Heart and Home is a monthly column by Josh Ishimatsu.
We’ve moved.
After close to a decade in the house on Julian, SV@Home has moved to new offices. So, in this column, I’ve written a couple thoughts about what made the old office great and what will make the new office great as well.
The house on Julian was iconic. It was iconic not in the current, pop culture sense – not iconic like Beyoncé is iconic. But it was literally iconic in that our logo incorporates the iconography of the house. And that people remember the house and identify SV@Home with it. When I first started working for the City of San José, somebody brought up SV@Home in conversation and said something along the lines of “You know, they’re the one whose office is a house.” A housing organization that was housed in a house. It made a certain kind of sense. It was memorable.
The office was a home. I am a relatively recent member of the SV@Home team. So, I don’t have the same history with the house as many others do. But the collective history of the house as a cozy, welcoming, productive space is evident. You can see it from the pictures/people’s memories of earlier employees in the house. Leslye curled up on a couch with a laptop. Pilar with her dogs. Mathew toasting pop tarts in the toaster oven (but you couldn’t use the toaster oven and the microwave at the same time without overloading the circuit ☺️). The house on Julian is a space where a lot of great people worked, and where they (we) have accomplished a lot.
The new office will be a gathering place. For all the charm and symbolism of working out of an old house, it was hard to have external meetings there. For one, parking was tough. Like most people of a certain age who went through UCLA Urban Planning, I have been brainwashed by Donald Shoup that parking is bad – it subsidizes individual drivers and messes up the urban fabric. But ample, free parking is good when you’re trying to host a meeting. Our new place has it. Our old place didn’t. For two, our old place, as the staff grew into more spaces, didn’t have a big room with a door that closed. If you wanted to have an external meeting in the conference room, you had to make sure that it was a day when both Kenneth and Cory were working from home. Otherwise, they’d be standing at their desks, trying to work, while you were trying to have your meeting. In contrast, our new place has a conference room with a door that can close. All of this means that we will be better able to host meetings and fulfill our core function of bringing people together to advance affordable housing and housing justice.
The new office will help us build our social media empire. Jk, we’re not really social media imperialists. But, if you are a careful observer of SV@Home, I hope you’ve noticed that we’ve upped our social media game over the past year. Over the next year, we’re planning to do even more. Our new offices, with more rooms with doors that close, means that we will have a space that can double as a studio for podcasts (SV@Home podcasts are coming soon!) and shortform videos. This means more social media content, more avenues for us to reach the broader public with our affordable housing and housing justice messaging.