the country, we're experiencing this crisis of housing affordability. The current system premised on the market is incentivized to drive to maximum profits. That’s the fundamental nature of the market drivenness of it, the commodification part of this. At CZI, part of what we do is try to help within the existing market system reduce the cost of housing, whether that's by incentivizing innovative construction approaches, new financing models, etc.
Consistently, what we run up against is the challenge of the incentives of the market to drive to maximum profit. When you think about the banks that are designed to do this, because they have to give returns to their shareholders, the developers have to give a return to their shareholders, the land owner that you buy the land from is trying to get the maximum value so they’re going to hold on to it. Every part of the system is designed for profit maximization.
And, that's how we've set it up. What is exciting about this is thinking about creating a new kind of market, a market that isn't about maximizing profit. A market that is designed to meet need, and only achieve returns up to the level of the cost that it takes to produce the housing itself. On the financing side, what if we could get the public to actually do the financing work and just come back to zero or have a revolving loan fund of sorts, not having shareholders on the other end saying we need maximum profits, we could really produce new kinds of housing that would be affordable to many more people.
We’ve been okay with the externalities of this problem up until pretty recently, because they haven't hit all the income levels. Social housing could be, as Regina had said, an approach to help lots of people across the various kinds of income levels, get the kind of affordable housing that they actually need. So that's exciting and also daunting. How do we actually think about creating a new market system that would be driven by different kinds of incentives?
Alex Schafran: I want to flag up a couple of things before we move into this question about where we go from here, based on a couple of things that Tomiquia and Jennifer just said. Tomiquia mentioned the possibility of getting to scale. I think that's a really important theme that you hear. That’s one of the things that makes Singapore and Vienna so successful is that this is a fully scaled system, that works throughout huge swaths of society and in Singapore, throughout the entire nation.
I’m hearing talk about a new paradigm, more than thinking about social housing as a building or type of development. That’s a really important thing - for me, the most powerful conversations about social housing are about that new paradigm, about reshaping the market. Jennifer, it takes a lot of courage to refer to social housing in some ways as a type of market.
One thing that’s important is that in Alex Lee's [original] version ofAB309, there are both rental options and various forms of homeownership options. It's a mixed tenure approach that recognizes that what individual households want and need is different, but that it valorizes them equally, and it provides the same level of protection and gives people real choice. But the only choice you don't have is to have inadequate, insecure and unaffordable housing, which I don't think it's a choice that any of us would want to make. So I think these are really important things.
There are some proposals that are really centered in building an affordable housing developer - like the Alex Lee proposal, or ones that are focused on housing finance, like some of what Jennifer was talking about. One of the things that's really important about these issues are the incentives that are so problematic in the real estate industry. Some of it has to do with greed, and with culture, and with the exploitation that has been a huge part of our real estate system in the United States from the very beginning.
But a lot of it also has to do with risk. Building housing is a very risky proposition, especially in the United States. One of the reasons why we see people constantly having to push for these higher profits is that they don't trust that they're going to get any profits at all, because the way the system is set up, the whole thing could fall down like a house of cards at any moment. That’s one of the most profound parts of it for me is really thinking about risk and using that public power to get in there and make a system that doesn't have to be as risky. We make our system so much riskier in the United States to build housing and to manage housing than we have to again. If you go to Europe, or Asia or anywhere else in the world that has a better housing system, they use that state power to make the process of developing housing less of a sort of crapshoot, which is how we seem to like it here in the United States.
With this in mind, and with this kind of diverse set of definitions all aiming at something powerful, with these themes of more state action and bolder approaches to deal with what has become a truly profound housing crisis, what are some of the actions that you'd like folks to take? One of the nice things about having the three of you here is that you have both incredibly varied backgrounds in public sector or private sector or not for profit sector, as developers, as funders, as activists, as leaders, as all of the above. Are there things specifically that you'd like different groups to start thinking about and doing differently? What are the steps that we need to be able to get to that new paradigm and get to that scale? And do so let's just say, within our lifetimes?
Tomiquia Moss: It’s such a big question and my mind is just sort of swirling, but I think what comes to mind first is recognizing that we actually need systemic change. There aren't enough programs there. There frankly aren't enough resources in this current housing system that are going to resolve the housing unaffordability for everybody who needs it. We need to be really honest about that. All Home focuses primarily on folks with extremely low income, these are folks who are earning less than $35,000 a year for a household of three, all the way to those who are experiencing homelessness today. The fact of the matter is, the cost that it would take to get enough housing with a deep enough subsidy in this current housing system feels prohibitive. That's why I think so many of our neighbors and residents feel like homelessness is intractable. How are we ever going to get to a place where there's enough housing for everyone when we've under invested in housing for decades across the region?
You now have graduates from San Jose State University, from Stanford, from all public institutions who are now unable to come back to the communities where they grew up, and can’t afford housing rents. One of the takeaways for me is that these challenges will not be met by just investing more money into a system that is producing disproportionately inequitable outcomes. Social housing offers a model that does a system transformation. You actually have a financing system shift that doesn't maximize profit at every point of the life cycle, but enough to be self-sustaining. The Vienna system is self sustaining, it's actually more cost effective in producing housing than we have in the United States. So I think just recognizing that I know change is really scary and change at this scale can feel impossible, because you have to figure out where along the continuum of brokenness you need to disrupt. But I think the overarching theme of social housing as a systemic response to a lot of the housing challenges that we have in the state of California, could really help people get more comfortable around understanding this concept and digging into what kinds of infrastructure changes we would need to make.
I also wanted to lift up the point you made Alex about choice. We want to offer a public option. I feel like this is analogous to the Affordable Care Act where President Obama was trying to be like, “Look, let's give the people an option, right? Let's not just have it all be privatized.” I think this is the same concept, right? If we could build quality housing quickly and much more affordably, I think people could then self select whether or not this is a housing option that they would prefer. And so I really liked the idea of social housing serving a broader range of incomes, but also being able to be an option, if you ended up wanting to buy your own home, you could still do that. But it offers so much more choice for so many more people. I think that's pretty cool.
And then the last thing I'd say is, the state of California has a housing element for every jurisdiction in the country. We have regional housing needs allocation goals, through our process of RHNA in the Bay Area, and we need about 57,000 units of housing over the [next year, or] next eight years for extremely low income households. That, to a lot of jurisdictions and the conversations I have with our partners, feels impossible, both from a cost perspective and a time perspective. Using the social housing construct as a solution set that could be that could actually help deliver that scale of inventory, in a shorter period of time, could be an incentive to shift the conversation for many of our partners.
Alex Schafran: Jennifer, let’s go to you. I’m also going to throw in a particular addition to that question. You helped convince me in prior conversations that the fact that we have these different definitions isn't actually one of the many obstacles to social housing. When you're talking about what we need to do, do you think that we need to coalesce around a particular idea? How do we deal with all of the different ideas that are out there?
Jennifer Martinez: There are probably some principles that would be helpful to agree on. One principle we've already talked about on this call is that it's a different system that's incentivized for different outcomes. But how we get there, given our current conditions, should really be open to a lot of experimentation. I mean, California is a country in itself. So if we’re just even talking about California, leveraging the Bay Area Finance Agency, and its tools to do things like land bank, manage the pipeline of development, maybe start doing financing differently. The LA version of this finance agency and the new revenue source that they [have], these are opportunities for us to really start to experiment and figure out what works under our conditions.
We’re not Vienna 100 years ago, we're the United States today. How do we start to create space for that? One of the things is being able to really do some deep education with folks, with legislators, we've got a new legislative class that just came in, there's going to be another one at the next election. We need to really educate folks around what we are talking about here. What is broken about our system? Why does tweaking it around the edges not work for the long term? Why do we need to think of a new paradigm?
I think there's a question in the chat about affordable housing developers: will they have a role in this system going forward? Absolutely. They're the ones who can physically develop things and wouldn't they love it if they didn't have to rely on low income tax credits that they can't get access to anymore because it's so competitive, and there are so few and they have to do stacked financing of six or eight different sources? And wouldn't they love a different approach to be able to be more efficient, effective, impactful, and at scale? We should have those conversations. I think there's a lot of education to do, and a lot of bringing people into the tent: community land trusts, tenant rights organizations, developers, bankers. There's a big tent to be had here. And that would be my other next thing to do, grow that tent.
Alex Schafran: Regina, I want to throw it back to you on where we need to go from here. Andrew [from the Q&A] asked some really good questions that SV@Home has a lot of great experience in. How do you push social housing in the face of NIMBYism? How do we get affordable housing developers, many of whom have just gotten used to building within the paradigm that we have? How do we generate enthusiasm amongst those who have figured out a way to survive in the existing paradigm to be part of shifting to whatever new paradigm that we're trying to build?
Regina Williams: We all really want the same thing. SV@Home is a membership organization in Santa Clara County focused on bringing everyone together to the table to solve this housing crisis and this crisis of folks being pushed out of their homes and out of the community. Our membership is very broad, including all of the [types of] folks that Jennifer mentioned, and we all ultimately want the same thing. It is clear that we want folks to have the ability to live and thrive in the Bay Area, in this region that has a tremendous economic success, but it's not being shared evenly across the population. We want everyone to benefit from the success of this region, this state, this nation, and be able to live, work, raise their families and be rooted here. And that goes to the average resident. Yes, there are NIMBYs, folks who do not want shared prosperity and do not want to see development in their communities, but they are in the minority. I want to be super clear about that.
When we go out and we collect data, the average person really wants to see their children being able to live here and stay. The folks who are around them in their community, their neighbors, the folks who work at their schools and the different services in their community. They understand that most folks are vulnerable to being pushed out. And the majority of folks want people to be able to have a home, and the stability that comes with having a home that’s affordable. We really try to leverage the fact that we have the same goal.
This new paradigm, that's not easy. Systemic change is challenging. But if we can bring everyone into this movement, knowing that we are aligned, and what we're trying to accomplish, and like Tomiquia said earlier, really understand that we have to have an abundance mindset in order to be able to tackle this challenge, which means thinking outside of the box, and even having to rewire how we think about things.
I do believe that folks will want to be a part of this if it really is achieving our shared goal. Some of the questions that folks have are around specific details. I mentioned the distrust of government, the idea of creating a new state entity. I think a lot of housing challenges and issues are local. There’s a real need for us to do a lot of this work on a local level. We need to pull in local jurisdictions, cities, counties, local housing authorities, folks who have been there and producing public housing and still receive funds to do that to some extent. To be able to look at it from a local level, we need to recognize that there's going to have to be a lot of involvement from neighborhood based non profits and community based organizations on what the challenges on the local level are, and how do we solve those local dynamics.
I think there's a tremendous amount of public will, and that people are looking for new solutions and actually open to them. Folks are looking for new solutions and are in a state of openness. If we are able to present this in a way that folks can understand it, and understand the role that they can play, I think we can get folks there.
Alex Schafran: With the remaining time I want to touch on a few things. An anonymous attendee asks “What about micro housing or container housing?” One of the things you’ll see in most social housing visions is a real diversity of options. It’s a paradigm that is starting to open up possibilities. For instance, one issue for me is the lack of availability of family size, especially multifamily units. That’s something that you do see in other countries, everything from permanent supportive housing and micro units all the way up to family size housing.
Shout out to the Catalyze SV folks who wrote in with a couple of really great questions that I thought we could end on. So one is Alex’s question, which is about “Who do we think are the most powerful or impactful or persistent opponents to social housing?” And since I have a feeling that you may or may not want to name names and throw people under the bus, perhaps another way we could think about that is if somebody is objecting and saying, “Hey, this is the United States. The government can't do this. The California government can't do this, local government doesn't have the capacity.” What would you say to somebody that is a skeptic? Maybe not an outright opponent, but to somebody who's like, “That sounds great. But come on, really? Is this really possible?”
Tomiquia Moss: It’s challenging for people to imagine a California where everyone in our region has housing that they can afford, because it's never been done before. So we are asking people to take the leap of faith to change the sort of bread and butter of their own self interest, whether it's protecting tenants, fighting for homelessness rights, labor wanting to make sure that their members have access to quality jobs. So when we are asking for a system reimagining where we've never been before, I think it's really hard to get all of the stakeholders to take that step together and figure out what do we all collectively need to do differently in order to imagine a system that can serve everyone.
That's fundamentally the challenge, that we don't have the imagination to let go of the way in which we've been doing things, to go in a completely different direction. I'll use the pandemic as an example. The pandemic was one of those moments in our lifetime, when the world had to actually stop and have a response about what to do in these unknown conditions when things were crazy. And amazing things emerged out of that tragedy. I personally worry that the state of housing unaffordability is causing epidemic/pandemic kind of impacts for our entire nation. And so if we could imagine a response that met the moment and the need at scale to transform society's basic need around housing, that's how we allow for things like social housing to blossom, because we cannot look at it from our narrow individual self interests, we must look at it as a transformative moment. And this is a set of tools that can be applied in ways that Jennifer and Regina talked about right now, for us to get closer to that shared vision.
Jennifer Martinez: I love that idea of looking at the way we've transformed other arenas of our lives in response to intolerable circumstances. The fact that we produced a vaccine in a totally fundamentally different way, the fact that we're getting more serious about climate change, we're transforming how we think about energy use. We can do the same thing in housing, we just have to remember that it's possible to transform these systems. We've done it before. And we can do it now.
Regina Williams: The reality is, the way this country was formed was from taking land and from free labor. And there is a lot of prosperity that has come from harming large groups of people. There’s a lot invested in the status quo. It's not just perception, there is actual money and wealth tied to maintaining things just like they are. We have to recognize that to be able to make change, that there are folks who are not going to be as wealthy.
That is the tension of shared prosperity, of making sure that we're no longer extracting from some communities so that others benefit. It really is about changing that dynamic. That's not the history of the United States, so it is hard to imagine. When is enough wealth accumulation and power accumulation enough? Or, when do we all have the numbers to have the power to be able to change it in spite of the .1% or whoever is actually stably housed in this country or has generational wealth? How do we leverage the power of the majority to be able to say, actually we want something totally different? To me, that’s a lot of the challenge.
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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/
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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.
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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/.
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