Housing After Dark

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Housing After Dark Episode 2: Emeryville Councilmember Courtney Welch on Housing Across the Lifecycle Mar 07, 2023

Show notes

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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexschafran.substack.com

Housing After Dark Episode 1: Housers from the 209 Mar 07, 2023

Show notes

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/.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit alexschafran.substack.com