LEILA FADEL, HOST:
As we hear a lot about divisions in this country, let's listen to a moment of unexpected connection. It comes from a recent conversation in San Francisco. As part of our series, Seeking Common Ground, member station KQED brought together a small group of people to talk about one of California's most vexing issues - housing affordability. California has some of the highest property values in the country and the largest share of unhoused residents. In the room for this conversation was a man struggling to afford housing and a woman who is a landlord.
NANCY BRIER: My name's Nancy Brier (ph). I have four properties. The biggest property that we have is six units. So, you know, really small-time landlords. We sort of know all of our tenants. You know, so I've been doing this for 30 years now and have really seen every kind of housing situation that you can think of.
LUIS EDWIN SANCHEZ: Luis Edwin Sanchez (ph), born and raised in San Francisco. I'm 62 years old, journeyman union carpenter, retired. I had to take early disability retirement a couple years ago and had a pretty decent life until I got hurt (laughter), and things changed dramatically. But, yeah, so I know what the people who are sleeping on the city streets in tents right now are going through because I've been there - three times. And I'm not happy to say that it's a very good possibility it may happen again. I'm currently on the Section 8 waitlist for a voucher. It'll probably take me another 10 years, if I live that long. I mention that because of how huge the need is.
BRIER: Can I say one quick thing? My last Section 8 tenant just moved, and that family was in this unit for nine years. And I'm very happy that we were able to provide them with nice housing for all that time. But I swear, when that family moved out, I could hear the angels singing. I have another tenant I've had for over 20 years. The piece of paper that we have with our rental agreement is one side of one page. And for the Section 8 family that we housed, I have boxes and boxes and boxes of papers. It was insane. So, you know, maybe the reason that you can't find a Section 8 house, which I wish you could, is because the system makes it too hard for somebody like me to give it to you.
SANCHEZ: It is extremely stupid, the way the Section 8 system is set up, because now I know what a person like you, a smaller landlord, has to deal with. Well, hello, it's the same thing for us, too (laughter). It was no fun for me to have to fill out a stack this big of paperwork just to get into this stupid place that I'm in right now. I was homeless at the time that I was going through all this. So I was walking around with a backpack with a whole heck of a lot of my belongings, and it weighed about 50 pounds.
Not only did she want me to fill out a stack this thick of paperwork, but she also wanted this document. She also wanted that document, this. And I said, lady, I'm homeless. Me and the gentleman that I'm roommates with right now, literally, for about a whole week, had to run all over San Francisco getting all these different documents and this, that and the other - proof of this, proof of that. It was a pain in the rear end, and it needs to be streamlined. Wave a magic wand. Build a heck of a lot more housing. And make sure that that housing, once it's built, can be afforded by people who are poor.
BRIER: If I could wave the magic wand, I would want the government to make renting housing less risky for small-time landlords. How can we provide housing that isn't crazy expensive? And one of the ways to do that is for somebody like Ed not to have to fill out a phone book worth of forms and for me, as the landlord, not to have to fill out an entire document box of forms. There could be more elegant solutions that we could all agree with and that would result in somebody having a better place to live, the landlord having a better experience and the community being more at peace.
FADEL: That was Nancy Brier and Ed Sanchez of San Francisco from a conversation hosted by KQED's Ki Sung and Erin Baldassari. This story is part of a partnership with Cortico. That's a nonprofit affiliated with MIT that uses AI tools to identify shared themes in conversations. In keeping with NPR policy, AI played no role in the recording or editing of what you just heard. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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