Rehab Right


My commute for the past two years before Shelter in Place was to an east bay city south of Oakland, to a low slung administrative building adjacent to the Hall of Justice. Several decades ago the building served as a sheriff's holding cell; the tell tale sign is that the windows start 7 feet above our cubicles, and require a special instrument available in the office break room to reach and open. 

The main purpose of the agency that I work for to provide money to support housing projects, both rental development and homeownership. Some of the money is locally raised bond funds, and some of it is state or federal money that passes through to us. We have to manage the contracts that we provide to make sure that the money gets used in the way that it is intended.

One of the contracts that I work on is with a national nonprofit that specializes in home building but is administering a home preservation program for us. The program was originally intended to provide low interest loans to low-income homeowners for rehab projects, such as re-roofing, seismic upgrades, and lead paint removal services for seniors and the disabled. The program had been in operation for a year when I began working with the team and had made fewer than 10 loans.

My job is to sort out what is particularly challenging about running the program and determine whether it should continue to exist or whether it is too expensive to administer. The nonprofit keeps losing sight of the contract deliverables and they spend way too much time helping each client. And they need more money to help temporarily move occupants into hotels when they are performing the work. I try to help them present their case to my agency's leadership team. 

While I look through and try to make sense of the program evaluation metrics that I've asked the nonprofit to flesh out, I try to connect the project to why I got into this work in the first place. I think about my mother and her service while she was still working as an architect on the Pico-Union Historic Preservation Overlay Zone Board for the Los Angeles City Planning Commission; I think about the book my program mentor wrote for the the Oakland Planning Department with her husband in June 1978, Rehab Right. 

One of the silver linings of the Shelter in Place order is that I don't have to go into that office every day; I very much prefer working from home and getting more time back in my day. But there are small things that I do miss, for example walking to BART after the end of the work day in the warmer months when the sun hasn't set before five. Heading east, you can get just enough elevation on the overpass above the train tracks to see Mission Peak Regional Preserve to the south, and on a crisp day, Mt Diablo to the northeast.

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