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Even the way the laws are written, your ROI is protected when you are a property owned and are renting. There are benefits even if you own your rental property but are keeping it vacant while people are dying in the streets. We need to get to a point where housing is not seen as a commodity. I really want us to look at housing like we look at food.

I Really Want To Stay At Your House MP3 Download

This brings me back to the question of housing professionals. When you think about your career as a houser, are there things that you want professional housers to think about differently? What is your message to the professional crowd?

Courtney Welch: What way do you want to bend the moral arc? I really think we need to get to a place where the main focus of housing is not to build wealth. Even on a personal level. People want to protect their home equity and the value of their home because they have so much riding on and invested in it.

I still remember the first time I heard Emeryville Councilmember and Vice Mayor Courtney Welch speak about housing across the lifecycle. I\u2019m used to hearing elected officials talk about housing, often in really inspiring ways, but it\u2019s 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.

From the day you are born to the day you die, you will need housing. It is non negotiable. You can not theoretically opt out of needing housing. Some people do opt out of housing, but most folks do not want to opt out of housing. So when I talk about housing across the lifecycle, and how having an abundance of housing available throughout communities is so important, it\u2019s because, god willing, you live to be 94 or 104 years old. Chances are your housing needs will change for various reasons over your lifetime. Your family composition, physical abilities, and employment situation can change. So when we have an abundance of housing available in our communities, you don\u2019t have to be worried about any changes to your life either gradual or sudden because you know there is housing available that will work whatever your situation may be.

And now, I\u2019m in elected office. When you\u2019re serving a community they typically want you to live there. So I am bound to Emeryville for a considerable amount of time and have to live within a certain perimeter. I have very active children so accessibility to active space is really important. When I was single I didn't need a park or access to green space. I need a more family serving unit and space.

On the other side, maybe you have a great space that does meet your needs, but you know that it is so rare to find a space that works for you so you\u2019re worried about losing the place you do have and what you\u2019ll do next. You potentially have people that aren\u2019t staying in living situations that are the best because they\u2019re worried about availability in the market.

Alex Schafran: I want to go to your actual real day job. One of the things I admire about you is that housing is your main job, side hustle and hobby. You have one of the most varied and impressive professional housing resumes I have seen. You\u2019ve worked for homelessness services, community land trusts, stabilization-focused housing, and more. How did you get into housing and how has that led you to where you are today?

At the time I didn\u2019t have a car, so I needed to stay close to where my son was going to go to daycare. He was set to go to daycare the following month, and I was going to be working part time and making twice as much as what I was making with the good part time salary. Needing to stay in West Oakland was really important because my employment was dependent on it, and because it was where my childcare was going to be.

I was not able to find anything, so my grandmother called and said \u201CI know it\u2019s far away but I think you should come down here [San Diego].\u201D She said, \u201CYou cannot be unstable with a baby that young. If you were by yourself and you said you wanted to couch surf and figure this out I\u2019d get it, but you cannot be hopping around like this with a six months old. It\u2019s not healthy for either of you.\u201D

What I wanted to do is not just learn what got us here, but [learn] what the pathways are out. The roles I was in can attest to this. I started off at NPH [Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California] getting a bearing on housing policy in general, who are the building players, coalition building, how organizations support one another in changing and crafting policy. During the time I was there, they really started focusing on housing as healthcare. A lot of money from Kaiser was coming in because you can send people home with ailments, and if they\u2019re not stably housed, there\u2019s no way they will heal properly. Or if they have a chronic issue that requires refrigerated medication, or wounds that require you to live in a clean environment - that\u2019s not possible if you\u2019re on the streets.

I understand that on a surface level, but if you\u2019re advocating for policies that are limiting where people can live or how many people can live there because you don\u2019t want a duplex next to your single family home because you think it\u2019s going to lower your property values, that\u2019s a problem.

Also recognize that there is a lot of pain around housing in the Bay Area for the Black community. Yes communities change, but watching your community dwindle is really devastating for a lot of people. Then you start to feel like you don\u2019t belong in your own home anymore.

Alex Schafran: You talk about how it\u2019s important not just that black people can come to Emeryville, but that they can stay and sustain life in Emeryville. What are some of the most important things that you\u2019ve done or you\u2019re really hoping to to do to continue that process to make life sustainable for black people, people of color, low income people?

I think the only 4 bedrooms we have aside from single family homes that might have 4 bedrooms is in Estrella Vista, but it\u2019s income restricted (I think 30-80% AMI). That\u2019s only for income and household composition eligible households. They typically want you to have at least 6 or 7 people in those households. That\u2019s a lot of people. The challenge is when there are six or seven people in a household, it\u2019s not always just two adults with four or five kids. There is typically another adult in the household composition. If they\u2019re a senior, they might have SSI or retirement income coming in, so you might be eligible by household size but not income.

This is really important because this has been one of the reasons why people have left Emeryville. We can make sure families can stay here longer and attract families that don\u2019t already live here if we have more units available and online that are accessible and appropriate for a larger family size.

Alex Schafran: I couldn\u2019t agree more. If you\u2019re using the term \u201Cover-housed\u201D in your vocabulary, it\u2019s probably something you need to check. There are definitely some over-housed people but none of the ones that are impacted by housing policy. This goes back to our earlier conversation. This system is designed to be inflexible and treats people who have an extra bedroom as a problem to be solved. Maybe they would be happier in a different type of unit. This is true and it\u2019d be great if they were able to move, but unfortunately if we don\u2019t think about how to build more, how do we have enough housing to go around so we stop having these problems of scarcity? Having an abundance of housing is a problem I want to have. It comes with maintenance challenges but that we can solve for. Not when we don\u2019t have enough units to begin with.

S.E.: It definitely can. To bag on Downton Abbey again for a minute, when you look at, for example, the paper doll sets, you're not seeing Daisy and Mrs. Patmore. You're seeing Lady Edith and Lady Mary, right? People dress up for Downton Abbey parties as the people upstairs, not the people downstairs. And you don't see things that would've been common at the time. There wouldn't have been electricity in the servants' quarters, servants were probably using outhouses rather than indoor plumbing, servants were eating the worst cuts of meat and the leftovers. So you're not seeing the really ugly parts of the servants' life. All you really see is the kitchen, which is this kind of bright, idealized version of the comfortable English farm kitchen. And then you see the servants' hall where they kind of dine and have meetings. And then you see the room where they polish the shoes, and that's about it. So you don't get a sense of what their lives were really like except through the lens of the upper class people that they work for. And that's really not an accurate picture of what life was like as a servant at the time. 041b061a72