This is my free form talk about my experience at the 2026 Housing Summit … held by CHAT this last week. There are some things in this audio that are probably not accurate and there will defiantly be things that are offensive to some people … my intent isn’t to be critical but rather bring a bottom up perspective …

Scotty Franzyshen · 2026-09-27-Thoughts

Edited from my spoken transcript for readability. Filler words, repeated starts, and speech stutters have been removed while keeping the substance and tone intact.

Arriving at the Summit

I’m gonna continue to talk about the conference, and I’m gonna run through the itinerary and 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 B-Line 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 time into volunteering with them. I mean, in the upcoming year. We’ll see. I also spoke to Safe Space and their director.

Again, they were present and their booth was there and 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 environment here in Chico. And that’s curious to me. If you’re going to 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.

Keynote: Molly Calhoun

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 can say even though she jumped around a lot, I could still, keep up with her.

Let’s say 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, the history, I mean, we’re talking hundreds of 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. And I think, 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.

Housing Availability and RHNA

This cycle is just that. 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 RHNA, 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 make another report that comes out that says we need to build more housing and very little to no housing was built through those sites 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 in Chico alone. I’m estimating over three thousand properties. Now that might be single family, that might be multi-unit, that might be, a little bungalow, but either but there’s still a about three thousand 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 it’s aesthetically outside, it’s not inhabiting or hurting the image of the neighbor. That does not include boarding up windows. I mean, I don’t know there is an amount that needs to be addressed.

And a lot of those properties are not vacant because somebody is 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 and 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 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 need to account for everybody’s needs.

An Eighty-Four-Year-Old Woman at Torres

Because I mean, right now we’ve got an eighty-four. I mean, we’ve got a lot of people, but in particular, we’ve got one individual. She’s eighty-four, sharp as a tack.. Who is living at the Torres Shelter is getting very little to. No sleep at night is in a in a state of, constant, fear.

This is not some way that we should be treating, our fellow citizens at eighty-four, 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 get 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 eighty-four 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. 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 eighty-four, 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 State Shelter Team, I think it is, has tiny houses and options to be able to put those 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 gonna add, in Chico proper that need our help. 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.

Back to Molly and the Bigger Housing Picture

Anyway, let’s get back to the program. Molly. I’m curious to know her personal politics because she’s 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 homeownership. But housing in particular community really is what I think she was making her talk down to any success stories that she might have had in her past had come from active communities.

I’m interesting to see where she goes and what her work is in the future.

The Lightning Sessions

The lightning sessions for me were invaluable. I didn’t even know that. RHNA existed and I never heard of BCAG 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 that 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, and 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. We’ll talk more about that in a little bit. 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.

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 them 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, I got a, I got a little more information about how, Chico in particular handles what they get from RHNA. And apparently there are, substantial number hundreds.

We’re going to say hundreds of units, maybe six hundred or more, but not seven hundred that are going to come online 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 RHNA, do the b, c, a g 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. 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. There’s 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 two hundred thousand units came online in ten years in our county. And I’ve tried to research that number and have not been able to come up with that.

Yeah.

Lunch

Lunch. I had a soda. I had some chips. I had a sandwich on bread that was delicious. Cannot complain.

Appreciate all of the amenities that day. Okay.

Lightning Round: Building Communities

During or right during right after lunch was served. There was a lightning round that was called building communities. What does it take now? I gotta 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.

The Chamber of Commerce and Employment

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 business of Chico, understaffed, obvious. She mentioned that there were eight thousand four hundred, I believe, businesses in Butte County. And I believe she was said something around four hundred membership 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 change the dynamics there. If it means knocking on doors and promoting 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 businesses. One on one.

Anyway, and maybe, get more people involved in the business side of this equation. Then there was the B-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 C, we’re not in 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 buses and that needs special, attention and 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, two, three, four blocks to get to, a bus station. And maybe what we need to do is be able to have these smaller shuttles be people to go out and bring them back into, the centralized, transit center and be able to then use the other buses, 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. 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 recreational employment and, health care services and other infrastructures.

We’re, kind of not represented. I’m not sure if somebody was there from cart 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. And I’m thinking back, I need to go back and maybe hopefully get some information from chat themselves.

Childcare, Staffing, and Nonprofit Funding

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 childcare 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, 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 childcare, they just weren’t, managed better and that their director isn’t actually out there finding the correct funding or all the funding or, anyways, I question again, the efficiencies of these nonprofits. And I think it goes to like 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, one hundred thousand dollars cars and, living in gated communities and million dollar homes. I mean, maybe I’m getting a little far fetched, but seriously, there is a disproportionate amount of money that is going into caring for homeless and not building homes. The same amount of money could be spent in better ways than it’s being spent.

What Happens After a Housing Summit?

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, an 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 chats website. I don’t find that available to any of these housing summits that are held around the country this time of 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 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 eighties 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 a 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 non-profits in Chico alone.

Forty six fifty who knows exactly, because some of them are so out there. All right, so this is getting to be kind of long. It’s forty-two minutes already, and I’m only at the last panel on stage. And I gotta tell you, that panel was completely useless. It did not cover the topic, but one thing that did come out of that was connections reaching out and crossing boundaries, crossing borders, meeting different individuals and different organ, groups and coming together collaboratively.

I see this happening with the CalAIM and the social services and the medical being joined and combined. I’m very concerned that there’s a lot more exploitation going to be happening here. Especially on the taxpayers burden. But I wonder if maybe there isn’t something good that might come out of this for the individuals who are faced with these issues, homelessness, addiction, mental health, all of these multifaceted reasons of homelessness and maybe some good will come out of this, but I am worried and need pointing out that there needs to be more observation and more accountability for where this money is going. Twenty four billion in California alone, just in five years.

It’s just freaking mind blowing. Mind blowing. Anyway, continuing on the closing look, I think northeast, true or true North Alliance is one of the worst offenders of the problems that I’m having in this town about nonprofit overload. And I think they’re right on par, if not just on step two of my suspicion list and Jesus Center and that organization being number one, these guys set themselves up to be the authoritative authority in this town. And they block other efforts, I think, and take focus of any resources that are given out by the city.

And I’m really optimistic that this next city Council is going to look beyond Jesus Center and true North Alliance, and they’re going to look more towards people like Charles, in the North State Shelter Team, and other organizations that might be grassroots. Whereas Safe Space has started out in the grassroots arena. I don’t know what their future ambitions are. I would like to hope that they continue their grassroots approach, which is just fucking open the doors already. That’s how they got started.

And I just hope that continues. And so far, they are definitely providing the services and they are very accessible and their outreach is unprecedented. I can only hope that their next year is beneficial to them as an organization and to our community. I don’t want to ever feel like I’m criticizing these groups, but I do feel out of all the people that I asked and talked to at the conference about the obstacles, money seemed to be, some of these groups main concern. And I think that there’s a lot of money out there already.

And that there is not an obstacle of money as there is an obstacle of putting or places to put people. And that’s the bottom line here, so

My Main Takeaway

I’m gonna close about my experience at the housing summit. But in closing, I just want to say that I found it to be nothing more than more reinforcement that the nonprofits in this town exist solely to give middle management paychecks. Because they’re not giving the employees at the bottom, the actual people in the trenches doing the work, fair wages. The one thing I would point out that the moment that was so ingrained in my mind was the time that one of the case or, social workers stood up and made a comment about how close they themselves are to needing the services that they’re providing for their clients. That was the most powerful moment for me that came out of that event.

Otherwise nothing was accomplished. The bottom line is there aren’t enough houses. And, they all have a very difficult job ahead of themselves caring for the people in line, waiting for houses.