Housing After Dark Episode 11: Jill Shook and Philip Burns on SB4 Implementation and a Moral Imperative

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.

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