Ray Bramson

Chief Operating Officer, Destination: Home

Housing and Homelessness Columnist

Columns contributed second Monday of every month

Ray works systematically to meet Destination: Home’s goals by addressing key staffing, process, and infrastructure issues, while also overseeing the organization’s housing loan portfolio, grantmaking, and development functions.

Having focused on homelessness and affordable housing issues for the majority of his career, Ray previously worked for the city of San Jose, leading the city’s Homelessness Interventions and Solutions Division for over five years.

Prior to joining the city, he was a philanthropy manager at Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and before that Ray worked with HomeFirst–a Santa Clara County safety net organization–as director of development.

An alumnus of UC Santa Barbara, Ray spent the year following his graduation with the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps serving impoverished communities throughout the southeastern United States. He is a senior fellow with American Leadership Forum Silicon Valley and a board member for Housing Matters. Ray is also currently pursuing his Masters in Liberal Arts from Stanford University.

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Columns

April 12, 2021April 11, 2021by Ray Bramson

Bramson: The write stuff to say about poverty

Have you noticed how often homelessness and poverty are crowding your news media feeds lately? It’s everywhere from Nextdoor to the nightly news to your local paper. Evictions, encampments, unemployment, affordable housing developments, community responses, failures and new reports. And without question, there is a growing fascination with finding the headline grabbers that scrutinize and...

Columns

March 8, 2021March 8, 2021by Ray Bramson

Bramson: Do you know how to stay in San Jose?

In a 2020 tweet — that really could have been a sound byte from any platform in the last century or so — a former U.S. president claimed a victory that “people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream would no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.” It...

Columns

February 8, 2021February 10, 2021by Ray Bramson

Bramson: California’s rent relief measure puts power in the wrong place

Not too long ago, in a Silicon Valley very, very close by, tens of thousands of hardworking people could be heard asking themselves: “How am I going to pay the rent this month?” This was before the pandemic wiped away their jobs, emptied their bank accounts and left them with a mountain of debt and...