Shows
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 24: CalAIM in Action - When Health Meets HousingToday’s episode is one that goes back to a core motivation for starting this podcast in the first place. One of the reasons I love housing is because it is so complex. Never in a million years could someone be a true expert on the full housing system, in part because there will always be new wrinkles. This doesn’t mean it can’t be a goal to learn as much as possible about all the corners of housing, and this podcast has always been about giving me as the host and you as the listener a chance to dig...
2025-09-3054 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 23: A Report Out From the International Social Housing FestivalOf course all of our episodes are special, but this one is extra meaningful because our amazing editor and producer Tina Lee is stepping out from behind the mic for the first time, joining us in a new role as special correspondent. Tina was an attendee earlier this summer at the big social housing festival in Dublin, Ireland, hobnobbing with an international array of interesting people with generally interesting ideas about housing, including a few Housing After Dark alumni.Today, we are digging into what she saw and heard at the festival, including the differences between Americans...
2025-08-231h 03
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 21: Magda Maaoui on Lessons for American Housers: Why France and the US are More Similar Than We ThinkToday’s guest, Dr. Magda Maaoui, is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Researcher affiliated with the Joint Center for Housing Studies. Prior to that, she was an Urban Planner and Research Associate at the Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme (APUR), which is a key regional planning organization in greater Paris, where Magda grew up. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Magda for more than a decade, ever since she was an intern at our own Bay Area regional think tank, SPUR. Magda is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent and pa...
2025-06-111h 04
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 20: Ethan Handelman on What's Happening in Washington TodayIn today’s episode we dive deeper into what is happening to our federal housing system. If you’re like me, you know enough about federal housing to get in trouble but not enough to follow every twist and turn of HUD, FHA, Fannie, Freddie, and Ginnie and many more. Thankfully, today’s guest, Ethan Handelman, does know enough and does follow it. His regular LinkedIn posts about what is being dismantled, paused, canceled or attacked in the federal housing world have been a lifesaver.Ethan was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Multifamily at HUD in the Biden-Harris Admini...
2025-04-261h 02
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 19: Louisa Bukiet on Housing for People with DisabilitiesI’m super excited about today’s episode because it’s one of those episodes where I’m learning about something I should know more about: housing for people with disabilities.Today’s guest, Louisa Bukiet, is a Housing Development Manager at The Kelsey, a super innovative organization based in San Francisco that's trying to speed up the development of supportive, inclusive, community housing. Join us for a wide-ranging conversation about The Kelsey’s work, transforming the affordable housing system to make it more inclusive, and why being thoughtful still really matters when it comes to delivering housing....
2025-04-2555 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 17: Jonathan Fearn on the Monoculture of Development, Social Housing, and Aligning Policy and IndustryJonathan 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 whe...
2024-11-0153 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 16: Shanti Singh on Prop 33, Social Housing and Productive DisagreementShanti 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...
2024-10-291h 08
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 15: Ruby Bolaria Shifrin on Philanthropy's Role in Fighting our Housing CrisisWhen 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 un...
2024-08-3050 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 14: Paul Fordham on Homelessness, the Unhoused, and FundingToday’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 ho...
2024-08-2350 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 13: Nikki Beasley on the Importance of HomeownershipToday’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 f...
2024-08-0753 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 12: Supporting Housing InnovationToday’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...
2024-07-1951 min
ShelterforceOwnership Matters: Institutional Investors and Corporate OwnershipWho owns our homes is an absolutely essential part of housing policy, and an even greater part of housing politics. Alex Schafran reads, "Ownership Matters: Institutional Investors and Corporate Ownership."
Read the full story at: https://shelterforce.org/2024/05/23/ownership-matters-institutional-investors-and-corporate-ownership/
2024-07-1514 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 11: Jill Shook and Philip Burns on SB4 Implementation and a Moral ImperativeWelcome 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 transit...
2024-07-1252 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 10: Maeve Elise Brown on Remembering the Foreclosure Crisis and Debt's Radioactive Half-lifeMaeve 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...
2024-04-1548 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 9: Warren Logan on How Our Public Sector Can Operate BetterWelcome 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 giv...
2024-03-0557 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 8: The Insurance Crisis' Impact on Housing ProductionWelcome 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 Net...
2024-01-2356 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 7: Talking Housing with Gloria BruceToday’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 w...
2023-12-0353 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 6: The Future of Housing JournalismIn 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 wh...
2023-10-1548 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 5: Is the Future of Housing Finance Regional?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 yo...
2023-09-1454 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 4: The Future of Social Housing in CaliforniaWhere 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 th...
2023-08-1351 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 3: California Community Builder's Adam Briones on Multifamily HomeownershipEvery 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 H...
2023-05-2653 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 1: Housers from the 209It’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...
2023-03-0853 min
Housing After DarkHousing After Dark Episode 2: Emeryville Councilmember Courtney Welch on Housing Across the LifecycleI 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 b...
2023-03-081h 07
ShelterforceHow to Build a YIMBY/Tenant Activist Bridge, a Shelterforce WebinarCan tenant organizers and YIMBY groups work together, despite differences of priorities, and sometimes even values? Listen to "How to Build a YIMBY/Tenant Activist Bridge," a Shelterforce webinar moderated by Shelby R. King.
Speakers include:
—Lisa Bates, professor at Portland State University in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning and in Black Studies
—Margot Black, tenants rights organizer, activist, advocate, and founder of Portland Tenants United
—Ernest Brown, executive director of Abundant Housing Atlanta
Laura Loe, founder of Share the Cities
—Alex Schafran, housing consultant for Schafran Strategies
—Cea Weaver, campaign coordinator for Housing Justice for All
Watch the...
2023-02-231h 24
ShelterforceHow to Retrofit the Housing EconomyAre policy changes enough to address the housing problems we face? Alex Schafran, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Metropolitan Studies at San José State University, explains more in "How to Retrofit the Housing Economy."
Read the full piece here: https://shelterforce.org/2022/08/30/how-to-retrofit-the-housing-economy/
This piece was part of Shelterforce's Under the Lens series, Homes or Cash Cows. Check out the entire series here: https://shelterforce.org/category/homes-or-cash-cows/
2022-09-0222 min
Did That Really Happen?Back to the FutureThis week we're hopping into the DeLorean and going back to 1955 with Back to the Future! Join us as we get into just how creepy and unsettling this movie really is, "parking" with boys, Fantastic Story Magazine, the history of Black mayors in America, Chuck Berry's cousin Marvin, and more! Sources: "The Story of Johnny B. Goode," The Guardian, available at https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/jun/21/popandrock.vinylword "Johnny B. Goode," Rolling Stone, available at https://web.archive.org/web/20061228112332/http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/6595852/johnny_b_goode Allen St. John, "How Back...
2022-06-1349 min
Roses All TrashCalifornia, the Progressive Utopia ✿ Roses All Trash Podcast ✿ Read-Communitytwo californians debunk myths about their home state — is it really a liberal paradise? is it really the promised land? no, and we explain why.
Week 2, January 2021: "Place, Location, and Identity" #ReadCommunity
This week, we're reading the following:
Joan Didion, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem"
Louis Menand, "The Radicalization of Joan Didion"
Saul Sanchez, "The Migrant Experience from Birth to Age Five"
June Jordan, "Where I Live Now I & II"
Alex Schafran, "Road to Resegregation: Conclusion"
Read along (with members in 13+ countries!) at...
2021-01-1033 min
SVCF Philanthropy Now PodcastPhilanthropy Now Podcast: Why We Need to Think About Housing Differently, with author Alex SchafranScholar, teacher and activist Alex Schafran tells a powerful story of "the suburbanization of poverty, the failures of regional planning, urban sprawl, NIMBYism and political fragmentation between middle class white environmentalists and communities of color," in his recent book The Road to Resegregation: Northern California and the Failure of Politics. In this episode, Schafran and SVCF Housing and Transportation Program Officer Vinita Goyal share their thoughts on recent housing successes, following legislative wins at the state level. They also discuss the popular "3 Ps" housing framework which focuses on protection, preservation and production, and tackle big questions like...
2020-01-0821 min
The Henry George ProgramAlex Schafran on "The Road to Resegregation: Northern California and the Failure of PoliticsAlex Schafran discusses his new book, which is about the new style of segregation we see throughout the greater Bay Area (even beyond the Altamont Pass), how even well-meaning people helped create it, and what changes to our politics we need to find our way out.
2018-12-0600 min