This is my free form talk on my experience from the housing summit held by CHAT this last week. there are things in this audio that are probably not accurate and will defiantly be offensive to some people … my intent is to break this up into separate topics … I remind you this is the RAW material please do not share or promote this recording thank you …

Scotty Franzyshen · Scotty's raw thoughts ...

Thoughts ~ Scotty Franzyshen

Okay, I’m going to try this this way. I’m going to record it. That way, I have the audio as well as possibly being able to just transcribe it through the ChatGPT interface. I’m gonna continue to talk about the conference, and I’m gonna run through the itinerary, and then just give my thoughts of each section as it took place.

In the morning, I didn’t arrive until probably just before the opening, but I did get to meet some people in the initial beginning, and I just wanted to point them out. The one was the Beeline representative, very helpful, very informative, and also getting the word out about the possible route changes and service changes that are going to come in the next cycle for them. I’ll touch more about that soon. But right now, I’m going to just concentrate on the conference.

The other person I wanted to mention was the Habitat for Humanity, again, very informative, very helpful. Another place I might be looking to put some of my good is volunteering with them. I mean, in the upcoming year, we’ll see. I also spoke to Safe Space and their director, and director of communications Ashley Michelle, were present, and their booth was there in form. They had a bunch of information as well. They’re looking to kind of move out of the grassroots nonprofit arena into what I’m considering to be more of the structured, typical, everyday nonprofit that is in this “nonprofit complex” here in Chico.

That’s curious to me, but, like Moo said, it’s a money, so if you’re gonna do good, you need money, and if you can’t pay your people even a bare minimum, then you’re gonna have a hard time getting people to … commit to what needs to be done, at least not with the quantity of the people That are going to be in the trenches doing the work, because even now as I go through these lightning rounds, I’ll share some of the areas that I saw the people that are actually doing the job are feeling the stress.

The keynote speaker Molly Calhoun, she’s a definite natural teacher. That’s obvious by the way she presented herself on stage. Very articulate, very well, easy to follow, I could say. Even though she jumped around a lot, I could still keep up with her. Let’s say, and the only thing I would criticize, but I’d say this about almost all speakers is too much about them, too much about what she did and things, and I understand that’s in trying to lay down a foundation of why they think the way that they do. They want to express, how they got there, and that’s important. But I think it also kind of gets into the ego side of thing of look what I’ve done, what have I done, what I’ve done, and not so much about where it applied in the talk, but otherwise very informative, kind of a very brief. And she made a point about that in the beginning of the history. I mean, we’re talking hundreds of years and or hundreds years in a short period of time. She didn’t have much time to speak to cover everything. The brief was very brief, let’s say, but it did cover the foundations,

Charles from the North State Shelter Team put out in his newsletter. This week, a quote that she had up on the screen. It says, “Unless we truly center our housing policy around those historically and contemporarily most impacted, the cycle will continue.” And he nails it. He nails it. This cycle is just that it is a it is a revolving door system that is keeping people in homelessness, and I can’t say it any other way. I’m not saying that they’re obstructing the other issues, which are the most obvious, and that is housing. I mean, let’s face it. There are mathematically just not enough homes, doors to put people behind, and that needs to change. And it needs to change on a on a multitude level of things.

I started touching on the arena, the governmental side of things, and it’s really interesting to me that we spend all this money to draw up these plans, and then to actually have an outcome from that plan is next to zero. I mean, it blows my mind that the government spends all this money to put together all of these reports that tell us we need to build housing, and then at the end of the cycle, all they do is they make another report that comes out that says we need to build more housing, and very little to no housing was built through those cycle between those two cycles, if any, in some markets.

There is a huge problem that’s not being addressed, and it’s the availability of housing. Then let’s look at the availability of housing. There are a multitude of houses. Now I keep telling ChatGPT that there’s a multitude, and it keeps scaling me back and telling me, “Oh, it’s not that many, but it is that many. In Chico alone, I’m estimating over 3000 properties. Now, that might be single family, that might be multi-unit, that might be a little bungalow, but either, but there’s still about 3000 properties in Chico proper that are vacant, and the only ordinance that the city has in place for vacancy is that you got to keep the yard looking nice. You got to keep the outside looking good. It doesn’t matter what the inside looks like, as long as esthetically outside, it’s not inhabiting or hurting the image of the neighborhood, and I can tell you that ain’t. I mean that does not include boarding up windows,

I mean, I don’t know. There is a mount that needs to be addressed, and a lot of those properties are not vacant because somebody’s in dire straits and can’t afford to repair and bring the house back to usefulness. It’s because they’re in some portfolio somewhere in some housing portfolio, and it might be an individual’s portfolio or it might be a corporation that’s never even seen the property, and doesn’t even know where Chico, California is.

And then let’s look at the Airbnbs now, even a smaller percentage. But this is a college town, and there is a percentage of these properties that have been taken out of the market and exclusion excluded, just for this kind of purpose, short-term rentals.

And again, I’m not looking to socialize housing in the sense that I want to take over all housing. I just want there to be some form of community-owned housing that maybe can translate into individual ownership at some point transitional, and we can work with Habitat and we can work with other groups. But Habitat wants to build single-family homes. They don’t want to build tiny homes, and and how do you get around, auxiliary dwelling units or ADUs on an ownership basis if they’re sitting on someone else’s property?

We definitely need to have some diverse, multiple option solutions that that need to account for everybody’s needs, because I mean right now we’ve got an an 84. I mean we got a lot of people, but in particular we’ve got one individual. She’s 84, sharp as a tack, mentally in pretty gosh darn good shape for being 84. Who is living at the Torres shelter is getting very little to no sleep a night is in a in a state of constant fear. This is not some way that we should be treating our fellow citizens. At 84, we should be, caring better for this individual. Personally, I’d like to see us immediately getting her into her own situation, whether it’s a hotel room, just something where she can feel like she can lock that door and fall asleep and gets a good, sound sleep. Right now, she’s in a dormitory, surrounded by hundreds of other people who, as soon as she falls asleep, go through her belongings.

Something in between, living on the street and living in Chico Torres shelter needs to be a better option for an 84-year-old woman who doesn’t have a drug problem, who isn’t medically incapable of caring for herself, who just wants some independence and wants to have some kind of a freedom. So her biggest fear is that someday that they’re going to just show up and lock her into some home that she’s never going to be able to leave and get out of. And this woman needs to get out. This is her life. She needs to be out in the community. She needs to be interacting with these people. That’s what keeps her young. At 84, she’s amazing, and we should, as a community, step up and help her.

And she’s only one of several that people like Charles from North. Oh, drawing a blank on the the program that Charles is running. I should keep my notes in front of me. North State Shelter Team, I think it is. Anyways, I’m gonna just keep moving on. Has tiny houses and options to be able to put those in into places quickly and fast, and we can have them in secure areas, and we can check on her every single day, and not just leave her in Torres suffering every single day.

And I was mentioning Charles has a list of nine other women that he’s identified elderly women. I’m going to add in Chico proper that that need our help, and it’s time for Chico to stop bitching and complaining and stand up and start helping. I mean, it’s so easy to go on Facebook and just say get rid of these vermin on rodents off our streets, but it takes so much effort just to go down and maybe give somebody a meal, and you don’t have to give them any money, and you don’t have to approve of what they’re doing, but how hard is it just to give somebody your leftovers from your fancy dinner downtown? Seriously, nothing. It takes nothing, people.

Anyway, let’s get back to the program. Molly, interesting woman. Curious to know her personal politics because I was kind of flip flop about some of the comments she made. But I did like that she was kind of leaning towards the housing first kind of approach and to identify that there are systematic, which means they’ve been here since the dawn of time. Problems in our housing with discrimination and racism and inequality and these fundamental issues need to be addressed now and to correct and to change the way that we look at housing and especially home ownership, but housing in particular community really is what I think she was breaking her talk down to. Any success stories that she might have had in her past had come from active communities. We’ll just leave it at that. I’m interesting to see where she goes and what her work is in the future.

The lightning sessions for me were invaluable. I didn’t even know that Rhena R H N A, not R I N A, but they were pronouncing it RENA existed, and I never heard of BCAG. And again, I should have this analogy, but I believe it’s standard for Butte County Agent. See governments or area governments or something governments. It was some kind of a engineering hound or not a firm or something that that did. Well, I’ll dwell more into that and maybe have more of it available and ready for when I try to go to document documenting this talk or this this blog, and they taught. I learned a lot about housing tools and elements, housing elements, and local planning and all of that. And the bottom line is there is a lot goes into this, and some interesting and need to be reviewed equations I would call them that they use to determine these processes and these plans, but then they forward these plans onto the individual governments, and then then they’re done, and so we don’t hear from them, or they don’t do anything for that particular government again for another eight years, and we’ll talk more about that in a little bit. So skipping ahead, the lightning round was very informative. The individuals that I heard from, and they were they know their crap. They know their they know what they do. So hats off, good job.

Moving along, the first panel that was out building the future policy and leadership for affordable housing. This was the one that I was really looking forward to hearing and talking. I was hoping to see there being more of a back and forth discussion, some kind of an outcome, some kind of a an aha moment. Like, yeah, we didn’t think of that. Maybe that’s a great approach, but I got nothing.

I got a little more information about how Chico, in particular, handles what they get from Reno, and apparently there are substantial number, hundreds. We’re going to say hundreds of units, maybe 600 or more, but not seven, that are going to come online in in a short period of time. And what’s a short period of time? Less than a year, maybe a year, and all of which came through this process, and so not only did Rena do the BCAG do their job well, and the and the how the housing elements and the plan was presented to the to the to the community, and then trickled into the city, and the city did their thing. Let me see who Mary Jo, right, right, right. Mary Jo from the city was there, and I appreciate the city did attend and send Mary Jo as their representative, and that she was present for this panel, and she too confirmed the fact that there is indeed lack of housing in Chico, and the city of Chico’s mark Newberg also same thing. Yeah, there is a shortage of housing,

I guess that the takeaway from the hour long that they spoke on the stage was that Chico and the surrounding communities are not meeting their affordable housing Projections that there are indeed units in the pipeline that are going to come online shortly, but they too are not completed and not active. There was a statement during this that 200,000 units came online in 10 years in our county, and I have tried to research that number and have not been able to come up with that. And anyway, moving along, was. yeah. Lunch. I had a soda. I had some chips. I had a sandwich on bread that was delicious. Cannot complain. Appreciate all. All of the amenities that day.

The next panel was preventing homelessness before it starts. By the way, I totally skipped over the lightning round. Okay, during or right during right after lunch was served, there was a a lightning round that was called “Building Communities. What does it take? Now, I got to tell you, we did not learn what it takes to build a community from this lightning session, the title just did not fit the outcome of this, but what I did learn was the individual groups that were present and part of this are doing good work and need to be acknowledged.

And I guess the first would have been the individual with the Chamber of Commerce representing businesses of Chico, understaffed, obvious. She mentioned that there were 8,400, I believe, businesses in Butte County, and I believe she was said something around 400 membership in the in the in the chamber, and I think that’s sad. I think that needs to be looked at and needs to be addressed because business is important to this equation that people aren’t looking at. If you can’t have people in jobs, even low cost or a low paying minimum wage part time work, if you don’t have work opportunities for people to make the money that they’re going to need to pay for housing, then you’re not going to have people in housing, whether the housing is available or not. It’s still part of the equation. We need to get people to work.

I really want to reach out to our chamber, and I want to see where I personally can maybe help and and change the the dynamics there. If it means knocking on doors, and promoting the you know the chamber’s mission, I’ll do that. If they’re understaffed, I’ll try to recruit students or others in our community who have time that maybe make can make some phone calls, can make some visits to to businesses one on one anyway and maybe get more people involved in the business side of this equation.

Then there was the Butte line or B line again critical infrastructure in our community is our public transportation, and right now I would say we rank, in my opinion, I’ll give it an A, B, C, or D. I say we’re a C. We’re not an A by far. We need more options for transit for both the regular commuter, as well as our disabled brothers and sisters who cannot adaptively fit in within the current regular scheduled busses and yeah busses that need special attention. Smaller vehicles that are specifically tailored towards accessibility that can get them in and out of an appointment area quick and easy, where they don’t have to take 2, 3, or 4 blocks to get to a bus station. And maybe what we need to do is be able to have these smaller shuttles be able to go out and bring them back into the centralized transit center and be able to then use the other busses, more bus routes, more bus times, more longer bus times. These are things that we as a community, need to shift into.

We need to get away from everybody having their own goddamn car. If you get downtown, you can’t park. You’re almost getting run over by Main Street traffic because it’s 32 and and Broadway too, but not so bad. But boy, I’ll tell you, Main Street is getting bad at certain times of the day, Ninth and Eighth Street, again, 32. Bringing in traffic downtown is is troublesome. I like the idea of the revitalization. I personally. Think we need to do it.

I don’t care what Casey Reynolds says. Fuck her. Let’s do it our way, and let’s let the community decide. This council doesn’t need to make every decision. They can put it out to vote for anything that is controversial. If they can’t make a decision in council, put it to vote. God damn it! I can’t say that enough. And in fact, I’m going to stop this recording and go make a Facebook post just about that.

All right. I didn’t go make that post, but what I was going at? I completely forgot. Let’s go back to our program. I was talking about transit and recreational employment in healthcare services and other infrastructures. We’re kind of not represented. I’m not sure if somebody was there from CARD or not. I don’t. I think there might have been one person from the Department of Employment Social Services, but even then, I’m not sure who the panelists were. I’m thinking back. I need to go back and maybe hopefully get some information from chat themselves. The other infrastructures that were mentioned were childcare, and what interested me there is one of the women stated that they had no shortage of funding to get child care for a child, what they had problem with was funding to pay for staff that is needed to process and get that child into a program. That was the most mind-blowing part of this, and later there was another panel who was involved on the panel on the one panel about avoiding homelessness had a conversation about this, and she referred to this as braiding resources, where you would find funding from multiple locations or multiple areas, and try to combine them in order to accomplish your goal. Maybe in this case, these women who were involved with the child care, they just weren’t managed better, and that their director isn’t actually out there finding the correct funding or all the funding . Anyways, I question again the efficiencies of these nonprofits, and I think it goes to like you know like you know quality of the person that’s actually doing the individual job. Where I’m going for this is like a nonprofit might only be able to pay lower rates because they’re a nonprofit struggling and they can’t make their ends meet.

Yet somehow their directors are having decent paychecks, let’s say, and they’re driving $100,000 cars and living in gated communities and million dollar homes. I mean, maybe I’m getting a little far fetched, but seriously, there’s a disproportionate amount of money that is going into caring for homeless and not building homes. The same amount of money can be spent in better ways than it’s being spent,

and I really am coming to this conclusion when I when I look back at this summit and I look at I’m thinking oh great here’s a housing summit coming up and it’s this unique event that’s but it turns out this is the third annual housing summit and if you go back and look at the flyers for the past three summits they’re basically covering the same problem, the same thing, saying the same. Let’s have this outcome, and nothing actually comes of it.

I would, I would definitely, I’m going to contact them to see if there’s any like further discussion or follow up to this event. There’s I didn’t find any from the last previous events, but personally, if I go to like let’s say I went to one of these hackathons or something like that, I could expect to after the event have access to any slides. During any of the programs, maybe even access to the program itself, videotaped and recorded in video or audio at least, and made available. I don’t find that available at Chat’s website. I don’t find that available to any of these housing summits that are held around the country this time of year, year after year after year, all saying the same thing. Let’s come together and find solutions. Let’s come together and see if we can’t build a relationship that’s going to make that that final change. And then when you go to these things and they talk about housing, yes, the very first panel was talking about availability of housing.

They even had a developer on the panel, and basically saying it’s not profitable to build public housing, and that’s a big that’s a big eye opener there too. The reason these houses are not being built is because the developers and the freaking planners and such aren’t getting paid enough money to justify doing it, and governments are at the mercy of business development and commercial housing development to survive for taxes and income because they too have become these capitalistic gluttons that have to grow and expand and get bigger and more complicated and more expensive, in order to survive.

And that too is different than it was for me when I was growing up in the ’80s in Mount Holly, New Jersey. The freeholders didn’t allow that bullshit. They sat there and they judged every single penny that was spent, and I can tell you there were times that they spent money on unwed mothers, and there was time when they didn’t, and there was time when they spent money building prisons, and there was time when they didn’t, because they were making decisions based on the needs of the people, not on the decisions of the needs of the corporations, the developers, or the taxpayers who have the biggest tax burden.

I just think that we need to stop with complicating the problems. with over saturating it with management and structure and organizations. There are so many goddamn nonprofits in Chico alone. 46, 50, Who knows exactly? Because some of them are so out there.

And I okay. Look, I’m going to bash religion. Okay, I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to criticize the Catholics who are always proclaiming Jesus’s words and yet acting on none of them practicing it themselves. But let’s go on about how some of these religious organizations want to save you, they want to correct you, and they want to make you better. And what? We don’t need that in the emergency realm of things. We don’t need you to be preaching to these people salvation that may never, ever, ever, ever come. You need to basically feed them, clean them, wash their fucking feet. You freaking hypocrite Christians! Stop what you’re doing?

Oops … ran out of tokens … probably better since I kind of go off script :) … if you want to hear more it’s all in the audio