Housing After Dark Episode 15: Ruby Bolaria Shifrin on Philanthropy's Role in Fighting our Housing Crisis

About This Episode

When 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 unique eye for housing politics, and for what she thinks philanthropy can and cannot do, in housing. It’s also made her one of the smartest and most thoughtful people we have in the business, someone who is unafraid to nudge us all forward, and to support a wide range of housing ideas and organizations, including some who may think they are on different sides of the housing fight.

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 Ruby or any of my other amazing guests.

This Episode’s Guest

Interview Transcript

Alex Schafran: Ruby Bolaria Shifrin, welcome to Housing After Dark. It's wonderful to have you.

Ruby Shifrin: Thank you so much for having me.

Alex Schafran: So as is tradition on the show, we like to start with your history, which is an interesting history. I mean, almost everybody in philanthropy has some sort of backstory. I guess some people with inherited wealth get to go straight into philanthropy, but most of us work for a living and then go work for a living in philanthropy. So give us a little bit of your story. I know it involves a tour through development. Tell us a little bit more about how you became a houser and how you ended up at CZI.

Ruby Shifrin: Yeah, absolutely, I never in a million years thought I'd be in philanthropy. It was not on my radar. So I actually started my career in nonprofits working in social justice, environmental health. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer and go into public interest law, but actually my first kind of real job was at Earth Justice, based out of Oakland, and learning more about the work that they were doing supporting the environment and using legal tools to do so. During that time, I also got more involved with the Obama campaign in 2008 and saw the power of organizing. 

Through both of those experiences I saw that the legal victories that we were winning in the courtroom were really supported and won for the long term when they had people power behind them. It’s the David and Goliath battle, when you're dealing with these corporate interests and the court of public opinion actually had a huge impact on the outcomes. And then through organizing, you know, on the Obama campaign, saw kind of also this role that people power kind of played and things. And so I got the bug, and wanted to get more involved in that, and wanted to specifically work on issues versus candidates and so then joined a nonprofit called Corporate Accountability International and worked in food justice, water right issues across the country, organizing in communities, and saw through that experience the impact that the built environment had on people's livelihoods. 

This was right before folks were talking about food deserts. Michelle Obama had just started her food garden thing. It was slowly becoming more in the public consciousness, this idea that where you live dictates your access to resources and I saw that really clearly when I was organizing in different communities. I also never owned a car. Bought my first car this year, actually. And you start to really understand a city too, when you take public transit. So I saw that where people lived determined their access to resources, whether it was jobs, housing, education, nutrition, health care, and that a lot of these things were planned, right? I didn't realize that. I was like, “Wait, there's a thing called urban planning? This is interesting. I have to learn more. I don’t really understand this and how it works.” 

Alex Schafran: Someday we’ll learn about this in elementary school. 

Ruby Shifrin: I know, right? I was like, “I wish someone told me about this when I was younger.” In organizing, we talk a lot about following the money, and we talk a lot about corporate greed and all of this stuff, and I feel like I didn't really understand how to do that. So I went back to school, I went to UCLA and focused on urban planning, and really loved it, and wanted specifically to come out of that working on the private side. So I'd only worked in nonprofits up until then. I got a job first at JLL, working in the office market, and then moved over to real estate development on the housing side, building ground up housing in San Francisco, and I was a project manager. 

It's funny, all my organizing friends were like, “You sold your soul, you went to the dark side.” And all my new real estate people were like, “Who's this crunchy, granola hippie gal coming in?” So I always felt like I was straddling both worlds a little bit, but it was great. I got to learn how things get done, right? What are the incentives? How painful it is to go to the Department of Building Inspections and try to pull a permit right. How to really try to live and breathe in your pro forma, how to work through random issues. 

I remember at one point our building, because of an elevator, was like 10 feet over, but it was literally just for the elevator. So it's just a little piece. And because of that, the city made us hire and do a shadow study. And you know, that added like $30,000 just to the building, just for that one little thing. So you can imagine, it feels kind of like death by 1000 cuts sometimes in development. 

So I was working on that, and really enjoyed it. And I was doing development also with the intention of getting into policy change, or figuring out post practitioner, how do I help build a better system? And I met someone through a former colleague who worked at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and I hadn't really heard of it. They were new. They were just starting to get into housing, and wanted someone with housing experience to help build their program, and so it was a super cool opportunity in a field that I didn't even think of as a potential career. It seems to be a theme in my life, just kind of working in one area and figuring out something else that seems interesting, and it's been great. I've been here for six years, and I've been able to build and grow a program from the start and evolve that as well to now include our economic mobility work, our place based community work, and our DEI grant making too. So it has been a great opportunity.

Alex Schafran: Now that I have asked a lot of people this question about how they became a houser. I am learning that one, I guess, for better, for worse, people have to find their way to it, often through somewhat convoluted channels. Partly because we don't have this education system that teaches you housing and other forms of urban planning and urban systems at a younger age. As much as I am a huge advocate that we change that and give people more pathways earlier on, or at least more knowledge, there is something special about the fact that you have experience running campaigns and being an organizer and building buildings. Those two things are really invaluable and often kind of missing in the policy space and it's nice to have. 

So let's talk about this sort of building of CZI. Now housing, I think like a lot of places, most of the really influential institutions in it have been around for a very long time. It's not easy being the new kid on the block, and there aren't that many especially influential, but CZI’s housing work has been really amazing to watch how it's grown to be one of the most influential and important housing spaces, I think in the Bay Area, and in fact, increasingly in other places. 

Give us a little bit about what CZI’s Housing Initiative does. I know some of it precedes you. You've been part of a lot of it, I think six years, pretty amazing. I know we're going to get to the Partnership for the Bay’s Future at some point. I know we're going to start at some point with somebody convincing Priscilla Chan to become a houser. Give us a little bit of the story. 

Ruby Shifrin: I mean, first and foremost, I got to give credit where credit is due. And my predecessor, Caitlin Fox, who was, I think, employee number one or two or something at CZI. She really helped pave the way for this work and for making sure that housing is a program and which was led really by community. The communities in which we served consistently lifted up housing as a huge priority issue. And so to her credit, not only did she solicit that feedback and listen, but also was able to convince and demonstrate to our leadership, to Priscilla and Mark, that this is worth us doing, and this is something that we can make an impact on. 

Then where I came in and where there was some baton handing (if you will), is okay. Now, what's the right CZI shaped problem, as Priscilla likes to say, right? Because this is a huge issue, and it would be audacious for us to say that we could solve it alone, and that we could solve it, frankly, even in the next five years, right? How do you build a program where you're able to take a bite at the elephant and understand what your unique value add is in the space? I think that's something that we've learned along the way, through some trial and error, some obviously direction and vision that I brought in as well. 

But I think about the levers that we have to pull on this right. Our capital, our resources and connections to different people, and kind of a brain trust, if you will. Our ability to convene and bring folks together, especially across sectors and silos, whether it's advocates, academia, practitioners, all of that is extremely important, that there is more collaboration. I think I was shocked about how little collaboration there is across the different spaces. I think about the role of the public in the private market. So housing is a commodity for better or worse so there's a private market for housing, and there's a public market for it too, in terms of the role of the government. 

And so what is our responsibility and ability to shape those markets, to influence them, to leverage them. How can we use our capital to understand where the private market is better suited for things, and where the government and the public is more suited for things? Because I do think we need both, and the role of the government is very important in this. I think one thing that is been slowly eroding over time is government's responsibility in housing. How do we use our dollars to help incentivize and motivate or be the R&D capital so that government can scale those solutions. 

A lot of how we think about the work and the type of opportunities that we seek out is something that I've been able to help build out, and frankly, something that Priscilla is also really excited about. How we use, especially our impact investing side, to leverage our capital, has been something that she's really appreciated.

Alex Schafran: It's been interesting to watch as you all have evolved over the years. Not just the willingness to use capital. We'll talk a little bit more about the PBF and that model and top loss capital is my favorite. I don't know if I use it correctly, but I use it often because I really like it. But also it's been impressive to watch your willingness to really try to help convene and drive pilot projects, whether it's keys to equity work in Oakland, which is a program that struggled. Whether it's your small landlord work down in Southern California. There are times where I see philanthropy, especially these days, really saying, “Oh, you know, we're not the experts. We're going to sort of sit back and, you know, just tell us what to do.” I do feel at times that you have been willing to lead, even though, again, you are relatively the newcomers on the block. 

Is that a conscious decision to sort of be willing to say “Actually, no, we're going to lead. And actually we, we actually have some of the experts.” I mean, not just you, but I think of Jennifer Martinez, one of my favorite people, one of the most respected people on the ground in this business, in this state, now working with you, and you have that leadership inside. Is that a conscious decision to try to step out in that way?

Ruby Shifrin: That's a good question. Party yes, partly no. So it kind of depends. We do have a lot of good in house expertise, right? Folks that have been working in the field that come from it, I didn't realize how rare that is in philanthropy. A lot of folks that I work with across the industry sometimes they don't have any work experience in that field in which they're giving, which isn't always a bad thing, but it does give you a certain point of view when you've actually worked in the industry in which you're participating in as a donor now, and so I do think that we're conscious about that role that we play. 

We definitely want to co-lead, I think about it that way, with our partners in the field because we aren't as close to the problems and so we do need to center folks that are. And I think we should be honest about the roles that we play. I think it's unfair to say, “Oh, we're just going to take a total step back.” Because we were not 100% a particular grant making organization, right? We still are making decisions on those type of things, and so we do have to have buy-in and understand what's happening. And I think actually it makes for better funder partners when you can bring folks along like that and build actual solidarity, instead of it feeling like charity. 

I think that's something that we're actively involved, not so much to say, “Hey, we're going to lead on all the decision making here.” But more so okay, “How do we collectively come together and align on a set of goals, and then once we have those goals, what are the best ways to get there?” One of the things that we do really well is actually build in flexibility from the beginning. So that's also something that I've seen other funders sometimes not get exactly right, is they spend all this time on the upfront planning, and then don't have as much back and forth during the execution and post. 

I think that something in PBF, and something in a lot of other work that we've done, around building in room for changes and flexibility and understanding that market dynamics can change. So we need our flexibility and capital to change, right? That has been actually a secret sauce in a lot of what we've done, saying that, “Hey, we have to make some decisions because we have to move forward by these time frames. But we're making the best decisions based on the information we know now. We know that information will change over time. So let's build in milestones and timeframes in which we re-evaluate those assumptions or decisions that are going in and see if they need to pivot and change.” And I think that that's actually really beneficial, not just for us, but for organizations, so that when they're in the field and they're also thinking about this, they're like, “Okay, it feels a little less pressure to make a decision when you know you have the ability to change it, depending on how things go.“ And also for them to bring us in on that, so that there's not this kind of like fear relationship, where it's like, “Oh man, I've got to try to make this work, because otherwise I might not get future funding.” So it's building trust with those organizations so that you can have those conversations as collaborators or co-conspirators, versus these huge power dynamics, which definitely still exist, but let's acknowledge them, and let's try to mitigate them so that it doesn't feel like this elephant in the room either.

Alex Schafran: I want to come back to this question of the lessons that you've learned over time, specifically as a houser in philanthropy, but just in general and between philanthropy and larger civil society or larger society as a whole. But let's just take a quick step back, especially for any of the listeners who aren't maybe as familiar with the CZI Housing Initiatives work. What are some of the areas, things that you have built, things where you've done your learning that you want to talk about and shed a little bit more light on for people. 

Ruby Shifrin: Our work is mainly focused in two major areas. One is working to build the enabling conditions to win on housing reform. So equipping advocates with resources, thinking at a regional and statewide level, because I think at the hyper local level is not impactful as thinking a bit more statewide or kind of regional in those components. On the other side of the portfolio is more focused on innovations and more market-based interventions. The enabling conditions oftentimes focus on the policy side, the government side. Like, how do we create that we soften the ground for the change that we need? Ror example, when we first started this work, it was illegal to build anything other than single family homes in most of the state. Those conditions have changed. And then in order to enact on those conditions and realize the abundant housing that we need, we need to also invest in pilots and be the R&D dollars for the space to allow for almost like new markets to flourish as well and more equitable markets. 

One thing that we think a lot about is that there’s the history of inequity in housing, from a racial standpoint, from an economic standpoint, that's rooted both in government and in the private sector. We have to really intentionally redress those inequities and do so on both the market side and the government side. Our innovation side is really focused on building that equity lens in ensuring that who we build the housing for, where we build the housing, and how we do it is the most equitable it can be, right? 

Then we also fund research as maybe a cross cutting, let's fill gaps in our knowledge kind of way. And some of the work that I think we've been really great at is, on the enabling condition side, like I was mentioning, passing a bunch of rezoning statewide bills, doing a lot of streamlining to make affordable housing, in particular, faster to build. 

I'm sure a lot of your listeners are aware of the Casa Compact and how that produced a set of bills passed statewide, and I think more importantly, created this 3P narrative of production, preservation and protection. I think some folks are adding a fourth p of prevention, but just the idea that you can bring folks together across the aisle, from tenant rights advocates to developers, to focus on a collective shared agenda, was pretty game changing, and we were a massive force behind that. 

We also helped support the creation of BAHFA that passed and helping to set that up as well. So those are kind of great table stakes that you need in order for the change that we're looking for on a massive scale. And then some of the other work we've supported, like you were mentioning the ADU pilot, which hasn't gone great, but I think we can talk about that later, maybe lessons learned. 

Alex Schafran: You gotta be able to learn sometimes by doing the right thing and sometimes things are hard out there, you know. Often. 

Ruby Shifrin: That's right. And frankly, if we got everything right, then I don't think we're being risk embracing enough. And the role of philanthropy is to be the risk embracing dollars, right? You should have a few failures, otherwise you're not successful, as ironic as that might sound. And we've also funded things like the Terner Center’s Housing Lab, which has produced an amazing crop of organizations, including Esusu, which is now a unicorn company, focused on using rent payments to increase your credit score. There's been a lot of spillover effects. Also San Francisco Housing Action Coalition, Genesis LA, a lot of partners are CDFIs actually, and supporting their ability to lend capital at either a lower rate or be more risk embracing with the goal of changing lending practices for the long term, to support more giving to build or more lending to build housing. 

More recently, we also have been exploring guarantees, and we gave out a guarantee with LISC to support building on publicly owned lands, a guarantee with San Francisco Housing Action Accelerator to support modular construction. We're also trying to get innovative with the types of investments that we're making to spur innovation, not just in a one off way, but in a how do we influence and change the whole sector. So modular housing is really risky because of the way that capital is distributed, in terms of needing more upfront capital in the beginning, let's use our guarantee to backstop that upfront capital so that other lenders start to get more comfortable with it and then adopt that, and then they don't need our guarantee. So those are some of the examples I think of our work.

Alex Schafran: I just recorded an episode with Michelle Boyd from Terner Labs. 

Ruby Shifrin: Oh, love her.

Alex Schafran: She's fantastic. Like I said in that episode, I'll say now, I just can't say how important it is that people are willing to take risks to start companies. In some ways you mentioned earlier about we tend to talk about the private and the public sector as markets, but in some ways, there's also these institutions that we create right when. When these companies are founded with your dollars or with Terner Lab support are they going to be building in questions around equity and attention to  the unintended consequences that so often plague some of our best housing intentions? Is there a way that we can start to build these organizations and companies from that startup phase and build them differently, and build them with a little bit more of a social mission, a little bit more of that awareness, in some ways, take the best of the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem, but with being aware of many of the things that have gone wrong in that space, to do something differently. 

It’s exciting that you are willing and able to take that plunge, at least on some of these ventures, but at the same time still doing work in the policy space. Can you give us a little bit of understanding of the PBF fellowship? For folks who don't know, there's Partnership for the Bay’s Future that CZI helped create. It involves almost $500 million affordable housing lending fund, which Priscilla, and it’s one of my favorite things that she said, at the five year anniversary party, was that she was really proud that there had been a default, because it meant a little bit like what you said. It was like, had there been zero defaults, it means we weren't taking enough of a risk, and our job is partly to take risk. But the part of the of the PBF, that is just as exciting as the $500 million, is that you've been really investing in human beings and human capital and relationships, fellows who've been working with local jurisdictions and partner with local nonprofits to pass, often very difficult to pass, pieces. Will you tell us a little bit more about that program?

Ruby Shifrin: Yeah, absolutely. So the policy fund is part of the Partnership for the Bay’s Future. Like you said, there are two arms, the investment fund and the policy fund. And on the policy fund side, we're working with community groups to help bring their voices into the conversation at the local, regional, and state government side. So what happens is that jurisdictions actually apply for the resources and technical assistance, and they have to actually select a CBO, a community based organization, as their partner to go in this and identify the problem statement that they want to work on around housing. 

We structured this so that it would be doled out in three awards, if you will. So the first one was focused on a protection or preservation type policy, and so they had to identify something around that. For example, first right of refusal or tenant opportunity purchase act, a housing preference policy, a renter protection ordinance, something like that. The second round was focused on equitable housing policies that support more production type changes. So streamlining, up zoning, maybe a density bonus. We actually know so many different policies that can help grease the wheels to support more housing production and protection, for that matter. And a lot of times it's about how do you enact them? 

Okay this is working to help those local and regional jurisdictions with the technical assistance dollars that they need to figure that out, a fellow that's embedded for two years, and a cohort backbone support model that San Francisco Foundation is owning and running with. I think what's so beautiful about this is this kind of inside, outside strategic gain. Because each entity is partnered with these community organizations, and then you have the fellow that's embedded with the government, but is paid for by the policy fund, and so kind of sits as this go between with the outside organization and the inside government side. That has been super effective actually at building trust and supporting more shared understanding of some of the problems. 

I think one of my favorite quotes, of some of the evaluation that's been done so far, is folks on the community organization side said that they felt a lot more empathy for folks on the government side and understand some of the challenges that they're up against. And folks on the government side said the same thing. They said that they have a lot empathy for the organizations now and have a greater understanding of the impact that's happening in their own communities. 

That's been really catalytic in not only shepherding new policies, but also in rewiring and reworking relationships that go beyond the two year fellow. I don't have the numbers off to my head, but a lot of the fellows actually ended up getting jobs at local government too. So one of our secondary kind of goals in this was, can we help support more talent development and pipeline for local government? And I think that's actually been pretty successful, which is very exciting, and we've gotten more inquiries around emulating this model, even for different issue areas, because it's worked.

Alex Schafran:  We love to give shoutouts on this podcast. Unfortunately, there are too many PBF fellows to shout out, just saying hi to the book club. We've had one meeting of a book club that is the majority of PBF fellows. I think it's been a really amazing investment in the human capital, I think both people that will go into the public sector, people that will go and are already in the nonprofit sector, into philanthropy, or like many people do perhaps go spend time in different parts of those sectors. But it definitely gives me, when I meet them, it gives me more excitement and more faith about the future of our field.

Because there isn't a normal, sort of natural pathway always into our field, it's really nice to have these kinds of things. One of the things I appreciate also about the fellows and the policies that they work on is that it spans the range of policy interventions, and therefore spans the range of different people within the housing field that feel very strongly about some of those interventions, and maybe less strong about others. One of the reasons (full disclosure, I think most people who know me know this) most of my clients are CZI grantees in some ways. And I think one of the reasons that is because you fund across these internal these divides that divide us in housing, but shouldn't. Has that been a conscious decision to see the housing system as a whole and not just the sum of a lot of small divisions that unfortunately become large conflicts at times.

Ruby Shifrin: Yes, that was very intentional. And also, to Priscilla's credit, something that she wanted as well and was very into this idea of funding unlikely allies and bridge building and finding the common denominator in terms of things that we can work towards, and how do we build coalitions and partnerships. So that's been very intentional since the get go, and something that I think is, like you're saying, paying off now. It takes time.  As they say, “trust moves at the speed of trust”, or what's that thing? 

Yeah, it was very intentional in the work that we're doing, and has been helpful in building our credibility too, so that we can also sometimes be a go between, between different groups. I think at one point, someone came up to me who was a tenant rights advocate and was like, it’s only CZI that could get all these people in the room. Having the California YIMBY folks, the tenant rights groups, some developer trade groups, the community ownership CLT folks. 

It really is an ecosystem, but I think that is a reflection also of solutions that we need to get us out of this is an ecosystem approach. There is no silver bullet. We do need to be thinking about how we resource and fund a variety of solutions so that people have choice and options, versus saying, the best way to do it is actually just to build a bunch of cinder block huge high rises, and how's everybody like that? Sure there's efficiency in that, but is there maybe a better way? I think that there are, and I think we've seen a lot of great examples now of progress, both in different solution types, but also in the ability of these groups to work together. Because I think it's really important that we realize that all the fractions that we have sometimes in our own side, we're still all going towards the same goal of ensuring everyone has a safe, accessible, affordable home, and we're stronger together. So maybe let's spend less energy on the infighting and more on how do we find the common ground? 

Alex Schafran: I know from our conversations that there's been some evolution on your own part in terms of this kind of journey to both and and specifically around tenants rights or rent control issues. Can you give us an example of what happened and how that happened?

Ruby Shifrin: Yeah, totally. Similar to most people, in econ 101, and in every kind of formal training that you've ever gotten, rent control is used as the poster child of what not to do, or what's wrong in terms of market failure and dysfunction. I can see why that is the case in terms of a kind of empirical thing. But my thinking on this has evolved for a few reasons. One is because of the decades of under building, because of the history of racism, because of all the things that have led us to the cosmic storm that we're in today, there is no way that we can build enough housing to meet the needs that we need right now. Rent control, rent cap, whatever you want to call it, price control, is the quickest way to ensure people stay housed. 

I think one of my main issues now with it is that it should just be applied to everything, and then you'd have less market distortion. Because what happens is it falls on the like, 10 buildings that are rent controlled get all the benefit, and then everyone else is paying the extra cost of subsidizing that. If everyone just had it, I think that actually would be a better system. And we started to get towards that with 1482 started to get at that but obviously with some major restrictions. It's only multifamily, it's buildings over 15 years old. 

But I think the thing that everybody loves to hate but hates to love, is rent control because I benefited from rent control for most of my life. I'm sure a lot of folks did. It's not means tested, but it's a great benefit, if you can get into one. There are some issues with it, for example, there's an issue of family housing fit. For instance, you have a family of four living in a one bedroom, because it's rent control, and you have a senior citizen living in a three bedroom rent control, but they're not willing to move. 

There are some interesting things to actually think about in that. But I think the solution isn't rent control is bad, it’s how do we make it work better for everybody? Because the reality is that a mortgage is fixed costs year over year. Being a renter, you do not have that. So we have prioritized home ownership and a mortgage in a way that we don't prioritize renters or provide them any kind of financial stability. Rent control is a way to do that. It's just been so stigmatized. But if you think about a mortgage in terms of knowing your monthly payment for 30 years, wouldn't that be crazy in a rental market, right? We'd like, “Oh, there's no way that would work. There's no way that financial markets would let that work.” Well, it works in homeownership. So we're choosing what works and what doesn't work.

Alex Schafran: Amen. Amen. I can't agree more your push for a little bit more universal. Universal basic housing rights. we'll call it. We’ve kept such a fragmented, inefficient system, so many different band aids on band aids on band aids on band aids, and then you complain about one of the band aids. A piece I just wrote that got reprinted in Shelter Force, which talked about a bunch of bills trying to regulate the investor purchase of single family homes. One of the things that I talked about, one of the better methods, is to provide a wider range of tenants rights more universally regardless of when the building was built and regardless of how many units it is, etc. 

But part of what we need to get to in the housing space (and this is where rent control saves lives, which is why I have supported it for the longest time), when somebody proposes a solution where the spirit is right, but maybe the law, the specific proposal isn't perfect, to reach out and give that group a big hug and be like, “I'm fully with you. I see this. I'm not sure if this is the right way, but I am going to lock arms with you and say, yes, we're committed to that space.” Rent control, for me, it’s that basic. 

If prevention is the new P and we're trying to keep people off the street. Anybody who is trying to actively prevent this from happening, and if you don't think that it's necessary that people are not being pushed out on the street all the time, you're just not paying attention. Our cities are a machine for the creation of homelessness. What’s the official statistic, we create three homeless people for every one person that we're able to house and we're actually fairly good at housing people, like we actually can pull people off miraculously, but we make them homeless so often. 

I appreciate you willing to come on this show and talk about evolution. It’s just not something that I think enough people are willing to say, that they’ve changed in their view, and I think it's not again. 

I want to make sure that we get back to some of the lessons that you have learned, because it's been an amazing array of projects and experiences, including big statewide campaigns and so many things. What are the big lessons you’ve learned at this point? Let’s start with your houser hat about this intersection between housing and philanthropy. I know one of the reflections that you want to talk about is about changes that you can make within the system versus changes that need to come from outside the system. Give us a sense of how you see that and what are some of the kind of key lessons? 

Ruby Shifrin: I think we've learned a lot. I think one thing which might seem obvious, but just want to state, is that philanthropy is not the solution. Philanthropy is fleeting, and they change their mind often, and funding is never guaranteed. It's just not a stable source of change. And I think that's really hard to hear, and it's hard to say sometimes too right, because you're like, of course, I want to be in this forever. So the question then becomes, what is its role, and how do we utilize philanthropy in the most catalytic way to deliver on more long term solutions. And to me, that means one what is the role of philanthropy in supporting government to scale solutions. 

That looks like narrative change, it could supporting public will building and political will building for long term policy solutions. It means supporting local and state government in their capacity to be housing providers and to support housing solutions. I think that we beat up a lot, including myself, on local government and talk about the role of the state that's needed. But the reality is that the state has been passing a bunch of these things, and now local government needs to execute on it, and they don't have the resources a lot of times to be able to do that well. So how do we build a plan to support their execution in that work? How do we build the talent, or upskill the existing talent, so that they feel confident in their ability to do this work. 

I just read Jennifer Pahlka’s book Recoding America, which was so good, and one of her key points was around the lack of capacity in government at any level, and that the orientation of government sometimes around a kind of CYA mentality, of compliance over outcomes, and focusing on being compliant versus is this getting us to the best possible outcome and serving who we need to serve? I think that that is a mind shift, and that's a really hard question, but I think the right one for philanthropy too to be asking around. How are resourcing advocates and thinking about the tools when it comes to compliance and enforcement. 

Because, for example, legal tool has been used a lot and has been really effective, in terms of an accountability mechanism, but our litigious environment in the US in general, has also created a lot of consequences around being compliant and not necessarily focusing on the outcome or the real goal. So I think that's something that we're talking and thinking a lot about. 

What's the role of regionalism. How do we how do we build the scaffolding and infrastructure that can be long term. I think, another big lesson that we learned, how do we think about leverage, and that's both in a financial return type of way. How do we use our capital to incentivize other resources, whether it's in the public or the private or the philanthropic, whatever it might be, but also leverage in terms of impact. How do we think collectively? A lot of people talk about a collective impact model and a lot of what that comes down to, is trying to align incentives, which is really hard. I think though, that there is a role for philanthropy, in like we were talking about before, being that risk embracing dollars and mitigating risk for other players who have a lot more capital to bring to the table. 

So if I can put in $10 million, and it unlocks $40 million from JP Morgan Chase, not only is that a good investment, for that one thing, but let's talk about how that could potentially change lending behavior for JP Morgan Chase to continue to do that work without my $10 million. Those are the questions that I think we're trying to figure out more. We gave to this guaranteed pool that Kresge started, which has been really great in terms of understanding more the role of guarantees and how they can support changing lending behavior, which is really hard, and it's not like one moment in time that that happens. So you need multiple pilots. That's the other thing I feel like I've learned is, a lot of times philanthropy is like, “Great. I did this one building!” Or “I did this one project. Now everybody adopt it.” And it's like, no, it actually takes a lot of proof points to get there. We should also be thinking about our impact and scale and time a little bit more spaciously. And say, this is just going to be, this is one of maybe the 50 proof points that are needed. We're not going to contribute to all 50 maybe, but this is our contribution to moving us forward in that.

And changing lending behavior is a pretty big one that that has a huge potential reward though, in terms of changing underwriting requirements or reevaluating real risk versus perceived risk, and that's where CZI capital can help mitigate against both real risk and also help to identify that slice of okay, “What's the perceived risk? And let's prove to you that it's just perceived and not real, by using our dollars to backstop you.” And that that perceived risk category is something that I'm really interested in more, because I think there's a lot of that.

Alex Schafran: I love that you're talking about risk and I think it's so important. We talked about it on the insurance episode here, I do really think it's one of the most important things. So much of our behavior, public sector behavior, what the public sector believes that it can do, is influenced by risk. For public sector, political risk, it's often legal risk. Everybody gets sued, doesn't matter whether you're public, private, nonprofit, church, state, doesn't matter. Everybody gets sued in America. 

You talked about the lessons of philanthropy, and the fact that philanthropy could be fleeting, but sometimes a top lost capital, a chunk of money that is designed to sit there to absorb perceived risk, never actually gets used because, in fact, there isn't that much risk, and it can change behavior, and it can still sit there and continue to do its job down the road. 

And this changing of risk taking behavior is sustainable and is scalable unlike a lot of pilots or a lot of imagination that we're going to sort of do a thing and then all of a sudden everybody's going to, like, repeat us and do this thing, and that doesn't work. Scale works when you're selling widgets or selling web pages or selling certain things, but the kind of work that we do, I'm not sure scale is the is the right framework, but risk is.

Ruby Shifrin: I also just want to be really explicit that a conversation about risk and reevaluating risk is also intricately linked and directly related to racism. How we think about risk and perceived risk in terms of who's risky and not, definitely has a race component to it. A VC backed startup with no track record, no money in the bank account, led by young white men, mostly, gets all the money in the world. And you have other folks, BIPOC led developers, sometimes they do have $2 million in the bank or something, but they're like “Oh no, you don't know what you're doing. You've never done this before. It's so risky.” There’s some real risk in all of this too. But I just think that it's important for us also to include that race equity lens in the conversation around risk. 

Alex Schafran: If you add up what you've been able to do over the last six years, does this still leave you feeling pretty optimistic about doing significant things in housing and beyond in California?

Ruby Shifrin: Yes, it does. It was a very enthusiastic yes, right? 

Alex Schafran: That was a great yes. 

Ruby Shifrin: I think sometimes it can be really challenging and a little demoralizing every once in a while, right? But I also have to look back and say when I first started this housing was not a priority. We were new into a Newsom administration, Jerry Brown had cut all the redevelopment agencies, housing was not a priority in the state. Everybody kept on saying it's a local issue. People believing that you either had to be pro protection or pro production, but there was no both. A lot has changed actually, in the past six years. We've passed a whole slate of legislation at the state that basically legalizes more housing types. We've changed the nature of the conversation to not, is this a problem or a priority, but like, “All right. Housing is on the top side of the agenda. What are going to be the priorities within housing?” It's not even a question, if it's on the docket. We've also really changed the nature of the conversation around a both end approach. You need tenant protections, just like we need production and to have folks talk about that and move beyond it's only 100% affordable, or it's nothing. To understand how do we do more mixed development, how do we think about equitable development, is very inspiring. 

Also seeing new players enter the space. Like today, I just saw that a health insurance agency just committed millions of dollars of resources to build affordable housing, because they're realizing, “Hey, this is actually the thing that's impacting our bottom line the most.” So I feel like we've not only changed the nature of the conversation, but there's been real action done. I think that this stuff takes time. It's taken us a long time to get here, decades and decades, so it's going to take some time to undo. 

But I am hopeful, and I think also a lot of that hope emanates from the organizations and grantees that we work with, the folks on the ground leading it day to day, who are, frankly, doing the much harder work than I am, and deserve all the credit for a lot of the stuff that's going on right now on the ground. When I think of those folks and get to meet with some of our partners it's hard not to be inspired.

Alex Schafran: Well, thank you. know it's easy for me as a consultant and podcaster to say that thinking in both and terms is actually very low risk, but I hope that people hear that from you, and maybe they're able to take a a few more steps towards doing that. Thank you so much for your time and for the work that you do. 

Ruby Shifrin: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.