Housing After Dark Alex Schafran

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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