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: our tendency to fight over the right kind of housing to be built, rather than embracing the fact that many, if not most of us, will want and need very different housing at different times in our lives.

We need a housing system that enables us to change, to grow up, to grow older, to combine families and households and sometimes separate them. This is something I almost never hear from housing leaders and here was an elected official showing a housing group a simple truth we often ignore.

It turns out that Councilmember Welch isn’t just an elected official: she’s a professional houser, someone who has worked across the board in our field - in policy, social work, administration, and communications. She’s worked for a truly diverse set of housing organizations, from one of Alameda County’s continuum of cares providers working to assist people struggling with housing instability and homelessness to the Bay Area Community Land Trust and her current work with the California Housing Defense Fund. She’s also someone who’s not shy about sharing her own challenges in housing and struggles with housing instability, someone who knows what it is to look for housing assistance in the Bay Area which seems to be getting more expensive by the day.

It also turns out she’s prepared to push us in a lot more than just housing across the lifecycle, no matter how important that is. She’s one of the most complete housers I have ever met, someone who tries to see the whole system, and figure out ways she can make it better no matter which of her many hats she’s wearing.

It’s an honor to have her on the second episode of Housing After Dark, the Where We Go From Here podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

To read the transcript of this podcast, please visit Where We Go From Here.

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