About This Episode
Today’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 housing for generations, and as a result it is one of the most segregated places in the Bay Area. It’s also not entirely rich—one third of Marin-ites rent, and there are people all around the county barely hanging on to the roof over their heads. But Marin is showing signs of change on the housing front, in part because of the work of people like Paul and organizations like Homeward Bound.
I will do more to feature people doing transformative work in Marin in coming episodes, including some of the projects I am honored to be a part of. I will also feature much more about the professionals working on the homelessness side of housing, part of my own long overdue effort to bridge the homelessness / housing divide, a divide which is still very real, even if most of us in the business know it shouldn’t be.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this conversation with this smart and savvy Mancunian, a person who has become an important leader and a critical voice in housing in a place very different from where he grew up. Thanks as always for tuning in, and if you like the show, please give it some love on social media or pass it along to someone who needs to hear Paul or any of my other amazing guests.
This Episode’s Guest
Interview Transcript
Alex Schafran: Paul Fordham, welcome to Housing After Dark on a very hot and sunny day here in the Bay Area. It's great to have you.
Paul Fordham: Thank you. Happy to be here.
Alex Schafran: We like to welcome our professionals and other housers to the show by starting with your own story about how you got into this field. I know your story starts far away from here on an island that I've also called home. How did you end up in Marin County and how did you end up in housing?
Paul Fordham: Well, you're right. I'm from England from the great city of Manchester originally and lived in various parts of England and Wales in my formative years. Why I tell you that as part of my origin story, really starts early because my father was blind from birth. So I've always had this key person with a disability who other people would see differently. To me, he was my dad. He was very independent, he didn't have a seeing eye dog or any of those things. He was a professional musician and a music teacher at a college, and walked every day, like three miles, to work every morning and home again. Everyone had always told him he couldn't do things and he refused to let his life be compromised. And my mom worked for social services in the UK too. She was a helper and my dad was someone with a disability who was just proving everybody wrong every day that he could do whatever he wanted.
I grew up in this environment with these two role models. For me, it’s never been like a choice to help others, it's just something you did. The way I got involved with the homeless community was in Bath, England. I started volunteering at a local soup kitchen my very first day there. It was actually a wet shelter, because it rains at night. So a wet shelter means that people can take drugs and alcohol in and nobody sleeps outside, or very few people actually sleep outside in the winter, in Bath, or most of the UK, because it gets so cold and so wet people would die outside of hypothermia.
I started volunteering in the shelter where you like in a seedy nightclub. You go into this tiny little room with a bulletproof window and pass your drugs and alcohol into a little locker, they lock it up and then you can go into the main shelter where you would spend the night. I started volunteering there and from the very first day, it was hugely eye opening to me. I was fascinated by the people, their stories, and immediately shattered my perception of what homelessness was and who people were. They were just like people in my own family, you know, eccentric folks, people who drank too much, all kinds of different personalities in there, and I found it really, really interesting.
And if I thought I was having a hard day, it was immediately eradicated by helping and talking to these folks. I wanted to be part of the solution of rehousing people. That was in my early 20s. I came to the US to get married to a lovely American woman, who I just celebrated 20 years being married to.
Alex Schafran: Congratulations.
Paul Fordham: Thank you very much. Basically, when I first got here and got a visa to get married, but they didn't give me a work permit. They were like, “Yeah, come on into the country. Here's your fiance visa. Go get married.” And then we got married, and they're like, “Okay, well now you have to apply for a work permit.” And it took a long time to come through. So I was here legally, but couldn't work, so I just started volunteering at the homeless shelter here. And my first day, I went to this place called Friendship Park in Sacramento. I could not believe the hundreds of people in the park and the day service center, and 1000s of people in Sacramento who are homeless. And to give you some context, there were like 15 homeless people in Bath. That was the official count, and in Sacramento it was 1000s.
I was almost dumbstruck by that. I started just saying ”Well, what can I do about this? I need to be part of this. I can't accept this in this modern country. I just can't accept that this is how it is for people, and I want to be part of the solution.” So that's sort of how I got involved. I started volunteering at the shelter. After a few weeks of doing that, my wife was working every day, so I didn't know anyone. So I asked “What else can I do to help you guys?” I had an English Literature degree so I told them I could write. And they're like, “Great, yeah, start writing some grants.” So I wrote 10 grant proposals. Didn't know what I was doing. I got a book from the library called “Writing Grants for Dummies,” studied it and then I wrote 10 grant proposals and 8 of them were funded. I thought, “Oh, maybe I can get paid to do this once my work permit comes through.”
And so sure enough, I got my work permit pretty quickly. My wife and I moved to the Bay Area and I got my first job in the US as a fundraising consultant, and one of their first clients was Homeward Bound in Marin. I loved what they were doing. And soon there was a job opening at Homeward Bound, I applied, and I've been here for 19 years.
Alex Schafran: Wow. Thinking about my own origin story, and it’s something that I talk to young people about all the time. As much as I love being a professional, I think there are times, especially in our field, where there are things you can only learn by doing volunteer work. It does send a signal to people in the field that you're serious about this. A lot of us would do this for free if we could, but we have to do it for a living. Obviously working conditions, now that you're an employer, is important, and you want to pay staff well, but it's a common way that many of us get in there.
I'm really impressed by the 8 out of 10. I don't know if you continued that streak, because I know you still write grants, but no wonder you found your way into this. And for folks at home, we will come back to a few of the themes that I think Paul's already raised, including this comparison between the UK and US. I spent a lot of time there, and oftentimes folks in Britain would be comparing themselves to Europe and where the comparisons are not as golden the other way. I think one of the reasons why people were interested, a lot of my students, in talking to me, was that somehow the United States was worse, and it made people feel some perspective about some of the challenges of the UK.
So let's talk about Homeward Bound. I had the honor to come and see the facility and go up to Novato and see what Homeward Bound has become over the years. I remember growing up in Marin County when Homeward was a small organization, mostly San Rafael based. Now there's a sprawling campus, I don't know if it’s sprawling, it's a pretty compact campus that covers a wide range of different facilities.
So give us a little understanding about what Homeward Bound is, how you got there, and all the things that you're working on building.
Paul Fordham: Well, Homeward Bound in Marin, it’s our 50th birthday this year. Wohoo.
Alex Schafran: Happy birthday.
Paul Fordham: Thank you.
Alex Schafran: It's also my 50th birthday this year. Homeward Bound and I have that in common. Maybe we can do a joint party.
Paul Fordham: Yeah, sounds like fun. Should do it.
So Homeward Bound started in 1974 and they started with one shelter helping homeless families. I wasn't around in Marin in 1973, but apparently there was some pretty significant flooding in 1973 and for the first time there was this visible homeless population because people had been camping and living by the creeks and their campsites flooded. That winter of ‘73 a lot of the congregations in Marin took people to sleep in their pews, and then the congregations got together and said they really should be a nonprofit working on this issue to help people, and especially families with kids, find a pathway home. So Homeward Bound in Marin was formed.
We were initially called the Marin Housing Center, and a lot of people got us confused with the Marin Housing Authority, so we changed the name pretty quickly and became Homeward Bound of Marin a bit later. But around 50 years, starting with one shelter for homeless families, we still have that same building in San Rafael, and it is still the only shelter for homeless families in Marin County, we still operate there every day, nine families in there.
We've also grown over the years in response to the need for homeless services in Marin County, we really became the generalist. So now we serve families, single adults, veterans, seniors, basically all kinds of subpopulations. We have five homeless shelters; one for families, one for people coming out of the hospital who are homeless (it's like a medical recovery medical respite program); we have a shelter for adults suffering from severe mental health issues; then we have two shelters for single adults (one's in the Canal District of San Rafael, there's an 80 bed shelter called New Beginning Center up here in Novato).
We also have 13 supportive housing programs that we developed over the years. We've really focused not on building more shelter than building more housing, more back door the way out of homelessness. So over the past 15 years, we've developed 5 new supportive housing programs that we built from the ground up, and we are currently in the middle of developing 2 others, so Veterans Housing and also sort of workforce housing, so people who are in the homeless shelter or living in their car and the encampments, but actually going to work and coming back to those places every night.
We find some people take steps out of homelessness. There are lots of people that do everything right, turn their life around. They’ve got this full time job at Pete's, and they still can't afford anything. And they kind of get disheartened. They're coming home to shelter every night, and so we want to have housing opportunities for people like that who are working, whether it's 8, 16, or 40 hours a week.
We have 2 programs opening this year on top of the 13 housing programs we already operate. One is supportive housing for veterans; one is for folks who are working.
The other thing I'll quickly add about Homeward Bound that makes us a little bit different is that we have a pretty robust culinary training that's certified by the American Culinary Federation, and we do about $2 million a year in Social Enterprise business. So businesses that create training opportunities, paid training positions for people moving out of homelessness or people with barriers. So we have a big event center that makes a lot of meals for our own shelter and housing programs and for others. And then we have a line of high end dog treats called Wax the Treats. You can find them in 120 stores and any Pet food Express.
But we're also looking to expand and grow the culinary training avenue, because it's a great way for people who maybe have failed in traditional education or are looking to reinvent themselves. There's so many opportunities in the food industry, anywhere you go in the world where people eat. If you can cook, you can get a job. And we've really seen folks stick with it, who maybe had failed elsewhere, in different industries, or different routes, academic routes. We see folks who graduate our culinary program come through training, through one of these businesses, and then they go out into the world of work. It has become a career for some folks.
We do a little bit of everything but training, housing and shelter. I mean, all parts of the solution to homelessness. We need all of those strategies, I think, to move people from living under our freeways and inhumane conditions to being housed and feeling successful and having meaning in their life. So we try to do a little bit of everything and try to grow it as quickly as we can.
Alex Schafran: This reminds me, actually, that you also make mole. I have some of the mole that I bought the last time I was there. Mark my words, I’m going to be part of putting on an event at your event space. If folks are ever interested in an event in Marin County, it's a beautiful space. I remember when I was there and visiting, it's something like half of your pretty significant Homeward Bound workforce are people who've come off the streets that correct?
Paul Fordham: Yeah, I think last I checked, it was 53% of employees, and we have 130 staff, so about 53% of them were formerly homeless. They may not have come straight from the streets into our employment, some of them may have done particularly in the culinary field, but there are folks working in the admin office who have lived experience. We have that gentleman who currently runs one of our adult shelter programs. Seven years ago, he came through as a client, and we're able to get him housed. Then he came sort of as a relief staff to help us when people called out sick, and he worked in the shelter program, and now he's running the whole thing. Often the solutions to the problem are closest to the problem. People who are far more relatable for somebody who's been homeless to get advice from the director of the shelter who was walking in their shoes, than to me some rep with a weird accent. I'm not as relatable to them at all, you know?
And I'm out bitching for money, which is a different skill set, but in terms of helping people turn their life around, it's really helpful to have people who've been in that situation. The same with the culinary program. We try and really create advancement opportunities for people so we're not just introducing them to a career that's prep cook or dishwasher. How do we help them move through and become sous chefs? And we've had, actually, people who've gone on to have been really successful in the food industry. Success looks different for everybody. But we have somebody who works in Tyler Florence's restaurant who left our program 10 years ago. He's the Chef de Cuisine and just opened this fancy food network chefs restaurant in Hawaii. We have another person who has a pupuseria that they now run in San Rafael, their own restaurant.
I also have somebody who has a great job in the local school system, because she had kids. If she wanted to be a single mom who couldn't work when her kids were out of school, so we got a job in the school system so her hours match up there, and kids now long graduated from the school. She's still a cook in the San Rafael school system, and loves that job. And the success for her is that. Being able to hold down employment, find a career, while still raising a child as a single mom. So while the Tyler Florence example is a great one. I think equally valid is that the cook in the school system.
Alex Schafran: So I want to come back to the flexibility of your model, trying to provide a lot of different housing, and be part of a lot of the different solutions. Tell me a little bit more about the challenge of trying to meet people where they're at.
We were talking earlier about people trying to sort of pigeonhole or stereotype or make some grandiose statement about who the unhoused are. But when you've had experience working in this space, you know there are just so many different stories about how people get to where they're at, and not pretending that substance abuse or mental illness is not at times part of it, it’s a part of my life too, it’s a part of lives of so many people that I’m connected to. I don't understand how people don't see sometimes in people that are struggling, struggles that either they have had, or they could have, or their family members have had.
The fact is, though, there may be similarities in stories, or people end up in the same place or in the same camp, but they come there from really different places, and they need really different things.
How do you balance that? How do you work to be able to provide that level of service that people need that's so individualized in a challenging environment?
Paul Fordham: It's a great question, because definitely there isn't one homogenous homeless group. As you and I both know, there's just endless different people with different stories and different solutions. And sometimes you think people need one thing, unless you know what they need at all. So it's very challenging. I think what we have done this at Homeward Bound, quite successfully, but obviously not on a large enough scale. I say obviously, I'll just tell you, it's not on a large enough scale, but we've tried to develop dual housing trends.
We've tried to develop housing that is permanent supportive housing for people who are really impaired and are not going to make it on their own renting in the marketplace or holding down a job. So there's people who are struggling with mental health issues, physical health issues, substance use issues, and at least in the foreseeable future they're going to need supportive housing and they're going to need some kind of subsidy.
So we've developed some of those programs, permanent supportive housing. At the same time, if we just did a permanent supportive housing program, usually the next program we've developed is something that's focused on folks who maybe are on a different subsection of the homeless population, people who need either a shorter term intervention or they don't need a subsidy for life, they just they need an opportunity that's affordable so then they can move on.
So a couple of examples of that would be, we've developed a transitional housing program, which has fallen out of favor now. Transitional housing, if you don’t know, is housing but it’s time limited (e.g., two years). And it was very popular in the 90s, but they found at the end of it that a lot of people couldn't make the jump from a subsidized two year program to market rate housing.
So we have a transitional housing program, we had to because of the zoning and this military base we use (we developed it on a former military base in Novato). We thought, “How can we make transitional housing work?” So we tied it to people who are in training or employment, and really focused on maybe the top 20% probably of higher functioning folks of the homeless population. So those folks don't need permanent supportive housing forever, but they definitely had some major incident in their life, be it significant job loss, physical injury, or maybe they had a substance use issue, went into treatment, came out, and they're fine (they’re young and able to work). We've opened up 32 units here, of transitional housing, for folks who are working. Whenever there's an opening, we open it up to people in the shelter and say, anyone who's either working or working in a training program can apply to live in this housing. It’s $550 a month, it includes all utilities, food, anything you need.
I don't want people listening to this to think that it sounds quite expensive, certainly in certain parts of the country, but in Marin County, you can't rent somebody's couch for 550 a month.
Alex Schafran: I don't think you can get a parking spot for that.
Paul Fordham: Yeah, exactly. But for 550 a month for these folks, it gives them two years where they rebuild their rental history. So if you go to rent, people want to know where you've been renting before, so you can show you've been current paying rent for two years. That person checking that doesn't necessarily know it's 550 a month, but almost is irrelevant. You pay 550 a month every month for the last two years. We build their credit and because we don't increase their rent if they earn more money, we really are trying to pick people who are working who within two years, they're going to see an increase in their income, because they're in a training program, often an employer-based training program.
Then they have to make the jump to market rate, they're earning a much higher rate by the time they leave, and then we encourage them to save. We set the goal of people saving $10,000 by the time they leave. You think of seeing somebody who's under the freeway by the time you leave this homeless program, you leave for $10,000 in your pocket, credit cleaned up, rental history all good.
It's not the idea of a homeless program for a lot of folks, but it really works. And people say “How do I save $10,000?” Think about it. If you can pay 550 a month for rent, because you're working at Peet's 40 hours a week, you can save $100 a month. But over the course of that time, you're on the Peet’s management program, you get a manager's job, and now you're earning $500 more a month. Your rent doesn't go up. So now they can save $600 a month, and pretty quickly you're getting to that $10,000 in savings.
So the way we work with people in that program, they have a lease, we meet with them. If there are no other major issues they need help with, we'll just really focus on saving strategies. And we may anchor that at $10,000 and they miss and they only save $5000. Well, guess what? They're leaving with $5,000 in their pocket. So that's one program. We have a similar program for families that's $775 a month for a two bedroom unit. People in that program can live as long as they want as long as they have kids under the age of 18 and the idea is the same. They can earn more money, they can save that money, and then they can get a reliable car, they're not worried about their rent going up. It's just a fixed amount. As they progress in their life and have more stability, then they can save more. They can build assets like the rest of us, and then when they want to leave, there isn't a two year limit on that one so they can leave on their own terms. Some people leave. We actually have one woman buy a house. It wasn't a house in Marin, it was a house in Florida. But she was able to save enough money, and her son actually left for college in Florida, passed the 18 year old threshold, and she was able to buy a house in a Florida retirement community, and actually because of zoom and all the pandemic stuff, she'll keep her job in Marin as a paralegal, and work for California wages and this retirement community in Florida.
There are some really good successes that aren't just permanent supportive housing with a section eight voucher forever. We've tried to balance building programs that are focused on individual’s upward mobility with also permanent supportive housing programs. And we've done both. So to answer your question, I think it's not just having one model and that's the solution.
Alex Schafran: I think audience members who have read my work or listened to me before know how much I think about all the kinds of “both and” solutions. I'm always making lists of all the things we need to do, and I imagine it can be sort of overwhelming, but I think that's one of the things that I really love about Homeward Bound, is how you are figuring out how to do all of these things.
There’s another challenge, which is the issue or debate between permanent housing and transitional housing, or shelter. I've written about the need for temporary housing. Our society has always needed temporary housing. Always will. We have all used temporary housing regularly throughout our lives, not just on holiday, but oftentimes for visiting sick relatives or being somewhere for a work opportunity, or things happen in life, or people have relationships. If you've ever been divorced or had a breakup like sometimes you need to find a place really quickly.
How do you think about this relationship between permanent and temporary housing in particular with some of the politics of housing first. Do you consider yourself such a label that you will attach to yourself and Homeward Bound? I know it's a bit of a challenging conversation within the homelessness community, let alone between homelessness community and team housing.
Paul Fordham: I think I would say I'm an advocate for housing of all types. We need more of everything. Actually, do we need more mansions? I don't know. But we do need more housing, not just affordable housing, even if there's just more housing stock that alleviates the rent pressure on the rental market and it drops housing prices. So my point is, I think we need more housing of all types.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the basic needs is shelter for all, and we don't have enough of that particularly in California, but around the US. So we just need more of everything. I think, to your point. Well, two points. I want to talk about them both.
One the need for interim housing or interim shelter, however you put it, I do think there's a place for that, and it's a missing factor (it's almost like you're not supposed to say that anymore). I agree with you, having a temporary place to stay, that's what a lot of our cities used to have--little lodging houses or SROs. And a lot of those SROs were badly run and went to disrepair and were rightly turned into some kind of housing, whether that's a hotel or a permanent supportive housing program, but we haven't built new ones. I agree it's a very cost effective way to solve a housing program, a kind of boarding house model or an interim housing model, is really important.
And as somebody who runs homeless shelters, I would never build another congregate shelter in my life. They're too hard to run. We already have some in our community, and they don't serve the people who are in them very well. So I like the idea of interim shelter housing, the idea of these tiny home models or stackable almost like the shipping container housing. I think these things are great. If I think of the idea of shelter as an interim individual unit where somebody has their own space to be for a short period of time as a step towards more desirable housing. Yes, we need more of that.
If I had unlimited money or if I was in charge of government policy, and we can't build enough housing quickly, I would put a ton of those interim stackable units for everybody, because it's far more humane than a tent encampment anywhere. And I definitely would build that if I was going to build another shelter site, which I'm not, and I can get into why.
Alex Schafran: I think for me, the only time when people should be sleeping in a gymnasium is when there's a flood or a fire. Again, sometimes you don't get a choice, and it's better than the alternative, but most people will define a home as a place with walls.
Paul Fordham: I did want to finish that thought about shelter, the reason I wouldn't build any more shelter. I would build interim housing units, but I don't think any more shelter. It's very expensive because you have to have a lot of staff, need to have two people on staff 24/7 because you have strangers sharing space. You have a lot of rules to keep everybody safe, and those people don't like rules, probably the reason they're outside in the first place.
And it's so expensive to operate and to build, and if you're going to have a big fight for development, I'd rather be housing because you can shelter somebody for 364 days and then on the 364th night they have a mental health episode try to fight everyone in the shelter, and you have to ask them to leave for the safety of everyone. And so on the 365th night, they're homeless like back on the street. What have you done? You spent a ton of money, and hopefully you've worked to move them towards housing, but they're back outside again.
So I would build more housing where they don't have all these issues of conflict with others. They have their own home. And if they do lose that housing for any reason, they have rights. There's a period of time they can't be outside right away. Definitely, sometimes people have to lose leave supportive housing, or maybe they need treatment or other interventions. But even then, there's notice periods, right? There are periods where people can wrap around and try and get help for folks. I think shelter is very expensive and it's a waste of money. I'd much rather build the housing than spend that money and community development discussion for getting permanent supportive housing or some kind of interim housing bill.
Alex Schafran: I think you raise a really important point. I think one of the things that makes our job hard is that it can kind of always go south. Anybody can become homeless at any time. All that you've worked for, all that you've built, it can go away in an instant. And that's a tough piece of it. 364 days of success can be seemingly undone by one day of failure.
Paul Fordham: I was just giving a tour to somebody from the local Rotary, and he said, “Do you have to evict people? I'm a landlord and sometimes I have to evict people. Do you have different rights as a housing provider?” And I said, “No, we follow the same rules.” However, for a lot of the permanent supportive housing, we have case management. So if you're just an independent landlord, someone doesn't pay rent for two or three months, and then when you finally go and see the property, they've moved in five people, and there's a meth party in your house. Like, of course, that's terrible as a landlord, but with case management on site, if somebody is relapsing, having mental health challenges, sinking into a depression, like all these things. You know, we're able to be there for them to get in support sooner.
So the difference is, we're able to then work with people, and we do occasionally evict people, but eviction is the last possible thing, because we don't want to put another barrier to housing on somebody's record. So we try and use even if somebody can't stay where they are because they, I don't know, they've done something that we means they can't stay there, like they're dealing with drugs out there. Doesn't happen very often, but occasionally. So then we use eviction as a tool. Like you can't be here anymore because you just totally destroyed this unit. However, we don't want to evict you if at all possible. If you leave, we can arrange for this treatment bed for you, or we can get you here, or even you can come into the if you leave peacefully, we'll go into the shelter. We run the shelter. We can get you in tonight, and we can start again. So we're trying to avoid that eviction, even if somebody can't stay where they are. But the main goal is to keep people housed. So whenever we can do that, we will.
Alex Schafran: I think it is the focus on the eviction diversion in some places, and trying to find other pathways and using that as sort of the absolute last option is something I hope can spread. It's not something that needs to always just be a non profit, mission driven housing situation. I think that occasionally, when some of the for profits start to discover that by partnering with third party social service agencies, they can dramatically reduce turnover in their buildings and get over their issues around where the money comes from and who's supporting them, it really can be game changing. I wish more and more landlords would appreciate that.
So speaking of money, and speaking of things you would love to do if you could, what would you love to see in terms of support, whether it's from the policy arena, from the housing finance world, from the public sector, or from philanthropy. What do you or what does Homeward Bound need? What would make things just a little bit easier to do a very hard job?
Paul Fordham: The simple answer is, money. The more money that flows in, the more housing units that are able to be built. I think one of the greatest things that's happened in the pandemic era has been the Project Homekey funding. I know it's controversial and some people don't like it. But we've been able to build four housing developments during the pandemic. Three of them were funded with Project Homekey because the money came in large chunks.
We don't build with tax credits at Homebound Bound, we build smaller developments anywhere from our smallest with 12 units, the largest would be 50 units at a time. We're not in the tax credit realm of building large units. So for us, we've had to piece together financing grants here, a lot of donor tours, some less restrictive government funding, and it will come in $1 million chunk, $3 million, $5 million and you piece it together, and you also take $50 public donations. All that is still important, but Project Homekey can be huge chunks.
The latest development we're doing, the veterans housing, the workforce housing, we got $14.4 million all at once. Boom. There it is. And it's also not money we have to take a bank loan out, and they'll pay at the end of the project. We just submit them receipts and they reimburse us really quickly. Wo that has been really helpful. The other good thing Project Homekey has done is it's really accelerated timelines, so it has circumvented a lot of the public process where things can get stalled because you have to go through design review and planning commission and all these different things. And that's why it's controversial. The public says “I should have a say whether development should go in my backyard or not.” And nobody wants it there, and projects get stalled for two or three years going through the approvals process.
Project Homekey has expedited that process. So many units have been able to be built in a two to three year period of time. 1000s of units across California in a short amount of time. So I think, for me, maybe not the magic wand, but something that's working that we just need to do more of and put a lot of money into, is that kind of model of large chunks of money being delivered at once. It being like a forgivable grant, essentially. So it's not a loan you have to pay back and try to help projects move fast through the approval process.
Alex Schafran: Homekey may be controversial in various places but it's not on this podcast. As somebody who proudly lives down the street from two Project Homekey sites in Oakland (shout out to my old student and colleague Xochitl Ortiz from the City of Oakland who helps make those projects happen). I want to also acknowledge folks in Marin County like Adam Wolff in Corte Madera, and Susan Rice on the South LSAO, people have really stood tall for some of the Homekey projects that have happened in Marin County.
I think there's just a radical idea of just using public money to buy buildings and start from there. In my neighborhood, there are a lot of old hotels and motels that have actually been informal homeless housing for a very long time. So taking that next step, being able to get services on site, making that more permanent, changing some of those relationships, can be really special.
Paul Fordham: We had three grants. One, we took a motel and converted it into housing like the old rundown motel. That's the Corte Madera one, Adam Wolff was very helpful. We also took an office building that we ran as a shelter for a while, while our other shelters were under construction, and that's now being developed by Eden Housing as housing. So we’ve converted a motel, an office building, and then we also got funding to accelerate brick and mortar construction, stick built construction that had all these approvals, but lacked funding and then. It's accelerated development that way. I like that flexibility, too, and the creativity. Let's look at converting more offices and motels. Goodness, we need the housing, and the structures are there. So give us money and we'll do it. I think there are a lot of willing developers. It's just stalls with the approvals and the money.
Alex Schafran: Yeah, I love conversion. I'll repost the post I did on conversion. It's definitely time. We have these land use patterns that were built for a different era, for a different imagination of what America was meant to be and they just don't work anymore and they never really worked that great. I know for some reason it's hard for people to adjust when your local small shopping center, the strip mall, which has been struggling along, becomes something else, but people will manage.
I think part of the challenge is that sometimes it's a good idea to convert the structure, and sometimes it's not. And I think sometimes to hear the architecture community is really kind of getting into helping figure out new tools and assessments about whether it can be converted or not, and when sometimes the building just needs to come down.
One thing that you have mentioned to me before is the challenge of providing services, right? The more and more money that you spend in building the building, the less you can spend in maintaining it. Are there ways that you've seen that creatively overcomes that? Providing people services is not cheap, but it is essential. So how is it that you're figuring out how to incorporate that into buildings? Or are there better ways of doing it than we're doing now?
Paul Fordham: Well, we've done, I think, pretty well at Homeward Bound because we don't use tax credits. There's nothing wrong with them, they're great, but it's just not our model. We try and fully fund our buildings during the capital phase and without debt. And so that means the operating costs, the rents people are paying, whether it's the affordable rents I referenced before (550, a month, or 775, a month), or it says section eight voucher based program. Those revenues come in and they pay for all the utilities, all the on-site case management. Essentially, once it's built and it's debt free, the program is self-sustaining.
So that has really worked well for the majority of our developments. I think that is a model to move forward with. I think the way we're going to struggle as we accelerate housing, are there enough housing vouchers coming through at the federal level to create a lot of project based housing. Or if they are all project based housing, what happens to the rest of the vouchers that people always needed?
I do think there's an incentive at some level to rethink the idea. Can different jurisdictions, counties, create local voucher pools? Can bond money be passed to make local voucher programs so we're not relying on the federal government, and who's in charge of HUD to give us more vouchers and not cut the budget? Can some of these foundations that sit on huge amounts of money and they give out 5% a year, could they invest that money differently and create a voucher pool with some of their corpus. They don’t have to give it all out. But could they invest it and instead of just invest that to give out grants, could they give out 5 or 10% of those funds in a voucher pool that's funded by a local community foundation? I think we have to think differently, rather than just generating wealth all the time, how do we prevent poverty more.
Alex Schafran: You'll be hearing more on this podcast about vouchers coming up. Particular shout out to Dan Adams from the City and County of San Francisco, who had the courage yesterday, at a ULI event, to call for turning section eight vouchers into an entitlement. Call for America funding the four times as many people that need vouchers under the current rules as get them. At the end of the day, you understand this as well as anybody, you can't design a building for 30% of area median income. It just doesn't exist, not if we want it to not burn down and not fall down.
People just need that direct support. I think the federal government is the main place to get it, but I'm here for all the creativity, especially in a place as wealthy as California and Marin County.
Are there ways that we can be more creative about providing people that basic income that they need, that any housing provider needs to be able to get from people who live in housing to be able to keep things going.
Thank you so much for being here. I'm excited for folks listening. This is maybe our first foray into homelessness and questions for the unhoused, but it's not our last. You may not be excited about this fact, but it's also not our first foray into the amazing things that are and going to be happening in Marin County, California, which is where I grew up, when my father still lives in a very important place to me, and not a place famous for housing.
So it's now been 20 years or so since you've been a California resident, many of those now in the North Bay. Reflecting back to this island where you came from and where I've spent a lot of time, is there anything else thinking about the two places together that you want to share in terms of US housing for the audience? I know again, the numbers are dramatically lower. Is there something about the UK system that you'd love to see us think about a little bit more here in California and Marin, or the US in general.
Paul Fordham: Yeah, I mean, the UK has its own problems, and they said, I haven't lived there for a long time. But I will say, like the numbers of people experiencing homelessness in the UK, it’s about 3500 people who are homeless, unhoused on the streets. There's more than that in San Francisco, let alone the whole of the US, you know.
I think that is so significant, such a stark effect. And why is that the case? It's not a popular answer, but we pay much higher taxes, and those taxes are used to create a social safety net, so people get free mental health support, they get their health care taken care of, but there's housing subsidies. There are rights to housing.
The entire time I lived in the UK, I never had this fear that everything would fall apart and I'd be on the streets. And I came from, you know, working class, parents, teacher and a social worker, and we didn't have a car for a long time, we never had much money. But there was never this underlying anxiety that I might become homeless because there was a safety net in place. And I think that's the big difference. We pay a much higher tax in the UK, the minimum taxes is like 30% if you’re earning a lot of money, people paying 40-50% taxes. So I don't see the US ever going to 30 to 50% taxes.
Part of the solution is the use of the funds that are generated at the federal and the local level. And how can we really create safety nets for everybody in our community? I am encouraged, though, in the US, I've seen more resources in the last five years than I have in the previous 15 towards solving this issue. And so I do think it's not like, “Oh, look at that. It's great in England and it’s terrible here.” England has its own problems, for sure right now. And over here, I see optimism here in Marin County, when we open the veterans housing, I hope that we'll be either very close or actually achieve reaching zero veterans experiencing homelessness in Marin County. And then we have to try and maintain, you know, any new veteran who falls into homelessness in Marin County gets rehoused quickly. And so if we can prove we can do that, well, look at what it cost? How do we do that? We've done that over the last seven years by meeting weekly, tracking every veteran in Marin County. Where are they? What's the barrier to housing, and how do we rehouse them? And we've done it in a systematic, data driven approach. And then we can look at all the funding inputs we built this unit housing. There were this many vouchers, this many people returned to family, that we can know where everybody went because we tracked them weekly.
So if you look at that, you can do an analysis, what the cost was. Use a data driven approach, and then say, what would it look like if we did that for families? Right now, there's 54 unsheltered families in Marin County. There was as high as 70 something, 75 I think, a year ago, at a point in time. So what would it take to create 54 local vouchers, or the number for the year, you know what it takes to build and create a way out of this. I think looking at subsections of the population, we can make change here. But definitely the scale of the problem is far more overwhelming than in Europe.
The one thing I do love about the US is you keep creating new solutions. There are ideas like self reinvention, reinvention all the time, and hopefully we will use that reinvention to solve this crisis. Maybe we'll start 3D printing homes. We can just drive alongside people in a tent. You want a house, right? I mean 3D print you want to be ready and come back in eight hours, and we'll have it all printed and it's put some in on the input, and 3D print the house, and off we go. You know, maybe it's not zoned but it's better than that tent. So until you've got more housing being built, we can create better interim solutions. I see those solutions coming out of the US before they come out of anywhere else, because it's such a creative nation.
Alex Schafran: Thank you so much for the time. I do remember fondly from my time in Leeds that one is how few people, relative to where I came from, slept rough, to use the language of the island, and how many people in my neighborhood in Leeds lived in council estates, lived in supportive housing, had housing benefits, and how hard it was to tell who was who.
And I think that's one of the most important things that I've learned, not just from my time on the island, but from my time living in Europe. And that's it for me, I think the dream to get there. Paul Fordham and I have one other thing in common, which is a love of Eric Cantona, on behalf of both of our “Uniteds” I think we did a pretty good job of doing him justice. Something about seagulls now, I think.
Paul Fordham: Yes, because the seagulls follow the troller, because they think sardines will be thrown over the sun.
Alex Schafran: Alright Paul Fordham. Thank you so much for being here and thank you for all you do for my home county. It's truly appreciated.
Paul Fordham: Thank you. Alex pleasure, all right.
Housing After Dark Episode 14: Paul Fordham on Homelessness, the Unhoused, and Funding