About This Episode
Today’s guest is one of the most interesting and thoughtful housers in the Bay Area. I’ve known Gloria Bruce on and off for many years, as she worked her way to becoming the long time Executive Director of East Bay Housing Organizations (EBHO), the largest housing coalition on this side of the Bay Area. Our relationship, like so many in housing, is both professional and personal. I’m not sure that she knows this, but it was a conversation with Gloria during a housing conference street party in Oakland in 2018 which made me realize that I was done with academia and that I needed to be back home working with people like Gloria on a regular basis.
I’m proud to say that I’m now a triple member of EBHO. I’m a member, my company is a member, and I’m a member of an organization that is a member, inspired in many ways by her leadership over the years to make EBHO into an organization that supports tenant protections and affordable housing production with equal fervor. Gloria is now Senior Program Officer at the Crankstart Foundation. This conversation was an opportunity for her to reflect on both her work with EBHO and on new housing challenges she is focused on, in particular the persistent divide between two sides of the housing community - those focused on homelessness and the unhoused, and those focused on the rest of the housing system. I hope you enjoy this conversation with someone who is an esteemed colleague, friend and neighbor and someone always worth talking housing with day or night.
This Episode’s Guest
Interview Transcript
Alex Schafran: Gloria Bruce, welcome to the podcast.
Gloria Bruce: Thank you for having me, Alex. Excited to be here.
Alex Schafran: So let's start with what has now become tradition, which is to tell us your journey to becoming a houser, which I don't actually know despite the fact that you and I have known each other on and off for almost two decades. How did you get to this point?
Gloria Bruce: I'm hung up a little bit on the almost two decades, how have we known each other for almost two decades? I like to talk about my housing journey and I like to hear about other people's journey into housing because people come to it from so many different paths. I don't think there are too many people who, when they were a kid, said they wanted to be a houser when they grow up and I'm no exception.
I did want to be an architect when I was younger. Fast forward many years, I did my undergraduate degree in history with a focus on US history. Based on the fact that I was studying what at the time we called African American History and Women’s Studies, there was a lot about the roots of inequity that really interested me. I was also volunteering in public housing projects in Boston when I was an undergraduate. I was always thinking “How did this place come to be how it is? What can we do to make it different for the people who live here in the way that works for them?”
Eventually, through a couple of twists and turns, I found myself deciding to pursue that childhood dream of becoming an architect. I took an intensive, postgraduate summer course meant for people to figure out whether they want to be an architect. I came out of that course thinking, “Wow, I really don't want to be an architect.” The main reason why (and I think it may have just been a function of the people in that class and who was teaching it) is that it was shockingly so focused on buildings and not the people who occupied those buildings. As much as I love beautiful structures, public spaces and the idea of creating those for people, the people part was missing.
I had an excellent TA in that course who introduced me to some readings about new urbanism. I came out of that thinking, “Huh, there's some interesting interdisciplinary stuff that goes beyond the building.” It was that same teaching assistant who asked me “Have you ever heard of city planning as a field?” I had not. I started reading and got the bug. Several years later I ended up going to graduate school for city planning at UC Berkeley.
I was lucky enough when I was in that graduate program to be enrolled in a fellowship funded by HUD for students from underrepresented backgrounds to go and work at various community organizations. That’s how I first landed at a couple of community spaces, including EBHO.
I was not seeking housing out, but housing found me through that fellowship. I thought, “Wow. Housing this little known obscure area that affects everybody, but that nobody talks about.” Keep in mind, this was 2004-2005 and at the time, housing was an obscure area that people didn't talk about in the news or in the public sphere, at least not as much. And I was like, “Oh, my gosh, this is everything. This is the theory of everything on racism and injustice, and environments, and education, and so many other things.” I got hooked and have never looked back since then.
Alex Schafran: I'm excited to come back to this question about how we get into housing. Too many of us find or have to find our way here through a long and circuitous pathway. I dream about ways that future generations can have opportunities to find their way to housing in the broad way that I think we both approach the subject that's very human centered, appreciates design, policy, and finance and all the labor and materials that go into housing. That way, we can find our way there at least a little bit quicker or without having to go through a circuitous pathway.
Gloria Bruce: Yeah, and sometimes it's the circuitous pathways that bring us to different conclusions and perspectives that are really exciting. But if by having these conversations we can convince my son Theo, or other people that “Hey, this housing thing is something I want to do.” I'm all for that.
Alex Schafran: Yeah, I mean, I think at least one benefit is that many of us who have found our way through that pathway know that we're here for good reason. And it helps us through the difficult times.
This is a good reflective point, because part of this episode is about you having a chance to reflect back on what's been a pretty amazing and substantial career. As I mentioned in the introduction, Gloria was a longtime Executive Director of EBHO, where I'm proud to be a triple member. I'm a member myself, my company's a member, and I'm a member of an organization that's a member of EBHO.
Let's ground ourselves back in EBHO. You were the executive director for 7 years, part of the organization for 12. The organization has evolved in the housing space a lot over that time, even if at times, it doesn't seem like we've evolved as much as we could have. What are some of the big evolutions that did happen during your time?
Gloria Bruce: EBHO is obviously a huge part of my life professionally and personally having worked there for 12 years. The community I found at EBHO will be hard to replicate in the rest of my professional life. It’s such an amazing, diverse group of folks coming together for housing justice. I started not really knowing how I would find my place in that community. As I mentioned earlier, my first encounter with EBHO was through this internship fellowship that I did in graduate school and this was several executive directors ago where I thought, “Well, this looks like this looks like an interesting area to explore.” But I really didn't know the first thing about affordable housing which is EBHO’s focus specifically.
I didn't know how to find my place in it, but I started learning and a few years later, after a couple other jobs, got hired to be at EBHO by previous executive director, Amie Fishman, another huge player in the housing scene. I started by doing communications and education work. I have an education background, I've been a teacher and worked with youth in the past. My initial job was essentially to spread the gospel about why we need housing and why we need affordable housing. EBHO is very good at that task.
It's something that the organization has done and its members have done for many years to basically get the word out. Why do we need inclusive communities? Why do we need to provide an alternative to the market with housing? Why does housing justice matter? A lot of our activities and campaigns were focused on answering those questions in a way that was accessible to broad audiences, both those that were likely to be sympathetic, and those that, frankly, were not. So put simply, a lot of it was anti-NIMBY work.
Alex Schafran: So at its origins, EBHO was originally a coalition of what we would think of as affordable housing providers or nonprofit affordable housing providers. Is that correct?
Gloria Bruce: That's right. It was actually started in the 1980s initially as Oakland Housing Organizations, and it was exactly that. It was a bunch of housing providers who came together in the immediate term to solve problems that were happening in Oakland where they needed to come together, and grew from that into a coalition of nonprofit housing providers.
Eventually, it grew much broader than that. Faith groups, neighborhood groups, residents of affordable housing, the occasional labor group, other folks who worked in the field, architects, title companies, construction companies, contractors, the whole gamut coming together with this mission.
Alex Schafran: One of the things that has been really interesting for me as a relatively new consultant is being part of EBHO and experiencing the network of other small consultants and small businesses. It has been a fascinating way to experience how we organize and structure our industries because housing is ultimately an industry.
I know that one of the challenges that you encountered on the ground at EBHO was this question of tenants rights, because EBHO originally was, being an organization of housing providers, mostly made up of landlords, even if they didn’t want to call themselves that. They were building an alternative type of housing that was very different from the market rate housing but I know that this was a challenge that was somewhat central to your time at EBHO. Can you tell a little bit about how this issue kind of came about, how you started to see it in your mind and then where it evolved over time?
Gloria Bruce: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is one of the central both tensions and honestly beautiful challenges of EBHO and of similar housing organizations, though I think EBHO is unique. I want to emphasize to your listeners that EBHO is still going strong.
Alex Schafran: A triple shout out to Lindsay Haddix, the new EBHO director.
Gloria Bruce: I dealt with this. My predecessor dealt with this. Lindsay will continue to deal with this tension of is this an industry or a movement. Of course it's not an either or. As you mentioned, simply by the fact that there are entities who are literally constructing, financing, and operating housing, there are inherently industry structures around that. You have to learn professional lingo, you have to figure out how to get the dollars in the door, you have to collaborate with other companies, you have to operate like a business in some ways to keep things going. And this work is not for profit housing work. It is, at least in theory, and I do think in practice, mission driven and many of the founders of what we now think of as the California affordable housing industry actually came from pretty progressive and even radical roots in their concept , “Hey, we actually need to find a way to let people be stably housed and not just be at the whims of profit making people or entities.”
So there's this constant push and pull between housing as a human right, which I hope is what drives us all and certainly where I tried to center the work at EBHO the very clear realities of housing as a human right in a capitalist society where housing is not provided as a right or basic service. Those things came into tension quite often.
What we did working with our nonprofit partners (who were both developers of housing and landlords, but were somewhat loath to call themselves either because of all the associations), is just constantly have that conversation and work that balance. It's why we established and still have a resident and community organizing program within EBHO where we actually did trainings and worked with and for the end user, the residents of those affordable housing properties, who could tell us what was life changing about being able to live in a subsidized property.
More often than not, it was literally life saving. T hat's not a hyperbole. We would have people who tell us “I would have died on the streets if not for getting this unit, or this home.” At the same time, those same people would say, “I have this problem with management. I'm tired of the elevator not working. I wish our services person was on site more.” And those critiques are real and valid. We had to balance bringing those [complaints] to the developers who are also our members who also pay their dues and help pay our salaries. It was a constant back and forth and we didn't always get it right.
We eventually got to the point where both the residents and the housing providers understood that what we were trying to do was build connections and grow the affordable housing pie for everybody. At the end of the day, a lot of these issues on site would come from scarcity, or inadequate resources for these housing projects. If we were able through EBHO’s advocacy and policy to have more abundant housing funding, abundant housing being built, so many of these pressures would ultimately go away and I think we all saw that as a common mission.
Alex Schafran: It's great that you talked about the specific efforts you made to incorporate the voices of people that were living in the nonprofit properties. Specifically, organizing is something I know that Housing California has done and it seems to be a more common practice to try to intentionally give voice to people who are living in LIHTC buildings or affordable housing buildings.
One thing I've noticed in being part of EBHO that has been nice is seeing people like James Vann from Oakland Tenants Union heavily present. What was it like to try to work in what is essentially market rate housing that has a very different set of policy needs like rent control, or rent regulation?
Gloria Bruce: I think that that was definitely an evolution. I talked about how our housing providers would shy away from the term landlords. By the same token, we called our program a resident organizing program, not a tenant organizing program. That was also intentional because for landlords, the term “tenant” has baggage. Tenants make trouble, they organize, they complain and we need to of course strip any stigma from that term of tenant but there's some intentionality in trying to build these bridges going forward.
What we found is that we could make the argument to the housing developers and nonprofits that relieving pressure in the overall housing market, including market rate housing, would ultimately benefit them and serve their missions. Theoretically, we should all want to go out of business. We should want EBHO to not need to exist anymore. We shouldn't want to have LIHTC housing developers. It would be great if these things didn't have to exist, if our housing market actually functioned to serve everybody who needs a home, but we know that it doesn’t.
For every person who is displaced because their landlord in the private market jacks up their rent, or for every person who (as one of our residents did) got pneumonia every winter because of mold in her apartment, that's another person who ends up on the waitlist for that very limited precious affordable housing and increases the pressure on what we do. Not to mention the fact that at the end of the day, whatever the form is of the housing, we just want people to be housed in a quality way whether it's in a subsidized building or a non subsidized building. I think many of EBHOs members, of course, feel that really strongly.
When we went out and started pushing more clearly for things like rent control, anti-displacement policies, just cause, bills like AB1482, some of our nonprofit developer members were not exactly opposed, but were at first like, “Why? This isn't your core bread and butter, you're here to serve us.”
We had to make sure that we were continuing to do the core nitty gritty advocacy work that matters to them. But also saying, “This is a matter of housing justice, can we go back to that call that housing is a human right.” It does not mean that every position we took was welcomed with open arms. But it did mean that eventually most of the organizations came along with us when we were endorsing statewide measures.
And honestly, there was some self screening with our members. EBHO does not, at least as of this recording, have for profit affordable housing entities in our membership. That's not an intentional block. I never said if you're a for profit entity, we don't want you. But to be perfectly honest, there are organizations that are just like, “Yeah, y’all are a little too progressive, a little too pro-tenant. I don't really want to join as a member.” And that's completely fine. We were really clear about our values. One of them being people over profit, housing for people first. Our membership page says: Here are six values. If you espouse these values, you're welcome to be a member. If these values, like housing for people first, make you uncomfortable, you may want to find another affiliation.
Alex Schafran: I'm currently trying to do some work to set up a countywide housing coalition in another county, inspired in ways by some of the work that I've seen that you've done in EBHO and other coalitions. This is one of the thorniest challenges, right? How do you get people to work together, especially on issues in which they don't have full agreement. Can you build a coalition in which people agree on core values and 80% of the things and then they agree to disagree on certain things and allow the organization, staff and members to advocate for certain things in their name, even if they're not fully on board?
In this process, what did you find when working with some of your more influential or more powerful members that were a bit reluctant? Did you develop ways of either trying to convince them or just learning when you're not going to win that battle and walk away? Over time, how did you figure out how to thread that needle to walk that line while still nudging them forward?
Gloria Bruce: Yeah, it's a great question and one that I considered the fundamental question of my job that I still do, even though I'm in a different space in the housing world. You do sometimes take the losses, right? And then you decide which wins are the most important, which losses we can't bear and which ones can we.
It goes back to that self screening question. If I had an individual member who called and yelled at me because she didn't like something we had done on the local rental housing ordinance, but it was just that one member, I would hear her out. At the end of the day, she eventually decided, you know, EBHO isn't the place for me as a private market rate landlord. I was kind of sorry to see her go, because it wasn't a perspective that we had a lot of, but I wasn't going to change the entire trajectory of the ship for this one private market landlord who didn't like some of the some of the policies that we were espousing.
You brought it back to this issue of values and agreeing 80% of the time. I think in any coalition, and any membership group, you've got to ground it back at the values. There is no way that a collection of several hundred people and organizations is going to agree on everything. There's also a constant tension between whether staff makes the call, or whether members make the call. Sometimes we got that right. Sometimes we didn’t. We’re constantly figuring that one out.
I have always been of the mindset that you catch more flies with honey. That’s my modus operandi, but it’s not everyone’s which is fine. I usually found that if I showed up with openness, respect, courtesy, and listened, that would go a long way. I also found that showing up and doing the work goes a really long way. I know that sounds really obvious, Alex, but I would always be surprised by how many leaders or partners just wouldn't answer an email. It's amazing how much goodwill that generates.
It's basic. If someone's pissed at me and they call or email me, I'm gonna call them back. It all comes down to relationships, it’s the fundamentals of community organizing. Building those relationships, listening to people, pushing back when I really felt that they were not aligned with values, sometimes giving in, sometimes not. There’s no magic to it, or secret sauce, really.
Alex Schafran: Did you feel like you got caught at times in some of the zero sum game politics?
Gloria Bruce: For sure. I think the more zoomed into the hyperlocal level and the more caught up in interpersonal politics and relationships, the harder that would become. We actually ran into that quite a bit in Oakland. We would actually have battles about whether EBHO should fight for funding for permanent affordable housing, or for preservation of properties at risk of displacement, or for immediate relief for people who are unhoused. The fact that that's an or to me was always crazy. Clearly, we need both. It's easy for me to say that now in this chair not having that job anymore.
When you are in the job and you are faced with a budget battle and you have some of your constituents/members saying, “We fought for this particular pot of money, we feel really strongly about this particular pot of money. Gloria, you are giving it away to another group.” That kind of talk always made my blood boil a little bit because first, it's not our money. This is all public money, so it belongs to all of us. Second, just because we fought for or won a particular bond or ballot measure and we helped design the program, does not make it ours. The purpose is for the people.
And on a practical matter, sometimes it really sucked when you worked really hard for something and another political constituency would come and chip away at that thing you worked hard at. It was difficult. But you just have to keep grounded in those values. Sometimes it's going to be ugly. Sometimes you're going to be able to win back the people who think that way by just saying, “I'm going to keep making the argument I'm making which is that we're for all kinds of housing and this housing is for the people.”
Alex Schafran: One of the things that I've enjoyed in our conversations, and you've even said it now, is this acknowledgement that affordable housing is in many ways an industry. We don't like to use the “I” word. So many people are mission driven. Most of us could make more money doing something else. It's clearly important to us.
Some of the behavior you’re talking about, to me, it's classic industry. Maybe I'm just extremely middle aged and I no longer have the blinders on that I think I maybe did when I was younger and an activist about good vs. bad, industry vs non-industry. We're just folks making a living, especially on the professional side. Was that a challenge for you at times of getting people to kind of accept that “Hey, this is an industry and we are in some ways, an industry organization?”
Gloria Bruce: In my 12 years there, I really evolved in my thinking not just with EBHO but with everything else. Be transparent about who you are, what you represent and how far you can go with the moment and how far you really can't. Absolutely, there are components of this work that are industry-led, industry-focused and not even apologetic about that. Nor do I think apologetic is even the right term. As you said, they are a bunch of professionals, they care about this work, but they are professionals making a living doing this work.
You said a lot of us can make more money doing something else. Sure, but some of us are actually compensated just fine for what we do, and have built up a lot of professional credibility and some savings and are homeowners. That's a good thing. I want people to be able to make a living as a houser and have a comfortable life. My counterpoint to that is, the people who are residents services coordinators, case managers and housing organizers should also be able to climb that ladder and make a good salary and 401k. Right now, there's a pretty big gap between those frontline and services positions and the more “professionalized positions,” even though they are all professional positions.
At the same time, I would be really clear with my team about who EBHO was. We were not a tenant driven movement organization, we were a staffed organization of advocates that had members who were professionals in the field. Before I would finalize an offer and hire sometime, I would take them out to coffee and say “I love you, you seem great. I want to be really clear. If what you need to be doing is chaining yourself to city council’s podium, this may not be the organization for you. We are a progressive organization, we are not a radical organization. We will keep pushing, but we're pushing within a system, we are not necessarily dragging that system down. And you have to decide whether that's an okay role.” I eventually formed a team that was comfortable with pushing the system from within the system kind of stance.
Alex Schafran: If anybody out there is a manager, or in my case, a board chair hiring some executive directors, that conversation is how you set people up to succeed. It doesn't matter what the job is, it’s just making sure people are coming in with eyes wide open.
So to continue on the education and learning theme. When we previewed this conversation, you immediately wanted to talk about one of the main things that you're learning in your current role, which is also something that I am learning in my current role. That is not just about homelessness and the unhoused and the ongoing tragedy happening on our streets, but just how separate the homelessness and housing worlds are.
I've seen it many times from folks like Tomiquia Moss, and other leaders who are constantly reminding us that housing and homelessness are not separate issues, they're the same issue. Tell me a little bit about this journey that you're taking in your current work with Crankstart deeper into the world of homelessness policy. What have you learned about the divide? What are the ways that you're seeing perhaps that we're gonna start to undo it?
Gloria Bruce: I'm so glad you asked this question. Just for the housers or non-housers who might be listening, let me just say, people in the housing industry love to think that we have the wonkiest, hardest and most technical field. I'm here to tell you that serving unhoused people can be just as wonky and technical and difficult. It's all difficult folks. We all have our rabbit holes and we love our particular rabbit hole. But it can be really hard to get out of our particular rabbit hole and learn a whole new area.
Part of the issue is that as we discussed before, through necessity, these have become very professionalized areas. We have people who specialize in really particular things. And then it's hard to jump from that to say, “Well, I know how to structure a bond deal to get an affordable housing bill.” That is a very different knowledge set that takes years to accumulate. It's a very different knowledge set from “How do I talk to someone who has been unhoused for 10 years and convince them to come inside to this permanent supportive housing unit and to let go of some behaviors that serve them on the street and that are not going to serve them now that they're living indoors.” Those are both incredibly important skill sets. But of course they're different.
In my current role, I work as a Senior Program Officer at Crankstart Foundation, which is a family foundation in San Francisco. We do a lot of grant making on homelessness issues as well as on housing and I'm really excited to be able to work on and integrate both. Because, as you just said Alex, it's the same problem. It's literally right in the name.
It has been really interesting to see the different trajectories that bring people into homelessness response versus affordable housing. A lot of people come to this work through direct lived experience. But if I were to grossly overgeneralize, I would say other people come through a variety of experiences or professional interests. In the affordable housing industry, there tend to be people with backgrounds in architecture, policy, business, real estate. In homelessness response, it's more common to have a background in social work, substance use recovery, things of that nature. People are coming in from different disciplines, quite often speaking different languages. But I think there's also something deeper.
Many of us do this work because when we walk around Oakland, and we see people living and not thriving outdoors, we are moved by that. We know it's not okay. And we may often feel pretty hopeless and helpless about it. And I personally think it can be easier to focus on the upstream policy than to look at the really hard stuff that's happening right in front of us.
At EBHO, sometimes we would have those fights where people would say to us, “EBHO what are you doing on homelessness?” And we would say, “Well, we're building affordable housing. That's the ultimate end to homelessness. That's the ultimate solution.” Of course it is. And it is right for EBHO to focus on that. At the same time, I think there was a little bit of hesitancy, even on my part, to engage with the really hard realities of people suffering today on the street.
At Crankstart, I am working with organizations who are taking on that whole spectrum. I think a lot of people fundamentally understand the linkages. But I think there is a lot more to be done especially when you're talking about substance use recovery, mental health, physical health, community support. Those things need to be integrated much more fully into the affordable and supportive housing conversation. I think there are a lot of people who are doing that very consciously.
But what I have heard from practitioners in the supportive housing field (housing for very low income people, formerly unhoused people, that also has services attached) is that the housing organizations - Mercy Housing, Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, Resources for Community Development, and many others - they are set up to provide housing and too often the funding structures allow the services to be almost an afterthought or an add on. Housers have said to me, “We don't want it to be this way. It is not working.”
We are experts in building housing, and then you bring people with extremely high needs, move them indoors, and they’re not thriving right away. They are searching for other solutions. And that's where I find hope. That the housers are saying that we have to come together on this.
Alex Schafran: So much of my writing now, and one of the reasons why I'm doing this podcast is really to get us as professional housers to see the truth of our full industry and all of these pieces and to really see the system as it is and not always as it wants to be, sometimes, both on this housing and homelessness divide, and on the affordable versus market rate divide. A lot of times people are caught up in the definition of the space as they dreamed that it would be and not in the lived reality.
It's easy to say that there's no division between housing homelessness. Well, I mean, empirically, there is. And you’re right. How do you work within this system that we have, and recognize that some of the divisions are inherited, that's how they were trained, maybe it's just the limit of their knowledge and what they can do on a day to day basis, because we can't all do these things.
Gloria Bruce: Yeah, that's right. Nobody can do it all and no one should be expected to do it all. So it's not about oh, let's all become experts in each other's thing. That's not even practical. It’s recognizing where your thing may have some limitations and who else you need to partner with to bring in the other things that you need.
Alex Schafran: Is there anything that you're seeing out there in terms of bridging those gaps that are making a difference and giving you hope?
Gloria Bruce: Yeah, I think so. Some of it comes from the work of a lot of organizations, including EBHO, including Housing California with its Residents United program, including a great organization I've started to work with in San Francisco called DISH (Delivering Innovation in Supportive Housing) that are organizations that are first and foremost in their mission, housing focus, but have brought in that resident centered view. They have residents actively involved in the governance and organizing and policy of the organization which means you can't just wonkify it all the time. You actually have people telling you, “This housing is great and I also need XYZ if I'm really going to thrive.”
I think those resident center programs have been really impactful in that work. I also think that a common area of effort, to oversimplify housing developers and homeless services providers, is that we all are united in the truth that housing is the fundamental issue. I spent many years on the board of Alameda County's homelessness collective impact organization, Everyone Home. I was unusual in that group because most of the people on that board ran domestic violence (DV) shelters, or oversaw programs to assess people who are unhoused, and I was the housing policy wonk.
But every single one of those people, even if they were providing DV services or substance use services, they were all like, “Oh, yeah, it's housing.” They all knew that even though their job wasn't necessarily to build affordable housing. I think that's a powerful area to build commonality. Also as I'm seeing what's happening in SF and Oakland, where there is an increasing effort to criminalize and stigmatize people who are living on the streets, affordable housing and homeless services providers are united in their desire to stop and reverse that.
Alex Schafran: One last question of homelessness. I'm really grateful for you coming and talking. It's actually one of the things that inspired the podcast because I knew there was a limit to what I could write in the Substack on my own and I needed to start having conversations with people who knew a lot of things that I didn't know.
You mentioned temporary housing. That's been an issue that I've written about and it's something that's been a cause of tension within the housing and the unhoused community. What does housing first really mean? What's the role of shelter or temporary solutions? Has your thinking about temporary housing evolved over the last year?
Gloria Bruce: I wouldn't say it’s that my thinking has evolved, it’s more that it's clarified. I was already and always of the view that I don't frankly think it's productive for advocates of permanent housing to just say no to temporary housing. And I say that as someone who is very lucky to be permanently housed. I am a homeowner that has incredible privilege. So I speak knowing that I'm not speaking from the perspective of someone who is living outdoors right now who may have a different perspective.
You and I live near a beautiful park in North Oakland that has been a home to varying populations of people for the last few years. There are people living in tents in that park. It's not safe for them. It's not safe for us. It’s not a great situation and to say to those folks maybe in five years that there will be a LIHTC building 20 miles from here that you can apply to and get a unit in. We have to have a better answer than that in the interim.
I do think there is a role for interim housing. I think people are right to be concerned that political forces might be over investing in shelter and interim housing to essentially make the problem of homelessness invisible. Then great, we can't see those folks anymore so let's not worry about permanently housing them. That that is a live worry and I think it is a legitimate worry. When I hear people do things like compare San Francisco to New York and say, “Well, New York doesn't have the homelessness problem that San Francisco does.” Of course it does. New York also has a right to shelter law, which means most of those folks are indoors. They are still unhoused. They are still experiencing homelessness and terrible outcomes, you just can't see as many of them. Is that truly better? It changes the nature of the problem. I'm quoting Gregg Colburn here, I think. It changes the nature of the problem, it doesn't solve the problem. That is a legitimate concern. And I think interim housing has a place, so we have to figure out how to resource all of it. That's my question.
Alex Schafran: This fear of certain housing solutions because of the way that they can be misused by people in power, that applies to every single housing solution. If we're always afraid of negative externalities as opposed to doing it consciously knowing that there will be these negative externalities or other people will assume that people will sadly do the worst with it, and figure out a way to prevent that from happening, I think that's really critical.
All of these things can and have been used for wonderful things and can and have been used for terrible things by people in positions of power. But it can't stop us from having these solutions. I also struggle with any housing solution that flies in the face of what the rest of many of us need on a day-to-day basis.
We have the luxury of both permanent housing, and then temporary housing whenever we need it. I've been fortunate to mostly not need temporary housing because of crisis, but I've been divorced, I've had situations where I've had to move quickly. Temporary housing is a really fundamental part of human existence and has been since we started organizing ourselves in tribes and it will never go away.
We need to integrate [temporary housing] into our planning and our housing system, making it okay and valorizing it again. Not in the same way as we valorize permanent housing but as a real fundamental part of the system and not a sign that the system is somehow inherently wrong. That doesn't mean warehousing poor people in inadequate, unsafe shelters that they don't want to be in and nobody would want to be in. It's finding ways to do this in a way that is safe and legitimate.
Gloria Bruce: I think that’s right. That’s what we should all focus on and understand that there's a range of interventions that are going to work for different people. It's almost as if not everybody experiencing housing security is a monolith. And it's almost as if things aren't 100% good or 100% bad. It's almost as if circumstances change depending on people's needs.
If we really look at it, a tent is temporary housing that may be needed very much by somebody at a particular time. [A tent] may be, in a particular moment, preferable to living in a congregate shelter with a bunch of folks you don't know who might be ill. I understand there's a lot of nuance here. That's why we have to provide a range of options.
So that was really what my time at EBHO was about. It's what my time now at Crankstart is about. It’s about grounding and values, but beyond that, not being dogmatic about the type of housing. You've talked well and written well, and I really appreciated your interview with Courtney Welch about Housing Across the Lifecycle. We need different things at different parts of our lives. And that's true for all of us, regardless of our income or our background.
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