and good evening and welcome to oakland is my name is james cagney and my oakland is guess today is a daring lone staring is the board president for the east bay for is for housing organizations covering alameda alameda in contra costa county so broader than just oakland we work to preserve protect and expand housing opportunities through education advocacy and coalition building one point blank why should we care about the creation for affordable housing why should we care is that affordable housing is very critical component to healthy communities where everybody knows somebody who is benefiting from living in quality affordable housing that's developed by mission driven nonprofit housing developers how the housing units provided for people that applied to get well we go through a number of different ways  typically housing developers will go out and fundraise through and work with their local communities to secure sites and then to secure the funds it takes to construct the the buildings themselves we also work very hard to secure operating subsidies so that once the buildings are are there and ready for occupants that we can also subsidize the rents so those lowest income persons can still access an affordable home or the units built for this program are units that have been free constructed refurbished to be reuse are recycled for this for both we several housing developments and projects started as other buildings and through the influx of public funds we're able to rehab them bring them up to code compliance enhance their amenities and then also then make them affordable in actually have people living in there who are lower incomes than the than the previous tenants sometimes but also have a more high quality housing experience than the previous tenants because of the the investment in in rehabbing them and make him nicer to you what kind of programs do you provide floors either the homeless or first time buyers even are with students just out of college to be able  to get a unit it's a great question affordable housing affordable homes serve a wide continuum of folks you know you mentioned homeless folks or previously homeless folks with very limited incomes potentially having other special needs that you know caused to be barriers to them holding housing in the past and then all the way up to first time homebuyers you know so families that need a little help to get into their first property that's the a number of things are provided typically there's a housing service coordinator on site that helps connect people to their community within the building in their community outside the building there's a lot of efforts are put towards decreasing isolation would seem for seniors who live in affordable housing making sure that they're getting out and getting to know their neighbors decreasing isolation leads to a lot of positive outcomes for seniors they also could get linked to transportation services so they can get to their their appointments medical appointments out to field trips and outings and doing shopping and things like that and then there's just the general community building peace where you get to know your neighbors you get to know them just not as a face but as a name and you might know their story as a manager of housing i really appreciate the more my tenants are able to work through  their their neighborhood their neighbor issues and things that might come up in any kind of housing and you can't have that benefit if you don't invest the time in building that community within the having of seniors or people with special needs it seems like a community is really necessary to support them as you say but if there were people who were relatively healthy or whatnot what kind of services could they expect if they get accepted into in household who are looking for work you could access resume building job coaching resume could interview coaching and things like that is just it's pretty much what whatever the needs are to help folks get to you  and folks trying to kind of to game the real estate market that wasn't caused by affordable housing creators or the folks who live in there but it's created a huge gap for those people we don't have the resources we used to have available to us to create the housing and and that that whole housing boom and bust also made took people out of their housing and in created even greater need for affordable homes  recently lost the redevelopment agencies and all the resources that those that the redevelopment agencies brought to our local communities to to develop community assets but also more and more particularly affordable housing within jurisdictions that money's no longer available to us and we've also experienced a long term many years re duction in fed in money that's part of the federal programs  and houses that have been taken by by the recession does your organization at all try to recycle those is there a difference in houses aimed for affordable housing as those foreclosed homes and make them affordable either as first time home buyer opportunities or affordable rentals there's actually a policy process going on right now with these pay housing organizations to address the foreclosure issue and there are many nonprofit developers out there working to to recycle as you said and bring these buildings up to code eliminate the blight and really boost up the neighborhoods that these these homes are existing in and then create that affordable housing opportunity for a new family affordable housing fit in with the goals related to see like transit oriented development and environmental policies and stuff like that shopping health care schools parks any time you can do that you're taking the car off the road and by doing that you're reducing congestion reducing pollution everybody wins when you can co locate amenities transit and housing all together another big benefit on the environmental side is that affordable housing developers are in the forefront in creating or utilizing green building materials and also utilizing  got to be out there making sure that that everybody in the state of california particularly understands the need for a vibrant affordable housing industry to meet the needs of our communities to make sure that people are living closer to their jobs closer to their relatives again reducing the you know this the the two hour commute to work and so forth if we can you know really get affordable housing into as many communities as possible we're able to connect those dots also one thing that we really got to stay focused on is making sure that we're also creating jobs through the building of affordable housing those jobs those construction jobs are good wage paying jobs and they bring a lot of money into the community and stays in the community and that's something we can't forget to notice as well which is a great point this is this means that if i want to apply for a formal house it also sounds like i could actually get into the program and help either construct other houses or what not is it is the program open enough to allow allow that we have well in a lot of our it there's the habitat for humanity model where it's a sweat equity model where folks who are going to be families that are going to move into these affordable homes part participate in the actual building going to put it that's the sweat equity portion so that's one way another way that much more general way is that affordable homes serve folks all over you know throughout our communities it's our seniors it's our restaurant workers it's our teachers it's our guys working in the trades guys and ladies working in the trades they they also benefit from having an affordable home and so everybody's going to benefit everybody's going to get something out of this we're going to create jobs directed towards people disabilities and other special needs and you know when that's the case the main goal of that housing provider who's going to build own and manage for many many years is to make sure that the folks who are getting in there can stay folks a disability face a lot of lot of hurdles and oftentimes have find it hard to maintain housing in the market not just because of cost but because of just dealing with landlords and neighbors we work very hard to make sure that they don't just get in to the housing but they stay in the housing so services are adapted to meet those needs and you're sure it works as we as we wrap up to people who are watching this how can they get in touch or how can they find out more information if they want to look great thanks for bringing that up i'd like to direct viewers to check out a housing organizations at e p a h o o r g to find us on the web there's a lot of information there about the campaigns that are going on in concord at the around the naval weapons station there are great opportunities to create affordable housing there as part of their base redesign we also are working in city pleasanton as the through their planning process to make sure that we get more and more affordable housing available there and there's a media can conceive it's just around open issues there where we work hand in hand with city representatives to welcome back to the second half of oakland is my guest now is alan a lawyer from hayward california one of things we're going to talk about is about respect could you define respect as you see it as you feel respect is something that is owed by one person to another person based upon that person's abilities and character a lot of times scuse me a lot times young people don't seem to understand that if a person has been through some things and been through life then that person should receive the respect that just by being alive at the same time young people deserve respect because of who they are and so respect is the thing that if we will give it to each other is we get it back in ten fold in time actually because i guess young people are to respect their elders but i'm also hearing that you're saying that that respect is circular it is how and where were you raised because i  feel like respect sometimes feels like an old school notion to me and could you talk about your foundation with what respect means to you but leave it or not i was born in portland oregon we moved to in an ap indiana for a little while then we moved back to portland we lived in cleveland ohio cincinnati ohio my mother moved around a little bit and because i moved so much i get developed this habit of talking a lot trying to stay out of fights oh and in the late sixty's in the mid sixty's we moved down to san francisco and i graduated high school in san francisco and then i went to the army and from the army i finally got a chance to go to college and went to college and graduated from law school so i moved around quite a bit i was respect shown respect is shown by appreciating the other party's point of view when somebody says something you don't like or something you don't understand you don't jump i would prefer you not to jump on that person and say that's wrong or you know stop that listen and try to learn from what they're saying they try to improve it in your in your own life is there a or what is the relationship between respect and culture a lot of cultures teach respect like in the asian culture you were taught to respect your elders i think in the eskimos have taught their children respect their elders in the old school back in the day the old americans they taught their kids respect and this is not that kids aren't talked respect now but this do your own thing and look out for number one has to sort of taken away from the respect level we i would like to see us go back to the old school way of things when an adult tells you to do something you do when the older person tells you to do something you do it and i'm not i'm not jumping out of windows or anything like that but respect where you turn your music down because you know people don't want to hear all that loud music or if somebody is walking down the sidewalk for you to step aside to let them walk down the sidewalk it's a thing of where you would give respect in order to get respect in my forty's and i know what you're talking about with the old school notion in african american culture with with respect for elders or what not and i guess i have to ask what do you see has changed it's like what exactly happened to differentiate the way young people treat one another and treat the elderly now  versus versus a couple of decades ago so a lot of the young people have missed out i believe in the training because we had the community there was a time when the entire neighborhood had the right to tell you what to do to teach you to train you to chess ties you now we have a feeling where a lot of young people don't want anybody to tell them what to do at all and we have to have the authority the authority figures are here for a reason i'm not advocating the police take over and tell you everything to do a lot of times your parents in my opinion should be the ones to tell you what to do to advocate to the authority figures and for you to listen to the authority figures nowadays young people a lot of times don't have that authority figure to look up to and therefore they don't understand that you have to do what you're told to do and i guess we should also touch too on an education it's of course essential in this conversation but i guess i should ask you what role would you say education plays in culture and culture with us as of american education is such an important thing the knowledge once you gain knowledge once you accept you see that ther ways to look at stuff i was a substitute teacher for a while and had a fourteen year old kid is probably six foot two and i don't know over two hundred pounds he continually fell out of his seat and it was a joke i mean he wasn't hurting himself he he fell out the students in the class left so i finally said you must bring your mother in order for me to continue to teach you cause you disrupting the class when his mother showed up she was about twenty eight and so i realized then that we had a child raising a child and that the twenty eight is a child but she had the child when she was young so therefore a lot of things that an older person would have known to impart in a child she just didn't know and so i spoke to both her and to him and trying to get her to see that she had instilled in him that he had to do what i ask him to do he was in school to learn and that school was a very important education was a very important part for him to partake in sin into the office was not going to benefit him if every time he fell out of the chair or sit in the office  he missed out on class so it's very important i got her on my side to help me to to train him now people say with school teachers shouldn't be in the training business but i think as african americans when i was going to school the school teachers were really a part of our community and you see when a grocery store you see i'm in church and they could tell you know mrs allen lamont's doing this lamont's doing that or he's not doing this he's not doing that we didn't have to wait on the teachers conference because they were there for us and education is something that's going to benefit you throughout your life you know it's funny because i as a as a child i remember hearing phrases like don't aks more i remember sort of like even myself being accused sometimes of talking of whites i'm wondering too about the connection between culture in african americans and education it's like has there been a shift in the or what would you what would you even say to that i've seen this ship  incorrect the speaking of english in an incorrect way has been a lot it has been said that's the school we talked about ebonics i personally don't believe anybody's i believe is in correct english when a person graduates from college they should some type of kudos some type of praise but a lot of times when somebody comes home from from prison they are the ones who get the praise and as for a speaking white is not speaking white or speaking correct you learn how to speak english because this is our native language for the most part now there are other people that speak other languages but this is a language that we have in this country for the last four hundred years and i want to get into the slavery time but this is wait the way for us to get to go to move forward is to learn how to speak the language reading and writing and arithmetic other alternatives to education definitely definitely there are trying to do a lot of people just don't like school and it's like you don't like beach you don't like carrots whatever but there are those skills that you can go to there are are training schools that you can go to to learn a specific skill and if i children would take advantage of that a lot of times i see children who are so young people who are doing things that are illegal i saw a beautiful mural painted mirror was a graffiti but it was beautiful whoever painted this this graffiti has talent take that talent and learn how to put it on canvas so they can get paid for it i've seen young people who steal cars take that talent to learn how to build  a burglar burglar proof car try your best to burglar proof a car there are skills that you that we have in the community that can be used in a positive way and it doesn't necessarily mean four years of going to school nowadays i used to brag that i had a fifty voting on and i guess we should ask you what you wanted to define what's the the history of voting for the black in the black community there was a time when it was illegal for black people to vote black people were killed they the exact number or they would give them some type of academic test knowing that for the most part of that african americans that in that particular area were not very good readers and so on we fought in order to get the right to vote and a lot of our young people and that is not  just young people a lot of our people aren't taken advantage of the fact to vote we just had an election june fifth and i'm not sure what the percentages were but they were predicting it will be one of the lowest turnouts in history because we had no big issue but there were some issues from the cigarette tax to a number of other big big issues we need to vote come november for president barack obama and if i may just diverse just a little bit one of my pet peeves that i see on t v when the newscasters are talking they call president obama barack they're not friends i doubt if they know president barack obama they but they also call him mr obama the correct way to address the president of the united states is either mr president or president obama but you hear them say things that just to me is this is a little snide remarks that obama said this  they don't call other presidents it's always mr president or president whatever his name was and i want to get that respect for that's another term twin talk about respect we need to get that respect for our president i believe that racism sneaks in because he's our first african american president and i read an article about african american his father was african his his mother was american so we really got an african american at this point but at the same time he doesn't have a legacy of slavery because his father was from africa who doesn't understand or who wasn't involved in america's slavery and his mother was from kansas she didn't have a role in slavery and i think that sometimes his thinking is much different than african americans thinking because of that lack of legacy of slavery you know we've kind of lost touch i guess with the way with the way things used to be i guess who votes and why people vote for their own self interests and a lot of times the african american community doesn't understand it's for their own self interests when we did the census a lot of people would hide from the census not realizing that the census was very important because depending upon where the population was that's where they were put the hospitals the schools the medical clinics in anything that was necessary for you that's where they would put it because if there weren't a lot of people there why put a hospital there and there weren't a lot of people there why put a school what a lot of people there why put these social programs there voting is just as it is a more in because we determine who goes in office and makes these decisions force come november if the vote is not god no by if you don't vote whoever is elected is going to be your own your own vote so to speak you know we're running short on time but i really feel like i want to ask for those who can't vote felonies or what not it's like certainly there's something they can do in the community to help this process is there anything they really can do actively even if they can't vote they can get those young people or those people who who are not voting they can help them to vote drive them to the to the polling stations tell them how important it is to vote make sure that they understand that all the issues because a lot of times they speak and they write in double speak you almost need a law degree to understand some of the issues they have your voting on but even if you can't vote you can help other people to get out the vote next back to education with reading and stuff like