Today’s episode is one that goes back to a core motivation for starting this podcast in the first place. One of the reasons I love housing is because it is so complex. Never in a million years could someone be a true expert on the full housing system, in part because there will always be new wrinkles. This doesn’t mean it can’t be a goal to learn as much as possible about all the corners of housing, and this podcast has always been about giving me as the host and you as the listener a chance to ...
Sep 30, 2025•54 min
Of course all of our episodes are special, but this one is extra meaningful because our amazing editor and producer Tina Lee is stepping out from behind the mic for the first time, joining us in a new role as special correspondent. Tina was an attendee earlier this summer at the big social housing festival in Dublin, Ireland, hobnobbing with an international array of interesting people with generally interesting ideas about housing, including a few Housing After Dark alumni. Today, we are diggin...
Aug 23, 2025•1 hr 3 min
Today’s guest, Dr. Magda Maaoui, is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Researcher affiliated with the Joint Center for Housing Studies. Prior to that, she was an Urban Planner and Research Associate at the Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme (APUR), which is a key regional planning organization in greater Paris, where Magda grew up. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Magda for more than a decade, ever since she was an intern at our own Bay Area region...
Jun 10, 2025•1 hr 5 min
In today’s episode we dive deeper into what is happening to our federal housing system. If you’re like me, you know enough about federal housing to get in trouble but not enough to follow every twist and turn of HUD, FHA, Fannie, Freddie, and Ginnie and many more. Thankfully, today’s guest, Ethan Handelman, does know enough and does follow it. His regular LinkedIn posts about what is being dismantled, paused, canceled or attacked in the federal housing world have been a lifesaver. Ethan was Depu...
Apr 26, 2025•1 hr 3 min
I’m super excited about today’s episode because it’s one of those episodes where I’m learning about something I should know more about: housing for people with disabilities. Today’s guest, Louisa Bukiet, is a Housing Development Manager at The Kelsey, a super innovative organization based in San Francisco that's trying to speed up the development of supportive, inclusive, community housing. Join us for a wide-ranging conversation about The Kelsey’s work, transforming the affordable housing syste...
Apr 25, 2025•55 min
Jonathan Fearn is someone I’ve gotten to know slowly over the past five years the old fashioned way — by seeing him at housing events. Jonathan is a Senior Vice President of Real Estate Development at Oakland’s own Signature Development Group, where his day job is to build buildings, most of which are for people to live in. But for me, and I imagine many of you listening in, Jonathan is someone known for what he calls his “extracurriculars” — serving on public committees and non-profit boards ac...
Nov 01, 2024•54 min
Shanti Singh is the legislative director for Tenant’s Together, a statewide Coalition of local tenants rights organizations and one of California’s most important voices for tenants rights and housing protections. Shanti herself is one of the most interesting people I know in this business, someone with a diverse background — including time in finance — who understands both the technical and political side of housing. She’s an intellectual and an activist, and someone who I have learned I can tr...
Oct 29, 2024•1 hr 8 min
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 Califo...
Aug 30, 2024•50 min
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, wea...
Aug 23, 2024•51 min
Today’s guest, Nikki Beasley, is someone I first came across during a pandemic era webinar. I listen to a lot of webinars about housing and Nikki, the Executive Director of Richmond Neighborhood Housing Services, is a frequent contributor to the world of housing ideas. If you haven’t heard her, she’s great live, but her intelligence and charisma are not the only reasons why I am a card carrying member of her fan club. She also keeps it real, and too often she’s the only person in a housing space...
Aug 07, 2024•53 min
Today’s episode is about housing innovation, or really about the women and the organizations who help support innovation wherever it happens. My guests, Jenna Louie from Ivory Innovations and Michelle Boyd from Terner Labs, work to identify, nurture, support, and build a wide range of innovative approaches to housing. They support new companies, new orgs, new people, new policies and new ideas. They help others help themselves, and roll up their sleeves and build stuff directly. They also were a...
Jul 19, 2024•51 min
Welcome to the latest edition of Housing After Dark. I’m your host, Alex Schafran. Today’s guests, Jill Shook and Phil Burns from Making Housing and Community Happen (MHCH) in Pasadena, came to me by either happenstance or divine intervention, depending on your perspective. Jill is the co-founder of MHCH, someone with a background in ministry who became a houser because people in her community needed her to be. She’s the editor of Making Housing Happen: Faith Based Affordable Housing Models and ...
Jul 12, 2024•52 min
Maeve Elise Brown came into my housing life in 2017. I was working with Steve King at Oakland Community Land Trust and Anna Cash, who is now at the City of Berkeley, on what we called Housing Vulnerability Analysis . This was our attempt to develop a way of seeing housing in a city through a simple question: how vulnerable was any given resident to being displaced (for whatever reason). One thing we discovered in this analysis was that low income homeowners were some of the most vulnerable peopl...
Apr 15, 2024•49 min
Welcome to Housing After Dark, I’m your host, Alex Schafran. Today’s guest is Warren Logan, a planner and activist who has worked for city agencies on different sides of the Bay. He is now a candidate for political office, specifically of Oakland City Council to represent District 3, right down the street from where I live. Warren is one of the most thoughtful people when it comes to how our public sector operates, how transportation and housing fit together, and he backs up this thoughtfulness ...
Mar 05, 2024•58 min
Welcome to an extra special insurance edition of Housing After Dark. I’m your host Alex Schafran. One of the goals of this podcast is to shine light on the full extent of our housing system, pushing beyond the issues that folks think of as “housing.” Today we dig into one of the most important ingredients in housing: insurance. Joining me today are two people from very different corners of the insurance and housing question: Justin Dove, a longtime insurance broker and Area Executive Vice Presid...
Jan 23, 2024•56 min
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 O...
Dec 03, 2023•53 min
In today’s episode, we feature one of the most important sectors in housing, housing journalists. I think it’s safe to say that most people, even semi-grizzled academics turned housing professors like yours truly, get most of their news about what’s happening in housing through journalists. Many of us are also sources for journalists or work for organizations with comms teams trying to influence what gets written and recorded. There has also been a noticeable uptick in the quantity of housing jo...
Oct 15, 2023•48 min
Welcome to a special birthday edition (my birthday specifically) of Housing After Dark. We’re honored to have inaugural Bay Area Housing Finance Authority Director, Kate Hartley in our virtual studio. I’m a houser through and through, but I’ve spent the past 15 years studying regional government in the Bay Area. It’s very exciting to see housing getting more and more attention at the regional level and more support from local governments who realize that we can only do certain housing things (li...
Sep 14, 2023•54 min
Where We Go From Here is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. About This Episode Welcome to a special episode of Housing After Dark. The original episode was recorded in May at a webinar sponsored by my Institute for Metropolitan Studies at San Jose State University (SJSU), SJSU’s Institute for Human Rights, and SV@Home. The event featured a conversation with three of my favorite housers in the Bay including Tomiqu...
Aug 13, 2023•51 min
Every episode of this podcast is special and everybody who appears on the podcast means something to me, either personally or through the work that I do. But this episode is a bit different because for the first time it features work that I'm doing. Not work that I've done in my past, but work that is a current part of Schafran Strategies , my consulting firm, and a partnership that we have been building with California Community Builders for the last year and a half. The subject of the report [...
May 25, 2023•54 min
I still remember the first time I heard Emeryville Councilmember and Vice Mayor Courtney Welch speak about housing across the lifecycle. I’m used to hearing elected officials talk about housing, often in really inspiring ways, but it’s not often that I feel like they are pushing us housers more than we are pushing them. Welch was a relatively new elected official from a small but important city that I have studied for years, pushing housers in an area that has frustrated me for a long, long time...
Mar 07, 2023•1 hr 7 min
It’s hard to overstate how important the Central Valley is to the past, present and future of California. The Valley is urban, suburban and rural California all at once. The Valley is a place where we can truly see the amazing infrastructure and terrifying contradictions that are literally and figuratively built into our state. As someone from Northern California, the Center of that center is the Northern San Joaquin - Merced, Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties, places like Patterson, Manteca, ...
Mar 07, 2023•54 min
