Housing After Dark Episode 19: Louisa Bukiet on Housing for People with Disabilities
About This EpisodeI’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 system to make it more inclusive, and why being thoughtful still really matters when it comes to delivering housing.Housing After Dark is a production of Schafran Strategies, and we’re also the sole sponsor—but that could change if someone in the community reaches out to join us. Come help us keep the podcast going and keep it free and accessible. Especially in these difficult times, we need your support to stay focused on both the present and future of housing.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.This Episode’s GuestInterview TranscriptAlex Schafran: Louisa Bukiet, welcome to Housing After Dark on a very gray and slightly rainy day here in Oakland.Louisa Bukiet: Thanks for having me.Alex Schafran: So you’ve listened to the show, which is really exciting. More and more guests are listeners, and I’m excited to have you be part of what Housing After Dark is about. As you know, we always start with people’s journey into housing. So how did you become a houser?Louisa Bukiet: For me, it started because I liked to build things. In high school and college, I built theater sets. I studied architecture and engineering and started my career doing design and engineering work. I did that for a while, but as I engaged more with our built ecosystem—especially the parts that weren’t working well—and as we got deeper into the housing crisis we’re in now, I realized I wanted to have more say in what got built. I wanted to push back against systems that weren’t working well.So I got a mid-career master’s in real estate development from Berkeley, where I engaged with the Housing Lab and Michelle Boyd—who you’ve had on the podcast—and I learned a lot more about the affordable housing system. That’s when I started working as a developer in affordable housing. It was important to me to not just build housing—I love building things, and buildings are a great thing to build—but also to work on improving how we build housing. Where I work now, at The Kelsey, I found an organization that does both. We build inclusive, affordable, and accessible housing as a developer, but we also work with local municipalities and organizations to give them tools to build the kind of housing that should be built. We also do policy and advocacy work to create the conditions that make disability-forward housing more possible. So part of our DNA as an organization is to improve the system while operating within it.Alex Schafran: Well I’m jealous of many of your skills. I wish I knew more about how to actually build housing and I wish I knew my way around a pro-forma better than I do. I wish I was even just a better DIY person. But it’s exciting, the type of career you’ve built. I know it took a while to get to the point where you’re now at The Kelsey, and it’s just really exciting that you’re there.My first intro to The Kelsey actually came through Vinita Goyal. The Kelsey was being funded by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and Vinita bought my book for everybody. That’s how I first got introduced to your work. I’ve tried to follow you all ever since, and when I saw you ended up there—it’s just great. And now we’re here, on the podcast. So for the listeners, give us a little background on what The Kelsey is and what makes you all so special.Louisa Bukiet: Our organization was founded by our CEO, Micaela. She grew up with her cousin Kelsey, who lived with multiple disabilities. As kids, there was a lot of support. But as they grew into adulthood, Micaela realized that with the right supports, Kelsey could live independently—yet there was no one building that kind of housing. SSo, during her master’s program, she did a deep dive into communities across the U.S. and couldn’t find the kind of housing she believed was needed. That’s when she started The Kelsey to address the problem: to build what we call disability-forward housing. At its core, that’s housing that provides both physical access—across a wide range of needs—and also the supportive services people need to live independently.Alex Schafran: So tell us more about this model. A lot of what Housing After Dark is, at least personally, is about filling in the gaps in what I don’t know. Even though I supposedly know a lot about housing, there are so many areas I’ve had to learn from conversations. And I thought—why not record them? I know others have the same questions.So explain a little more about the housing model at The Kelsey. Where does it sit in the larger world of permanent supportive housing? There’s a lot of specific terminology that matters to folks in the industry—it’s helpful for those of us who aren’t experts to understand.Louisa Bukiet: We say we build disability-forward housing. It’s not a traditional PSH model, but it’s housing with many supports built in across different areas. Our model is based on what they call the triangle of community care. It has three different parts.The first part, and the one that speaks to my history as a physical builder, is physical buildings that meet people’s access needs. That includes things you may traditionally think of like elevators that work, wide hallways so people who are chair users can pass each other in the hallway—physical elements you might see in the building. But there are also elements to support their various access needs that might not be as obvious.So for example, in our project in SF, we have acoustic felt walls in many areas that create a much more comfortable acoustic environment for people where acoustics can be overwhelming or who rely more on auditory signals to navigate physical space than those of us who use our eyes.So there’s a lot of physical design elements that go into our projects. Many of those we’ve now created a resource called our Inclusive Design Standards, which is now available on our website. You can go and download it, and it has 380 different design elements that make a project more accessible. Many of those are physical, but they also go into the other elements that are part of our triangle of community care.So the second point is supportive services—and that’s formal supportive services. All of our projects are staffed with what we call our Inclusion Concierge resident services staff, and these are full-time staff, some of whom live in the buildings, who work with the residents every day to give them the support services they need.So we do some direct service provision, but most of what we do is service connections—so understanding what kind of services they might need, whether that’s paratransit or food assistance, someone coming to help them bathe or do budgeting, meal planning, stuff like that—and making sure they have access to those services and are working with people they like.This is important and different from a lot of PSH because the housing is decoupled from the direct services. That means that if someone wants to change their service provider—if they don’t like the services they’re getting—they’re not going to lose their housing. They can stay in our building and change their services because it’s not completely tied to where they’re living.And the third part of our triangle of community care is a supportive and inclusive community. This is an informal service system. This is knowing your neighbors, this is connecting to the people and place you live. So we do a lot of work to ensure we do community building, and make sure the residents know each other, like each other, and spend time with each other—and as a result, support each other through all sorts of things.Our resident support services staff support this as well through what we call inclusion hours—game nights, movie nights, going to a baseball game together—but the goal is that the community takes on that mantle and that work as well.And we’ve seen this happen in our first project, which has now been open for about a year in San Jose. It’s been really rewarding to see how the residents have loved their community and started to build it on their own. So that takes planning and foresight from a developer, but really it’s about community building.So it’s about the physical structure, the formal supports, and the informal supports that all come together to create an inclusive community.Alex Schafran: Very interesting that the reasons why you separate, in some ways, the creation and management of the physical building from the support system. Staying involved where it's helpful but also providing some freedom. I'm assuming that also involves a lot of partnerships with the service providers on your behalf, correct?Louisa Bukiet: Correct, and our inclusion concierge team forms relationships with service providers in the areas they work, so they make sure they understand what systems are available. This enables them to be the best referral partners to the residents. That's where the concierge service comes from—to understand what's there and connect people to what's needed.Alex Schafran: So, the term "concierge" will sound very fancy to a lot of people. And all of this, to anyone who knows how much things cost, sounds like it costs a lot. Before we pivot into how you deal with the challenge of cost, is it part of Kelsey's mission to provide people with things that may be expensive? You know, things that may be the highest quality of service regardless of whether they themselves have the ability to pay for it?That's one of the things I feel is coming from Kelsey—a certain recognition that certain people deserve dignity and an environment that culturally and physically supports them, even if it requires a bunch of the rest of us to find ways to pay for it.Louisa Bukiet: Yeah, 100%. Our history of housing people with disabilities in this country is very, very dark. Two generations ago, it was "get them out of sight, out of mind," put them in institutions. A generation ago, there was more understanding that people with disabilities should live in community, but it was mostly group homes or institutions-lite. We see The Kelsey as the sort of next iteration of that—a full living within community, full integration rather than separation. That just houses people with disabilities within a larger community; it's building, even within the building, the community is integrated. People with and without disabilities living lives together, supporting each other together. In terms of the cost, yes, our resident services budgets are larger compared to other projects. We believe, both from a design and construction standpoint, that people with disabilities have been told for many generations that they should get what's given to them and be grateful for it, and that's just not the approach we use. We say people with disabilities and people who can't afford housing deserve nice things, and we work to make sure the projects we build are not the bare minimum—that they are fully supportive and have everything people need, as opposed to saying, "Take what you can get because you can't afford it otherwise."Alex Schafran: I think it's a really important aspect of our housing crisis conversation that it takes a lot of courage, in some ways, to defend spending more money on people and especially their housing. You know, I'm with my value-engineering folks every step of the way. There are so many ways we can make things cheaper, but only to a certain point. Good housing costs money. Good services cost money. People deserve to be paid a living wage to provide those services, to provide the construction and doing the work. We're a very wealthy country and a very wealthy society, at least up to this point. Whether we continue to be is a question. There's only so far that we can reduce the cost of providing housing, and there are a lot of other ways we can give people the ability to pay for that housing and pay for quality lives, regardless of how much money they have, what kind of money their partners have, and what kind of resources they bring to the table. There's a certain dignity that we all deserve to live with, and just making it cheap and just making it low cost isn't necessarily that path.Louisa Bukiet: Yeah, we definitely come from an abundance mindset. We don't come from a mindset of doing the bare minimum. If you visit our projects—which I invite you to come see sometime—Alex Schafran: Yeah! We have to make it happen. Maybe we can do a live episode of Housing After Dark at one of the sites.Louisa Bukiet: You'll see that all the finishes are very high-end. It feels beautiful. We work with quality architects. One of my professors in school said, "If you're paying a designer, you might as well pay a good designer." On our first project, we co-developed with a market-rate developer, Sarah Regis. That was purposeful—to understand and come from a market-rate perspective of what it means to create a project that people want to spend money to live in, whether or not the people who are living there are the ones spending the money or are subsidized by public funds in other ways. Our projects' finish level and design quality reflect that approach of abundance and coming out of building a really beautiful project, making sure the people who live there live well together.Alex Schafran: So, let's tap into some of that housing finance knowledge you've acquired in the field and in the classroom. Help us understand the innovative ways you fund this. I know there's some philanthropic work involved; I think Medicaid's involved. We're going to do an entire episode, assuming this isn't all destroyed in the next few months, on health and housing and all the intersections and the ways folks are leveraging CalAIM and Medicaid around the country. I was just at Housing California, and it was sort of the talk of the time, aside from what's going on in the federal government—all the exciting advancements of connecting healthcare and housing, especially financing.Give us a little more of an understanding of how you raised money and how you pay for very nice and not cheap housing.Louisa Bukiet: First, I'm going to talk a little about Medicaid and how that works in our model. It's a really pivotal time for that because there are huge, huge threats, as anyone who's not living under a rock knows, to our Medicaid system. Our policy and advocacy team is working in deep and important ways to defend the system we have. A lot of The Kelsey's model rests on a Supreme Court case—Olmstead—which basically confirmed the right of people with disabilities to live in community and have resources to do so. Talking about when people with disabilities, if they needed care and support, were shoved into institutions, this Supreme Court case said, "No, we can use medical/Medicaid dollars to pay for people to have the support they need in their home, in their community where they choose to live."So, it allows for Medicaid dollars to pay for supports in their homes. It could be an aide to help them bathe. For someone with an intellectual or developmental disability, it could be someone who comes and helps you do budgeting. It can come in a lot of different forms, but basically, we can use Medicaid dollars to support you in your home rather than you needing to be in a hospital or institution to pay for that care.These systems are pivotal to The Kelsey because we house people in community. So, the way we structure our projects, we have 25% of the units reserved for people with disabilities. And the way we define that, in terms of our system, is people who use home and community-based services, which are Medicaid-paid supports within someone's home. Those 25% of our residents need those supports in their home in order to be able to live in The Kelsey. If they don't have those supports, they will have to live somewhere like an institution because they need those supports. It's very pivotal to their lives to be able to have those supports in their homes, and they're paid for through Medicaid.The other 75% of our units are general affordable housing, which means the only qualifier is that you need to be income-qualified. We’re creating an integrated community with people with and without disabilities living together. This structure is reflected in some of our funding sources, including HUD Section 811 programs, which are specifically for people with disabilities—and we make ample use of them. But it’s also critically important for supporting that integrated model we just talked about.Another thing to note: we actually end up with way more than 25% of residents who have disabilities in our projects for a number of reasons. First, our projects are physically designed for people with disabilities, which makes them far more accessible than most housing options out there—so folks with mobility limitations, for example, are more likely to choose our communities. Second, the supportive community culture and values we’ve created attract people who are already part of the disability community and want to celebrate that identity and be part of an affirming environment. And finally, there’s the intersection of disability and income—unfortunately, people with disabilities are disproportionately low-income. So when you’re building deeply affordable housing, you’re already going to end up serving a higher percentage of people with disabilities, simply because of how those demographics intersect.Alex Schafran: I also imagine your buildings are not a bad place to age. You know, most of us end up facing some sort of challenge by the end—if we’re lucky enough to live that long.Louisa Bukiet: Yeah, totally. A lot of elements of our projects are similar to senior housing—both in terms of supports and physical design—so they’re very compatible with aging in place. But what makes it really unique is that seniors who need that type of support don’t have to live in a seniors-only building if that’s not what they want. At the same time, for many people with disabilities who need Medicaid support services, their only options are senior living communities—even if they’re in their 30s or 40s. So we often see younger adults with disabilities living in senior housing just because there’s no other option that provides the support they need. What we offer with The Kelsey is a place where someone in their 30s can get the support they need and live in a community that reflects where they are in life—not be stuck in a model that doesn’t fit them just because of their care needs.Alex Schafran: Yeah, that’s so important. And speaking of support—one thing that’s really exciting to me about your work is how you’re innovating when it comes to operating support. People make a big deal about the capital costs of housing—$500k or a million per unit, and yeah, that’s a challenge—but maybe an even bigger challenge is operating the buildings, especially ones that include significant supportive services. Keeping that support going for the long haul is often the hardest part, and it's usually attached to the person, not the building. You have a very specific strategy for how you use philanthropic dollars. One of the things I write about a lot—and will do more on Substack—is this idea that we should reorganize the housing system so that each piece of the system does what it’s best at. Philanthropy can be a game-changer if it’s deployed strategically. So tell us how you think about that.Louisa Bukiet: Absolutely. One thing I think about all the time is that if we lived in the world we should live in, my job and The Kelsey wouldn’t need to exist. This work would already be integrated into how we do housing. But we’re not there yet, so philanthropy becomes really critical.As a mission-driven organization with a clear theory of change and a strong understanding of the needs we’re addressing, we’re really well-positioned to partner with philanthropic sources. We use philanthropic dollars in a few important ways. First, of course, to support our organization itself. But beyond that, we use it directly in the capital stack of our projects.One of the biggest ways we do that is through pre-development funding. Philanthropic partners and mission-aligned donors help provide the first dollars into a project—money that’s used before the project technically “exists.” It’s risky money. You don’t have the site fully entitled, and the project could fall through. But you need those funds to pay architects, design work, applications—just to even apply for LIHTC or other large public funding. That’s where philanthropy plays a powerful role. It might be a small amount in the total capital stack, but it’s highly leveraged—it unlocks much larger public funding sources.The second major way we use philanthropy is as a permanent source in the capital stack. This is really about operations. Services and staffing are a huge ongoing cost—hiring multiple on-site employees, paying them well, providing consistent support. Normally, a project might have a permanent loan and make monthly payments to a bank. But instead, we use philanthropic dollars to replace part of that permanent loan. So instead of paying interest to a bank, we’re using that same cash flow to pay staff salaries and support services for our residents. That’s how we frame it for our philanthropic partners: you give once, but the impact is long-term. You’re freeing up operating dollars we can use every year to deliver services.Alex Schafran: So much of this is about creative money-moving. It's not quite the mega revolving loan funds we all dream of, but it’s so critical. By the way, how many Kelsey buildings are there now?Louisa Bukiet: We have three projects in development right now. One of them—our San Jose project—opened in April 2024, so we’re just coming up on our one-year anniversary.Alex Schafran: Congrats! Shoutout to the 408.Louisa Bukiet: Our San Francisco project—right across from City Hall—is just about to get our TCO in the next few weeks. So we’ll be moving in residents next month, which is really exciting. And our third project is in Birmingham, Alabama. As an organization, we work nationally—not only with municipalities and partner orgs across the country, but we also want to build our own projects in different places. We’re proving that this model works, and it’s needed in communities far beyond the coasts. The hope is that by demonstrating what’s possible, we’ll inspire others to replicate or adapt the model.We’re not out here trying to compete. The scale of the housing crisis is too big for that. Instead, we want to be a model that other people can pull from—whether that’s borrowing elements of what we do or replicating it entirely. That’s why we have free design standards and other open-source resources on our website. We want people to take this and run with it.Alex Schafran: I love that. Especially the work in Alabama—there’s something powerful about a California–Alabama connection right now. So, looking ahead, what’s next for The Kelsey model? Where do you see this going?Louisa Bukiet: We see it as something that can be applied nationwide. A big part of how we do that is through co-development. First, because we’re still a relatively young org and sometimes need a more established partner to access funding. But also because housing development is deeply local. You need partners who understand the politics, permitting process, and community context of wherever you’re working.So we always partner with local developers and mission-aligned organizations. In San Jose, we partnered with Sares Regis Group and with Devine & Gong. In San Francisco, we partnered with Mercy Housing California—who have been amazing collaborators. They run property management and resident services, and we co-develop and co-own the building. In Alabama, we’re working with Gulf Coast Housing Partnership. They bring the local knowledge and relationships that are essential.And the hope is that our partners come away from these projects with new tools. Mercy Housing, for example, now has a deeper understanding of what it means to build disability-forward housing. They might not do a full Kelsey model next time, but maybe they incorporate more universal design or accessibility in all their future work.This also speaks to why we don’t provide all the services ourselves. We’re not the service provider. That part of the work requires deep local networks of professionals and care providers. So, just like with development, we approach services in a modular, partnership-driven way. That’s what allows the model to scale without us needing to become a giant centralized institution.Alex Schafran: Right. It’s not like software, where you can go from two users to a million. Housing has some economies of scale, but it’s a very different game. Scale is hard in this industry.Louisa Bukiet: Yeah, I used to work in mechanical engineering. When you're designing something that’ll be injection-molded, your design decisions are totally different depending on whether you’re making 10 of something, 1,000, or 100,000. Housing is the same way—how you think about your model depends on your scale goals. For us, since we want to work nationally, we have to design for scale from the start. And again, our abundance mindset tells us we don’t have to do this alone. We’re not in competition. We want to support anyone who wants to create more accessible, inclusive housing.We’ve worked as owners' reps, helped community orgs figure out how to develop land they own, advised cities on accessibility policy. Whatever angle we take, the goal is the same: inclusive, accessible, affordable housing where people with disabilities can live and thrive.Alex Schafran: So let’s talk a little bit about this transformational work that you do. I love that your vision goes beyond being just another nonprofit housing developer. You’re really trying to transform the housing industry. That’s one of the reasons I was so excited to have you on the show—not just to learn more about the specifics of housing for people with disabilities and how it’s different from Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH), but because you and The Kelsey are among the few organizations in the housing world that are talking about changing how we do this work. It’s not just about policy; it’s about fundamentally rethinking how we operate. And I don’t think that gets emphasized enough in housing. So let’s dig into some of the specific ways you're thinking about doing that.One of them is design standards, right? You’ve created this new set of inclusive design standards—adaptable, spreadable, and usable by others. Tell us more about that.Louisa Bukiet: Yeah, part of our work is really about field building—building the broader field of disability-forward housing and creating resources that anyone can use. Our design standards were developed with our architecture partners at Mikiten Architecture—shoutout to Eric Mikiten—and we spent a lot of time making sure they’re practical, flexible, and accessible.It’s a self-certification process, kind of like LEED or other green building frameworks. But even if a team doesn’t want to go through the full certification process, the standards are still a super helpful tool. They cover accessibility at every level of a project—from site selection (because access to transportation is huge for people with disabilities) all the way to unit layout and building operations. That last one is key—how you run the building matters just as much as how it’s built. For example, we talk about things like our Inclusion Concierge program as part of creating an accessible experience, not just an accessible building.Each standard notes what kinds of access needs it supports—mobility, sensory, cognitive, etc.—and often also links to other benefits like sustainability, safety, or even biophilia. They’re open-source and available for anyone to use. For example, the City of San Antonio took our standards and adapted them into their own. That’s what we hope for—we’re not proprietary about this, we want other people to take them and run with them.And many design firms we work with have adopted them into their own workflow. They’ll do their standard schematic design, and then pause to go through our design standards and ask, “Where can we go further? Where can we do more for accessibility?”We also talk a lot about the curb cut effect—the idea that features designed for people with disabilities benefit everyone. Curb cuts are a classic example. They’re essential for wheelchair users, but they also help parents with strollers, delivery workers, travelers with luggage—pretty much everyone. That’s true of many accessibility features. They’re not burdens; they’re upgrades.Alex Schafran: Totally. It reminds me of how green building started—it was seen as something only for environmentalists, but now, you step into a LEED-certified building and it just feels better. The air is cleaner, the lighting is more natural—it’s more pleasant. We often forget that these improvements, even when designed for a specific need, have huge spillover benefits. That’s an argument for building better-quality housing for everyone. And yeah, we’ve sometimes seen standards introduced without proper funding or support, and that’s a challenge—but it’s a solvable one. We don’t have to shrink our ambitions just because the systems haven’t caught up yet.Louisa Bukiet: Exactly. And I want to talk about cost for a second because it always comes up. People constantly ask us: “What does it cost to make a project accessible? If we follow your standards, what’s the added cost?”The truth is, if you design for accessibility from the beginning, it doesn’t have to cost much more. It’s just like the early days of LEED—when sustainability is part of the plan from day one, it’s way more cost-effective. Sure, some things do add cost. If you’re building a four-story walk-up and you add an elevator, yes, that’s a significant cost. But if you’re already building an eight-story building that needs an elevator anyway, then making sure it’s reliable and large enough for accessibility is just good design.And so many features are low or no cost if you’re intentional. One of my favorites is wayfinding. In our San Jose building, each floor is color-coded and has an associated animal. So the elevator buttons are colored, and when the doors open, the walls match. If someone lives on the red floor, and the doors open to blue, they know they’re in the wrong place. It’s a small thing, but it makes a huge difference in helping people feel safe and oriented. And it costs basically nothing—you’re painting anyway, you’re doing signage anyway. It’s just about being thoughtful.Alex Schafran: I love that you used the word “thoughtful.” I think it’s one of the most important concepts when we talk about housing. And yes, sometimes “nuance” gets used as a delay tactic, but real thoughtfulness—that intentionality—can make all the difference between a building that works and one that doesn’t.Quick question before we shift to systems change: I imagine this is all easier to implement in new construction. Are there ways your design standards can be used for rehab or retrofitting existing buildings?Louisa Bukiet: Great question. So right now, our standards are definitely written with new multifamily construction in mind. But because the standards are broken down by category—site, units, building, operations—many of them can be applied to rehabs.In the future, I’d love to develop an addendum focused specifically on rehab. We have so much older housing stock that’s deeply inaccessible, especially stuff built before the ADA. So retrofitting is critical.For example, we recommend putting blocking in the walls for grab bars during construction. That doesn’t mean you install grab bars in every unit—but adding the blocking costs very little (a piece of 2x6 and a couple minutes of labor). And it means that later on, if a resident needs a grab bar, you’re not ripping out drywall. It’s cheap and easy to install, and it supports that unit’s accessibility across its lifespan. In rehab, though, adding that after the fact can be very expensive.But other features—like wayfinding—translate easily to rehabs. And I’ll say this too: our San Jose project is right in line, cost-wise, with average construction in the area. And our San Francisco project is actually lower cost. So we’re building fully accessible, service-rich housing—and not spending more than others in the same markets. And honestly, I’d argue we’re delivering a better product.Alex Schafran: So that feels like the perfect segue into what will take us home—which is the ways you’re thinking about transforming the affordable housing ecosystem. One of the systems changes you’ve been exploring is around income compliance. From The Kelsey’s perspective—you’ve learned a lot, made an impact, and now you’re expanding nationally—what are the shifts we need to be talking about more, whether for people with disabilities, people who aren’t, or people who aren’t yet? What are the kind of ecosystem changes we need to be talking more about?Louisa Bukiet: This is such a good place to wrap up because, as I said at the beginning, one of the reasons I got into this work is because I wanted more of a say in how things happen. I’m someone with strong opinions, and I wanted to make sure that—even if we’re not yet living in the world we want—we’re actively building toward it.The affordable housing ecosystem has a lot of systems in place, necessary systems in place that have been engrained for decades and there are a lot of really good people working to make sure that people get housed. Such important and vital work. And there are a lot of systems that are detrimental to that goal that have just become engrained.So we approach everything from a resident centered perspective. Is every choice we’re making the best for the people who are going to live in this building and this is the framework I use when we’re making decisions and development is a series of thousands of thousands of small and large decisions over years and years. So if every decision we think about is the best for the resident, the end result is a much better product.One example of that is the income compliant system which we work within. It’s a complex, lengthy and outdated system that puts a huge burden on the low resource community who are trying to getting into affordable housing, There’s a lot of paperwork they have to fill out, non accessible systems that they have to engage in order to get into the housing they need and the yare at a disadvantage because we are the ones that are providing housing and they are the ones who need it. There’s an actual hierarchy there. They have to work within the system because they have no other choice.So while this is not The Kelsey’s main mission, while we’re leasing off our buildings, we’re constantly asking “how can we improve this compliance system for our residents to make it less challenging for them, to make it less of a burden on them” One example here is accepting digital payments for their application fee. We’re in 2025, it feels like an obvious thing, but there are ways people have done things and it usually includes a check or money order, which seems inaccessible for someone that is low resource to spend more of their precious time to get a physical piece of paper and bring it to a physical place. When we have ways of accepting digital payments. Again it’s a small piece of this entire long system, but if we can constantly be asking how we can make it better, how can we make it easier to create a better system.I do want to shout out another housing company Pronto Housing, which is creating software to tackle this issue.Alex Schafran: As someone who is now part of this larger social housing conversation in California where we are thinking about what we can learn from Vienna and Singapore and various other places. The AMI madness and income verification and income limits is truly challenging and it’s sadly a problem that comes from both the Right and the Left. Both sides are so obsessed with determining who is deserving of a very small pie, talk about scarcity mentality as opposed to an abundance mentality, and saying “Hey in Vienna, if you earn less than 200% of AMI you’re in. Show us one time and you're in” And we’re not going to worry so much if occasionally one person doesn’t really need the help and we’re going to use all the money and time and headache we save to actually house people. What a revolutionary idea. Oh yeah and accept digital payments.There are so many times where we in this country feel like it’s 1972 not just politically, which it now feels like it’s 1922, that it makes me sad. Including having to pay cash for a coffee at Amtrak, it’s like come on, people.There’s two more that are on your list, one is about risk mitigation and lawyers fees and the other is about building code requirements. I know I’m going to get a cheer from some of my audience about the single stair. Give us a brief run down.Louisa Bukiet: As an organization that is working towards constantly making this ecosystem better, we think about different ways of approaching this. One of my colleagues has been doing a little bit of work around how we as an organization can advocate for single stair reform which does play into accessibility. We have these layers of building requirements that have built up over time. Each one had good reasons to be there but what we end up with are these heavily regulated industries that are an amalgamation of lots and lots of requirements which at the end of the day add costs to the project which means at the end of the day, that fewer housing units get built.One of those is requiring two staircase which really forces a specific layout for projects in our area. If you’re required two stairs, four egress, it means you have to have a double loaded corridor. It can be L shaped or square space but it has to be a double loaded corridor. If you remove that requirement, it makes it easier to have an elevator and a staircase in a building. We rely on elevators, just because it is incredibly important for so many people to have access to an elevator. Elevators are expensive, we know that . But, if we can remove some of these other requirements like two staircases it means we can fit an elevator building into so many more sites. Especially if we’re building infill in cities. The sites that are available aren’t necessarily going to have easy layouts. Removing that requirement is going to open up so many possibilities of building accessible projects across so many more different places which at the end of the day means that more people can live in more accessible housing.The other one we touched on was just risk mitigation. Again there’s so many costs that get added to projects for risk mitigation that are required by a lot of public sources. So if there’s public money coming in thre’s huge amounts of added costs to a project in terms of the number of lawyer that needs to look at a project, the paperwork involved when you’re putting together a capital stack that’s seven different sources, each of those sources has to work well with every other sources. You sometimes have competing needs between different requirements on different sources. All of these requirements add up to create cost on a project, it literally adds dollars. When people are surprised that affordable housing costs as much as market rate housing to build, that’s always a shocking thing when people realize that. And they’re like it’s going to be cheaper finishes and all that, and like I already talked about, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case but part of the costs comes from enormous amounts of paperwork that has to be done to make those work.What can we do to reduce that? Because at the end of the day it means that you can build projects for less money which means you can build more projects. The public funding that goes into the project will then go farther as well cause a lot of the funding that is going into the projects is public funding, it’s fundings from cities it’s funding from the state it’s LIHTC funding. If those dollars could be spent to build more units, more people would be housed. It’s in everyone’s best interest.Alex Schafran: Absolutely. This is ultimately one of the true lessons of the social housing system that works is the way that the public sector is willing to take on that risk. Willing to de-risk and use its power to re-risk projects so that it becomes way less risky for everyone else in the food chain and if something goes haywire that means okay, the public sector is on the hook, but it’s so much better than the system we have right now where it costs so much money because the public sector is constantly trying to de risk itself because it’s afraid of a scandal it’s afraid of that thing going wrong. We have such a fearful system built up after years and years that we can’t do anything. Right now I'm following a teacher housing project in Marin county that is at risk of falling apart because of questions around the public sector's appetite for risk. It’s a super innovative project, that could not only be impactful on its own, but a little like it’s kelsey, in a different model, but a model and a pathway to a radical transformation of how we do affordability and how we do affordable housing in particular ways in which different types of entities (in a little bit like your buildings) can have different owners of different units. One of the challenges in affordable housing is we have units that are alla often owned by the same landlord and you have people with a lot of different needs and it may be a better system to have leases on multiple units from specialist organizations that have special clients and not necessarily have everyone in the same boat. But again it’s all about risk and that’s what the Europeans do better. They’re willing to use the power of the state to absorb that risk. We push that all onto the nonprofit and private sector. A lot of that goes into lawyers fees driving up the cost of housing, and that’s maybe one really expensive thing that we don’t need in all our housing, is a ton of lawyer fees. Shoutout to all my lawyer friends out there, there’s a lto of other work that we can get you to do in affordable housing without layering fees onto top on the projects which again are really expensive and I hope you’d appreciate that i’d rather spend that money on a really big powerful elevator that's not going to break down and maybe even ahs a backup generator cause guess what, someone in a wheelchair isn’t going to get out of a five story building down your first staircase or the second extra staircase. They’re getting down in the elevator and it’s got to work.Louisa Bukiet: This is a podcast so you can’t see me but i’ve been nodding this whole time.Alex Schafran: Well thank you so much for coming on this show. These are difficult times for so many of us in housing, I made a pledge at the beginning of 2025 that we would toggle back and forth between episodes that really get into what’s happening in Washington and the crisis that is being produced by the current systems and other episodes that are really focused on solutions that we had before this crisis that we’re going to continue to have after this crisis, and we’re going to continue to push forward and continue to do the work that you’re doing. You were doing great work before, you’re continuing to do great work now, and I have faith that The Kelsey will be here no matter what happens with our federal government or our state government or local government or any other aspect. Really appreciate you for being on the show and all the work you do at The Kelsey.Louisa Bukiet: Thank you so much for having me.If you liked this post, consider supporting us by hitting like, subscribing, or sharing. Get full access to Where We Go From Here at alexschafran.substack.com/subscribe
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