Housing After Dark

Jonathan Fearn is someone I’ve gotten to know slowly over the past five years the old fashioned way—by seeing him at housing events. Jonathan is a Senior Vice President of Real Estate Development at Oakland’s own Signature Development Group, where his day job is to build buildings, most of which are for people to live in. But for me, and I imagine many of you listening in, Jonathan is someone known for what he calls his “extracurriculars”—serving on public committees and non-profit boards across the Bay Area. He’s never the loudest person in the room, even when he’s on stage, but when you look at his list of accomplishments and the places where he shows up, you’ll realize how quietly important a person like Jonathan is to moving all of Bay Area housing forward. It’s an honor to have him on the show, and I hope you enjoy our wide-ranging conversation on everything from the interconnectedness of the housing economy to social housing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.