What do we mean by social housing in the United States? How has it worked in the past, and how should it be expanded? On May 14, Shelterforce and Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ) co-hosted, “Housing as a Public Good: The State of Social Housing Today,” a webinar that explored how to build caring communities that meet everyone’s housing needs.
The webinar was moderated by Shelterforce’s Miram Axel-Lute and NPQ’s Steve Dubb.
Panelists were:
- The Rev. Rae Chen Huang, a Presbyterian pastor and senior organizer at Housing Now!, a California statewide housing justice coalition.
- Jonathan Tarleton, a writer, urban planner, and oral historian.
- Fernando Martí, an Ecuadorian-born community architect, housing activist, writer, and artist.
- Kristen Hackett, a community-based researcher and a community organizer with My Eden Voice.
Watch the full video above, or read a lightly edited transcript of the conversation below.
Miriam Axel-Lute: Social housing is one of those terms that shifts its meaning a lot. It came to us from Europe, where it usually refers to programs most famously exemplified and studied in Vienna, where housing is provided by the public sector for a wide range of incomes. In the United States, it’s taken on a different feel, encompassing a wider range of approaches to affordable housing, but still especially those that don’t involve short-term subsidies in the private market.
But what it means, and how it should be pursued and achieved is still debated in the field, and our panelists today bring a range of perspectives and experiences to bear on this question. We hope to lay out a vision of how we can move social housing forward, even under the current conditions.
We’re going to start with Jonathan Tarleton, author of Homes for Living, and a member of the Shelterforce board.
Jonathan Tarleton: I am an urban planner. I’ve worked on housing from a number of perspectives at housing authorities, at community development corporations, with CDFIs, and as a researcher and writer. I recently released a book called Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons.
This book centers on a model of social housing, a great, very successful model of social housing that we have here in the United States, that being New York City and state’s Mitchell-Lama program, and these are both rentals and co-ops. But I focus mainly on the limited equity co-ops where folks have been able to buy in at very low rates with the deal being that when they leave, when they sell their share back to the co-op, they are not able to profit from that housing, so to the extent that folks can still buy a home in New York City today for $45,000. But they can’t reap the massive perceived value of that home on the other end, thereby preserving it for future generations.
One of the risks, one of the challenges, to this model is a controversial decision available to the cooperators themselves, which is to remove that resale restriction. This was never intended in the program. But the cat is out of the bag, and there are very intense debates within co-ops about whether to go down this road, and the book centers around debates at two of these co-ops as a way to look at how we maintain these great public goods that we have, once we build them, and given that this is a very successful model we already have, we can learn a lot as we seek to build new forms of social housing today, how to build in their maintenance long term.
If there’s one thing I want to leave folks with today, it’s really the idea that as much as we talk about the physical and the financial maintenance of these buildings and these communities, I think it’s particularly important to also be focused on what I think of as the social maintenance of these places, the norms, the ideas that underlie this kind of housing, because the laws change, loopholes get opened, and the thing that allows us to preserve housing as a public good is the concept of this home as infrastructure, as a human right, not as a commodity.
Steve Dubb: Rev. Rae Chen Huang, talk about the state of social housing, organizing, and the national trends you’re seeing.
Rae Chen Huang: I am the senior organizer at Housing Now, which is a statewide housing justice coalition in the state of California. Some of the things we’re seeing around trends and in social housing, organizing, is that unlike four years ago, when our coalition first decided that we wanted to focus on social housing as a priority for our long-term work—to change our housing system, to make it actually equitable and just—there was very little conversation about social housing. It was just a few of us who happened to have read a book about social housing, or visited a country where social housing was popular, and we started having conversations.
Now, four years later, it’s amazing how many articles—thanks to our wonderful partners here, Steve and Miriam, who have helped put this together—are beginning to be published about social housing, where we’re seeing more education around social housing with tenants. What we are seeing is a number of tenant unions and tenant organizations working together to where buildings are, you know, run by slumlords, or where there has been such an extreme rising of rents, or in other cases where the Low Income Housing Tax Credit units, which is buildings that have used the tax credits to be able to keep it affordable. They have an expiration date, and so, after a period of 30 years or 55 years when that expiration date ends, the affordability of that building is removed, essentially, and there’s no more tax credits to support that. And so the owners of that building then raise the rents to 300 percent in the case of here in Los Angeles, the hillside villa apartments in Chinatown. And so we’ve seen tenants gather together and say, you know, we need to remove these buildings from these profit interests and put it into our own hands. And what are ways that we can actually try and buy back this building, apply pressure to this corporate landlord that’s a slumlord, to pressure them to give up the building and expose what’s happening, and really put it back into community hands, which is social housing.
And so that has been the kind of boon of organizing that’s been happening amongst tenants. A huge piece of that is just simply political education, having local meetings, webinars, workshops around social housing itself, and then also creating policies and putting forth legislation that can help move in that direction. And that would be, for example, various opportunity to purchase acts. So we have COPA (Community Opportunity to Purchase Act); TOPA, Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act. Even MOPA, manufactured housing opportunities to purchase act. We have all these basically giving the first right of refusal to tenants or to residents to be able to purchase buildings that are going up for sale, or ought to be going up for sale because of how badly they’re being taken care of.
Other things that are happening as well in national trends and organizing is that there’s been a number of developments of community land trust cooperatives and land-back movements led by indigenous communities and organizations, to be able to buy back land and have it owned by communities to have them run it. There’s a number of revenue campaigns that have been successful, for example, recently in Seattle, to fund social housing development authorities, which are offices that are focused on being able to acquire, preserve, and develop social housing opportunities within those cities and districts.
I wanted to highlight in particular one, which is that mobile home parks a lot of times, because it is a smaller segment of our housing options here in the U.S., it is a growing one. Particularly, it’s been historically a place where there’s been naturally occurring affordable housing, where that’s sort of one of the last resorts of housing for families—and with the same way that we’ve been seeing corporate landlords completely take over our units of housing, of apartment buildings and complexes, we’ve been seeing that also in mobile home parks. And so there’s also been an effort by mobile home residents to purchase their own parks. And I wanted to highlight one in Fresno, the Communidad Nuevo Lago, that recently purchased their park. And now these residents who have lived there, and who were being essentially pushed out, have been able to gather together to purchase their park.
We recently held a first-time-ever national in-person convening of organizers across the country who are working on local social housing campaigns and statewide social housing campaigns, to start to organize collectively to advocate for what we need on a national scale to be able to help us move towards the goals that we have.
Fernando Martí: I teach at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and University of San Francisco. I’m an architect and an artist and I’ve been involved in the social housing discussion in San Francisco. For a long time I was co-director at the Council of Community Housing Organizations, which is our local coalition of affordable housing developers and community advocates for the last 11 years.
One of the things that was part of our agenda and challenge was expanding among our members and the general public the vision of what housing is or could be. For so long, affordable housing has been defined as housing for the neediest, those most in need of housing, which is one way of looking at what the country needs to be producing, but very different from thinking of housing as a human right that should be available to all, and that should be part of our conversation in the same way that we think about Social Security as a right that we have, and something that is needed for the infrastructure of healthy cities.
A little bit about what we’ve been doing in San Francisco. In 2019 we passed a couple of ballot measures, one of which called for authorizing the city to develop 10,000 units of social housing, and the second one, a revenue measure based on transfer tax of real estate sales dedicated to innovative housing solutions, which included thinking about broad social housing, limited equity co-ops, other kinds of housing, and especially the kind of preservation programs that Rae mentioned. That same year, legislatively we passed San Francisco’s Community Opportunity to Purchase Act.
I think it was the first such right to purchase legislation in the state, maybe the first one in the country after Washington, D.C.’s TOPA, which has been, in effect since, I think, the 1980s. When multifamily buildings are put up for sale, the state has a position in buying those properties, taking them out of the market and creating decommodified housing. San Francisco’s very specific version kind of gives nonprofits a first right to purchase.
Since then we’ve worked on a number of revenue measures, one which is very long term—trying to develop a public bank for the city of San Francisco, a municipally run bank that one of its primary purposes would be to provide low-risk and low-interest lending capacity for the development of social housing.
We also passed recently our revenue bond legislation … and are looking for a … partner to help develop a new agency within the city and county of San Francisco that would oversee the development of social housing. What that looks like when its financing mechanisms and so forth are still in the works.
I can talk more later about the details, but that’s a little bit about what we’ve been doing.
Along with what other folks have talked about already—thinking about housing as a human right, as a decommodified thing that we have access to—is thinking about housing as homes rather than units, as places that are really where we live, where we develop ourselves, as who we are, our children. And that’s a very different way of looking at things than output of units. That’s another piece to add to defining social housing.
Dubb: Kristen, I know you wrote a piece for Shelterforce last year about what’s missing in the social housing conversation.
Kristen Hackett: I currently work as a community organizer with My Eden Voice, a member-led organization in the unincorporated area of Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area. But prior to joining that team, last year I was living in New York City, where I was completing a Ph.D. and organizing alongside public housing residents across the city to preserve public housing.
It was with these neighbors, and from this vantage point, that I first learned about social housing, and from the beginning we had some concerns.
For one, my comrades felt like it was like, if others want to decommodify deeply affordable housing and resident management, that they should join the fight to preserve existing public housing and expand what that term means in the U.S. in a technical and regulatory sense. Instead, the pivot on the left was read as a class- and race-based fracture, with many concluding they want what we have, but they don’t want it with us.
These feelings were reinforced by articles that promoted social housing alongside negative falsehoods about public housing, in an effort to distinguish between these two ideas. One of these enduring myths that aim to enhance the image of social housing was the idea that public housing was exclusive because it only served low-income families. By contrast, social housing has been promoted as a mixed-income model that would serve more households across a larger income range.
And this myth was just regurgitated to me again while preparing my remarks for today. However, as many residents will tell you, public housing is mixed income. There are households living on less than $10,000 a year, and there are households earning more than $100,000 a year. And as evidence of that, the New York City housing authority, just a couple years ago, created an income cap for public housing of $120,000 a year, and some people did lose their subsidy about that. So there’s a very broad range of income levels of people who are living in public housing, one of the largest remaining social housing models, right now in the country.
And this is the income range that the best versions of social housing would be able to stably and affordably house. But instead, there’s a lot of fine print in the plans for social housing that admit that without the federal funding that public housing has, social housing is unlikely to address the needs of households most in need.
In my opinion this means that therefore, with social housing moving forward right now, we’re at risk of recreating and deepening the dual housing system and the social exclusions that capitalism relies on. And this is highly concerning at this particular historical juncture, where houselessness is steadily rising and is now legally considered a criminal and fugitive state, where climate change is making houselessness a more life-threatening experience, where new construction that relies on modern techniques is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore worsens these realities. And more generally, we seem to be ignoring the signs with blinking lights, telling us that capitalism and its practices of society-making are at odds with life on the planet overall.
It is further concerning when we consider who is bearing the brunt of these changes at this time, which is the same communities that have been excluded from housing and land and state care since the American project began, and threats to these communities are trumped up further under the current administration, play on words intended.
To me these are some of the uncomfortable truths that we need to contend with if we want the slogan “housing for all” to be more than a catchphrase or worse, a red herring. Housing is central to individual and collective lives, and it’s central to whatever system we use to organize our lives.
We need to work towards undoing housing’s central role in the capitalist system to begin working towards a future where housing is a human right. And I think to begin that work, we need to focus on undoing the relations of social exclusion that the present system relies on.
Axel-Lute: What is social housing? What does that phrase mean to you? How else do you hear it being used? And what do you think are the promises and the dangers of those different angles?
Huang: I think Kristen did a great job of capturing what the phrase means to me personally and in my work, and for the organizations and members that I represent. Which is that when we hear “social housing,” we hear “housing is a human right.” We hear that housing cannot be a commodity. Housing needs to be a right and a public good for everybody, no matter what race, gender, sexuality class, background.
I do want to, though, lean into just what is social housing. Housing Now is a member of the Alliance for Housing Justice, which is a coalition that was started during the first term of Trump’s administration [when] we saw attacks on public housing. And so the Alliance for Housing Justice was created, and one of the goals since that time is a focus on social housing. And so, together with a collective of other organizations across the nation, we worked collaboratively to identify exactly what are the main principles that we all gathered around, that we felt could capture where we were on our diverse experiences and development of social housing [but] could still carry out what our mutual interests were, or mutual values were.
Those principles are that it would be socially owned, owned by community, it would be permanently affordable, because we see a lot of current affordable units under the low income housing tax credits—which is the primary way of creating affordable housing—that they all have limited covenants, and so actually social housing would be one that would be permanently affordable, permanently decommodified, so that it would not return to the market and become again a profit driven commodity; that it would be under community control so that communities could determine for themselves what exactly they needed for their housing.
Some [communities] are made up of young families who might want a small park, others might need actually working washers and dryers; or when your lights need to get fixed, that you would actually have resident control to be able to make sure that your units are constantly updated. Your home is getting the modernization it needs for it to be successful and to be resilient against the changing climate. Another is that it would be anti-racist and equitable, so that way it’d be available to all income levels; and particularly highlighting the fact that for those who need it the most, which is low income, extremely low-income households. It would have strong tenant security. We’ve seen in other countries that that’s been a huge component of successful social housing models—because if there is no security, then what is the point of a home? It’s certainly not a viable long term, solution or sustainable; that it be high quality and accessible, and that it’d be forever sustainable. So that way we can ensure that we are moving towards a long term success of a world where our children actually have a place to thrive in the future with the changing needs of our of our country, with climate change.
Now to answer a little bit more, what is social housing? How is it being used? And what are the promises and dangers of the different angles? I would say that the promise, of course, is that we would create a system where housing is no longer a commodity. … I don’t see in the short-term social housing being the model of the whole system of the country.
We are currently not in a housing system or in a political climate or environment by which we can make every single home owned by the public or by community ownership. But I think that it is a promise to be able to stabilize the rising prices that people just can’t afford right now. But the danger that we are seeing right now is—as we think about and try and apply social housing across the country—there is a concern that, for example, there is some interest in trying to identify where we can find the right funding for social housing, development and acquisition, and some people have wondered about private funding sources. One of the challenges, and one of the dangers, with that is that if we do lean into private funding for social housing, it does then return back into the same old situation that we have, in which case, then, it becomes another place of profit, or we are held accountable by needing to basically put that money back into the private interest, and then we lose that actual ability to make the social housing available to everybody and actually keep it affordable. The other [challenge] is that
we want to ensure that one of the ways that social housing succeeds is that it doesn’t have a repeat of history.
Historically, we have made housing unaffordable or unavailable and inaccessible to communities of a certain class or a certain race or whatnot. And so what are the ways that we are going to have very strong protections and ensure that, as our housing system continues, that we create strong legal protections to ensure that social housing is provided for those who need it the most, and those who are oftentimes historically left out again and again out of the housing market, out of an ability to actually have a home that is stable and sustainable for them? That [means looking at] where housing is built, how housing is built, and then also resident control, being able to determine for themselves what they need in that housing and ensuring that it doesn’t return back to ownership or management by private entities who want to control it—and also even I would say, if you will, racist and classist ways of thinking about who gets to own and how much they get to own, and how available social housing [will be] to extremely low income and low income communities.
Tarleton: As I’ve been talking to folks across the country about social housing, one of the more intuitive ways that I found to think about it, and this does differ in slight ways to how Rae has framed it, is that it’s any permanently affordable housing that is kept outside of the market and has some element of resident governance.
One of the areas in which that definition [differs from] how Rae framed it is that I actually don’t think, necessarily, private ownership is incompatible with the concept of social housing, when there are strong tenant protections, when tenant unions have leverage, when residents and tenants have a say in the governance of their homes.
I see the Community Service Society in New York has done great work on social housing, where they talk about it as a continuum. There are many different models of this that range from public housing as the largest and most significant source of social housing in the U.S. to limited equity co-ops, to rentals with strong tenant protections, and each has drawbacks, benefits, different funding models, different abilities to push them forward, and I think frankly, an approach to as many different kinds of this model that fit under that overall umbrella is quite important, and still fulfill almost all of the principles that Rae outlined in terms of accessibility and serving folks from across a range of different income levels.
Hackett: A lot of the way I understood social housing initially was sort of like, “Oh, it’s not public housing,” and even folks that I was talking to at that time that were organizing around social housing were saying we just can’t use the word “social housing,” because it’s been so denigrated over time.
But I think the other benefit of the frame “social housing” is that it is a broader term that refers to lots of different kinds of housing models. Its elasticity is sort of helpful for building a larger tent. And like Rae was saying, it’s really set around a set of values and commitments that defines sort of what social housing is.
But I do think that the technical and financial questions are really important for thinking about how successful we are in achieving that and I think there’s a lot more work to be done on that. Some of my concerns around how social housing is being used—in part because of the elasticity of the term— is around the new local and city housing developments that are to some extent being pegged as new versions of public housing or public housing for the 21st century. And in these models, like in Montgomery County, we’re seeing bond-reliant housing developments be created.
And we’re not talking enough about what those bonds are or whether or not that constitutes decommodified housing. Bonds are not benign right there. They’re central to reproducing and exacerbating inequality, the inequality that not only characterizes our economy, but is making life increasingly difficult, making political wins increasingly difficult.
Bonds are seen generally as a mundane aspect of public financing, but more so they’re a tax-free investment opportunity for a bond-holding class that expects a return on that investment, whether or not the public benefits from that bond materialize.If you’re looking to understand that more, I would refer people to Sandy Brian Hager’s work.
The other concerning trend is that there’s an emphasis on relying on cross-subsidization rather than real subsidization by the federal government. And what I argue in that op-ed is that that tendency basically means that moderate- and middle-income households become a structural necessity and a priority in providing housing to those households, and that puts low-income neighbors and people who are in desperate need of housing as secondary, and reliant on housing those moderate- and middle-income households.
And that’s very concerning, given the trends of the political moment. And so I wanted to highlight the need to think very carefully about the funding options like Rae was saying. From my perspective there’s a need really to go back to the federal government, and demand that money, and that should be the short- and long-term goal of the social housing movement. That’s what provides the long-term stability and the deep affordability and the ability to address households at all income levels.
Martí: I’ll do a counterpoint to Kristen. Which is simply, I think we’re in a point of a lot of experimentation and a lot of trying to do something in the United States that I don’t think has ever been done. That was perhaps part of Catherine Bauer’s vision in the 1930s, in the development of public housing as a counter to segregation, as an all-encompassing integrated housing for all program and system.
A lot of the pushback to Catherine Bauer‘s vision was from a coalition against socialist housing, among other various capitalist cohorts that came together to really transform that vision into kind of housing of last resort, and [said] that the market would be the only thing that would provide housing for everyone else. And so here we are in a system where we’re reliant on tax credit investors who get a tax break in return for investing in low-income housing, and market-rate housing that is dependent on investors who demand minimum 16 percent returns on their investment.
So we have this sort of bifurcated system, both [types] of which only work for very few people, and leave the rest of us out—people on the market and at the low income—and also out because of the scarcity of it. So in this kind of experimentation, I think we’re going to be seeing over the next 10 years a number of incremental solutions, very imperfect. So whether they rely on revenue bonds that might be getting 4 or 5 percent returns for those investors, they’re still Wall Street investors. But if it means that we start to see a broader set of housing, we might be seeing the cross-subsidy that Kristen mentioned.
And all along that there will be dangers. Does that create a certain dependence? Does that mean we’re just focusing on a very narrow spectrum of workforce housing or middle-income housing to the detriment of that broad vision? I’m not sure how it’s all going to pan out. I think it’s going to be an incremental thing. And I think our role collectively is to stay clear to the vision of that breadth of housing for everyone.
Dubb: Jonathan, give us a little bit of historical perspective. Is social housing new to the United States? And to the extent that it’s not new, what are the notable successes of what we have learned from past experiences that sustain those efforts for the long term?
Tarleton: As our conversation has already showed, it’s definitely not new. We obviously have public housing, which has been a very successful model in many parts of the country, and through austerity, has been undercut over and over again over time as part of a political campaign against it.
We also have the various opportunity to purchase acts. There are a variety of programs that have led to small bits of decommodified housing across the country. A lot of my work has been on the Mitchell-Lama program in New York City and state, and New York City alone built over 140,000 apartments between the mid 1950s and early 1970s, much of which is still with us, particularly on the on the co-op side.
As far as lessons that we can take, the idea that social housing doesn’t fit the U.S. … you know, it can happen here just as fascism can and is. So this is about building the world we want to live in. And we have existing models that do function in the states already. We’ve seen broad interest and growth in community land trusts as well.
We live in a world in which housing is supposed to serve many, many different purposes. Homeownership has been propped up as a substitute for an actual social safety net, and so people are forced in many cases to try to instrumentalize their homes for profit, or to borrow against or to risk in order to pay for other social needs. This is something I see happening in these privatization debates in Mitchell-Lama co-ops. Folks say, “Well, how do I pay for eldercare? How do I pay for this emergent health care need?” And without that broader ecosystem of support, it’s quite difficult to maintain these models, especially when they are not the norm. This gets easier as you scale it, it becomes more and more common. Folks become less attached to the idea of homeownership as building wealth through appreciation of an asset, and more home as a way to build wealth through stability and savings, through low housing costs and ability to pay for other needs and other dreams. That’s a key takeaway from some of the work in New York City and state. Over time as the pressures, the profit motives that could come from privatizing existing social housing, or commodifying it, as that grows, we need to have a reaction from both the state, from residents, from our nonprofit partners . . . there are folks on this call who do incredible advocacy work to maintain this social housing.
That sort of social maintenance is really key. We need to reaffirm the purpose of this housing again and again over time. And that’s a narrative challenge as well. [As] Kristen was mentioning, we should be critical of the funding sources and the role of funding sources, and how we preserve this.
One of the things that I always note that some of the only tools, some of the only incentives to maintain existing social housing is “Oh, we’re the city or state. We’ll give you cheap debt. We’ll give you cheap debt to pay for all of those needs to replace the roof, to replace the windows, replace the boilers, meet these new requirements.” And if that is the only mechanism, and the only argument we have is, well, this is good for you financially, it actually reifies the idea that home is about just money.
It’s about what is the best financial deal here, and social housing is a great financial deal for many of its residents. We are about people’s basic needs and material needs and meeting those. But in that work to maintain it, we have to also drive forward the narrative sense that well, housing is, in fact, a public good, and we have to build that into our culture and our messaging constantly.
Axel-Lute: Jonathan, you mentioned scale. How do we scale up these various forms? We’ve mentioned several different kinds of decommodified resident-governed housing, public housing, land trusts, cooperatives, various versions of resident-owned communities and manufactured housing. How can we take these ideas and the history that we have, and right now, in this current moment—which is a tough one—strengthen them and scale them up?
Martí: Thinking about scale and thinking about the level of commitment—I think Jonathan used the word infrastructure—it’s really important for our cities and our states and for the federal government to begin to look at housing as infrastructure, as part of what makes a city or a region work and work well. If you can’t house people if they are in unstable conditions, that is not good for your economy, and for whatever your vision is.
It should be seen as part of the infrastructure, just like transportation is, just like all the other infrastructure projects, which then leads to [the question] how do we fund this? And you know what we’ve done in the United States, this tax credit program, has funded what—maybe 2 million units of low income housing across the United States, for folks earning mostly less than 50 percent of the median in their area. We have a mortgage interest relief program for homeowners. That is the largest federal subsidy for housing of any kind. That’s what our federal government does: It does homeownership. And then it gives tax breaks to rich people so they can invest in low-income housing.
Can we do just direct subsidies or some combination of direct subsidy? We’re gonna build it, or we’re gonna lend you the money to build it at a very low interest, you know something
comparable to what our Treasury bills are at, or maybe a little higher, 3 percent, 4 percent, something that stays on par with inflation.
And so when we model this, even in San Francisco, even in a city that has probably one of the most expensive housing construction costs in the country—I think anywhere between $800,000 to $1 million, just to build one unit—if you are not paying the kind of returns that market rate investors want, you can build this stuff. You could build a lot of social housing, and that’s where that cross-subsidy comes in, not cross subsidy for market-rate developers, not cross subsidy for investors who are trying to get their 16 percent returns. But the kind of thing that at a scale that we are used to doing as government, when we build bridges, when we build sewers, when we build all this other stuff that we consider public infrastructure. It is entirely possible, but it requires a change or an expansion of how government sees its role. Once you change that you’ll find the solutions.
Dubb: Public housing needs to be social housing. “Public housing,” that phrase, got delegitimized and now there’s a possibility of the same thing happening to “social housing.” How do we learn from that? And there’s a challenge in balancing housing stability for those who need it most, and getting the political support to sustain social housing. So how do you think about that? This is sort of the universalism versus targeting question, in a way.
Hackett: The question of how we build broad support for the social housing movement or the housing movement in general, we have to think about who’s the base here. And who are we eliciting broader support from? And I do think a lot of the time we’re thinking about nonprofit, affordable housing developers, and maybe some elected officials. But the base that needs to be activated and engaged are the neighbors who are most negatively impacted by the existing housing system, or, as Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis [authors of Abolish Rent] say, the “unhousing system.”
And we need to learn from the experiences and listen to the perspectives of neighbors who are confronting this life-threatening experience of being unhoused, and those who are teetering on the edge of that experience. It’s really from that vantage point that we need to deliberate on our housing futures and the models that are needed.
What’s really concerning to me right now is that the loudest voices on social housing are saying that we need to exclude some of these neighbors to pursue housing for all, and I want to go back to what you’re saying about successful models of social housing. The narrative around public housing is really negative, right? That this was a failed model. And that is a myth, because that housing program is almost 100 years old and can provide stable, affordable, long-term housing for people who would otherwise not be housed. Right? It’s the only social housing program that’s really doing that.
And the reason that that’s effective is because of the federal investment in that program. And right now, if there were more federal investment in that program, the buildings could be renovated, the program could be expanded with enough community power and agitation. I think we are looking at re-regulating public housing and expanding that program towards actually housing all people. So to me the question is an organizing question.
And we have to think about who’s the base here and who do we really need to be activating and who needs to be centered in the movement and defining the answers. And to me those are the neighbors that are most negatively impacted. So I don’t see those things at odds at all. I see the only way that we achieve the values that we’re laying out right now around housing for all and long-term stability and resident management. The only way we achieve that actually is, if we reach out to neighbors that are bearing the brunt and the most violence of this unhousing system right now.
Tarleton: I agree with Kristen that this is an organizing question. I don’t think we really have the luxury to say we’re going to do one or the other. How I expect we will be able to approach social housing is investing in many, many models at once, and through doing that building a broad coalition while still centering folks, as Kristen said, who are most in the crosshairs of the violence of the existing system. So I think we can do both. This has to do with the many ways of doing it, investing in the existing models that we have, preserving the models that we already have, taking existing housing that is in the private market and socializing it through these opportunity to purchase acts, and developing new housing that is permanently affordable and social from the beginning.
And all of those are going to serve a variety of different kinds of people, and I think that is ultimately in service of building a durable social housing system overall and building the ecosystem that can support that durability.
Huang: There’s been a lot of debate about even using the term “social housing.” In fact, there’s been numerous narrative research done on what to call it, if not social housing, and, in fact, in many cases legislators who have introduced social housing legislation, did not even call their bill social housing. They called it something else that maybe included social housing in the actual text of the language itself, because most people don’t know what social housing is, and all the stereotypes, or it doesn’t quite lead to what it provides.
But I don’t know that it’s even useful for the public to know the term. What’s useful for the public is just to have the access of affordable housing. I think the use of the word is beneficial for policymakers and for the advocates who are calling for a different system. But what we really need to do is just simply change the system to one—which is what we’re talking about—so that way, it becomes so readily available. Because most people, when you’re looking for a place to buy or looking for a place to rent, you don’t care what it’s called. You don’t even care necessarily [about] the technicalities of the ownership or the management, you just want to be able to say this is an affordable place that I can live, and that it’s a healthy place for me to raise my kids. That is all that people I think, are generally asking for.
I also wanted to return to the question . . . around public housing and social housing, in that we oftentimes tiptoe around the fact that the main reason why public housing is now being seen as the ghetto—or whatever, in this mythology that we create—is simply because of classism and racism. We’ve completely disinvested in areas which we associate with public housing. When you think of public housing, because of the racist system that we’ve had, and also Hollywood filmmaking, I immediately think of, unfortunately, like primarily poor Black folk in a neighborhood that’s been not taken care of, and that’s what I think of when I think of public housing.
That is not the reality. That is something that we have both projected and created ourselves as a system. And so what we need to do here in our social housing model is to say that public housing as a policy is actually a solution for our country.
What can we do to ensure that social housing does not become a repeat of the classist, racist, disinvestment, to lead back into that situation and also ensure that we have very strong protections—whatever it might be, laws and regulations—to ensure that it doesn’t go down that route, so that we protect the people who are actually living on those spaces?
I don’t know that the argument is necessarily about, is it mixed income/is it not mixed income? It’s about actually providing the kind of housing system that is going to ensure that everybody who lives in it is going to be able to stay in there forever and not be worried about being kicked out if they lose their job for three months.
Or because of the current political climate that now, if you’re an immigrant, you’re going to be at high risk of being attacked by ICE, or whatever it might be, that [you’re] going to be at risk to stay in [your] house.
And so we need to be able to ensure that this is a long term, permanent system that can actually create stability for families. And I think that’s the most important thing that we need to take away from that.
Axel-Lute: What is promising and possible at the state and local level right now?
Huang: It is hard sometimes when you open the news not to feel really pessimistic about the opportunities of creating an equitable system for everybody. And particularly thinking about housing, especially as Medicaid is being cut [and] Section 8 vouchers are likely going to be cut, and so on and so forth. We’re just losing a lot of our safety net. So what’s the opportunity? And what is the promise of what we can do now in this moment, and that, I think, really is at the local and state levels. And I’m really excited about this and the fact that because the federal government is basically pulling away from their ability to do their job to support the needs for our local and state level work. What it means is the local and state level legislators are in a moment where they are trying to think creatively about what they can possibly do.
There is an opening right now where people are looking for real solutions, where they’re looking to figure out what to do. And this is the opportunity to really mobilize people to say, well, we can change the situation for ourselves. And it builds out into what we can do on a federal level eventually, right? And so the things and opportunities we have right now is that there are local campaigns of organizers who are, for example, reclaiming homes that have been neglected by the state
I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Reclaiming Our Homes campaign, here in Los Angeles—and sorry I’m highlighting California so much, but this is where I live, and this is where I work—but where we had unhoused family members and individuals take over buildings that were for decades left alone because the state had originally planned on building a highway through this area. So they bought a bunch of homes, properties, and then they just left them vacant, and they haven’t done anything with them. And so unhoused organizers decided to get together and claim those homes and say, look, the state needs to do something with these homes and they’re right now trying to purchase those homes and put them into a community land trust so that these homes are actually going to be used.
It is at the local and state level that we are able to really build the kind of organizing power and movement to push our electeds and build a case for the level of expectation of what we need. And have a larger imagination about what it means for us to have a housing system that actually provides for everybody.
So I would say at the local and state level we have an opportunity now to lean in to the uncomfortableness, if not anger, that people are feeling in this moment [when] our safety net is being taken away, and we need to not just demand it back, but we need to take it back. And that is what is possible, and that is what is promising for us in this moment.
Dubb: One question was raised was about Mitchell-Lama and how that works. Then, how do you think about social housing in a rural or more rural place, as opposed to an urban place like New York City? And then another question was about tenants and the role of tenant management, tenant organizing. Each of you can jump in where you feel most comfortable.
Tarleton: I can speak briefly to the Mitchell-Lama question. Mitchell-Lamas come in both rental and limited equity co-op varieties. And the official name for the law that created was the Limited Profit Housing Companies Act of 1955. And basically the deal was that the city and state paid, in many cases, up to 95 percent of the project costs. So it was deep, deep public investment in the construction of these developments, and those developments get a variety of ongoing subsidy, including relatively inexpensive financing, property tax abatements, and particularly in the co-op side of things residents are the owners of the building. They manage the finances of those buildings, and adjust their housing costs, ongoing maintenance accordingly, to take care of the needs of their community.
Huang: There is social housing in rural areas, and in Inland Empire and Central Valley, for example, here in California, there are community land trusts that are being developed. When we think of social housing, a lot of people tend to think of apartment buildings that are bought and owned by communities or by nonprofits. But in the case of a lot of more rural areas, they are actually purchasing homes. And homes are part of community land trusts, homes are part of co-ops, and so it doesn’t look different at all in terms of its provision. It’s just the building structure is different. I would say the organizing challenge is more around the tenant organizing side, which is what I have found here in California. There is a dearth of tenant organizing in more rural areas, and that is not because of the lack of need at all, but rather it is the lack of resources going to rural areas. There’s a lot more philanthropy groups that give funding to organizations in urban areas. And because there’s a lot of focus on that as well as the fact that when people live more closely together . . . I live in an apartment building, so I literally see every neighbor every time they go out of their house, I can say, “Hi! Hey, is your water working today?” And then we can talk about the challenges we face.
But when you’re a couple miles away, it’s really hard to be able to organize collectively as much. And so there is a real need to be able to put more energy into organizing more of our rural areas. And I think that’s something for us to really be thinking about as a whole housing movement.
And not just about housing, let’s be honest. It’s about all areas. When you do even just look at our political map, who are the folks who are joining together, banding together on more progressive perspectives? It’s usually in urban areas versus rural areas. And it’s because we’re just not doing the organizing. And we’re not collaborating and collectivizing our ideas. And so we’re really just isolating ourselves into these bubbles. And so we’ve got to find a way to really break down those walls and connect the dots.
Tarleton: To piggyback on the rural question, the community land trust movement in the U.S. started with an agricultural cooperative in rural Georgia. So these models are by no means exclusive to urban areas, rural areas, or suburban areas. They can be done in any context,and there are different models that suit that.
Someone mentioned manufactured housing communities. ROC U.S.A. does incredible work to help manufactured housing communities own their own land, as many people know. If you live in a quote unquote, mobile home—which is not typically actually mobile—you often own the structure, but not the land underneath it. That is a perfect setup for developing a community land trust, because . . . divorcing the ownership of a structure from the land is the fundamental way in which a community land trust works. So these models can really fit anywhere. It’s just an organizing challenge and a financing challenge.
Axel-Lute: How do we avoid the demonizing of public housing that happened in the past? Real estate interests and various others were able the first time around in this country to really demonize public housing. What lessons can we bring out of that? Some folks have said that one of the lessons that we get from that is that we really do need to aggressively make it serve more folks so that it cannot be shoved over into one corner as if to say, “Well, that’s just for those people,” or, as Kristen said before, maybe make people more aware that it does serve a wide range of folks. But this does seem like a central question in the organizing, as we move forward with the vision that we’re discussing.
Hackett: From my perspective right now, I’m more concerned that the social housing fight will be co-opted by capital and not necessarily demonized. But actually, what we end up calling social housing won’t be the same as what our values are, and some of that is because of the financing models that we do see moving forward. And even though the state doing is that, that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s a decommodified model. And . . . the way that we counteract that is through organizing and building networks and channels and connecting urban and rural. And getting very clear on what we mean by social housing and getting unified on what the short- and long-term goals of that fight are.
And I do think there’s got to be a tension between building a big tent and pursuing a social housing-for-all model but also making sure that the people who are bearing the brunt right now of this unhousing system are centered in those spaces and in that divisioning of what the housing that we’re pursuing is.
But my concern really is more so that it will be co-opted. And potentially we’re seeing that happen already.
Dubb: There was a question in the chat about regulation raising the price of affordable housing. I’ve seen estimates of $500,000 to $600,000 per unit in Los Angeles, for example. Are there ways of changing policy to allow for building of social housing at scale there? In addition to providing money, we’ve created the system of housing tax credits as opposed to just providing grants to build housing. So that’s one source of inefficiency. But how do we think about making the system more efficient in terms of monetary output that’s required per unit of housing?
Martí: There’s something beautiful about the phrase “abundance.” What we need is an abundance of investment. What we need is an abundance of public housing. When you get the developers—nonprofit or market rate, or whatever kind of developers they are—off their ideological high horse and say, “Hey, let’s look at your numbers.” Soft costs are always 10 to 15 percent. There might be some slight variations, but that’s a percent of a total cost. So that $600,000 unit is not because of regulations. That’s a slight little piece, and it was the same piece that it was 20 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago. Of course it’s a pain in the butt to have more regulations, and of course it would help to smooth things out and reduce those. But that is not the problem.
It’s really important to understand what are the things that we can improve around the edges.
One of the things I heard back from one politician was, “Well, I can’t do anything about the funding, so I just have to talk about regulations,” which is, you know, just a defeat, an admission that as a politician, they are not willing to do the work to actually talk about the kinds of investment that we need. And I think for a lot of folks that sort of honing in on regulations, which is a real problem. I’m not saying it’s not a real problem. . . . But if you can’t make your project pencil out, whether it’s a fully, publicly subsidized project because you don’t have the full investment in there, whether it’s tax credit, whether it’s the market rate, whatever, because the costs are there, the costs are not the regulations, the costs are everything else. It’s, you know, labor materials, tariffs, you name it.
I think that gets back to what our vision is, and our vision has to be about the role of the public in investing in a housing infrastructure that houses folks so that we have cities that work, which was the original vision of public housing.
Huang: I think it’s more that we just don’t have the political will. We say that we don’t have the money. We have the money. We say that we there’s too much regulation. If we want to get something done, we get it done.
What’s the issue with regulation? There’s too many people who need to pass the pot and fill out the sheets and check out the space. If we had enough people, and we were paying people to quickly go through the process to get it done, oh, they’ll get it done!
We keep giving reasons, like the system is so broken, [for] why we can’t do it. We just need the political will to fix the system. We just need to get politicians and our electeds to actually own what their job is and say, “It is a priority to make sure that every single person in my city and in my state and in my country is housed,” and if they feel that strongly about it, they will find a way to get it done.
I remember here in Los Angeles I was talking to a community organizer, Estuardo Mazariegos, who was telling me that there was a park in Los Angeles, that they and their organization, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, were working together to try and update that park.
And they were asking the city, and the city was like, “Oh, we can’t do anything about it. We don’t have the money.” And so they did a huge action. And they basically forced the electeds’ hand. The next week [the city was] like, “Oh, we just found $2 million lying around to fix up the park.” So there are ways to do this. I think that I would call out all of our electeds who say “I just can’t do anything, I’m in just my own little realm, I can’t.” No! Like BS! They have the ability to do this if they really believe in it, and if they’re ready to really fight for it, and that’s the thing that we need.
And I would call on us as a collective here, every single person who’s listening on this call. We have the ability and power to move. That is actually what that’s what democracy is. But we have to demand it. And we have to take it. We have to move it, and that’s what I would probably say in terms of like, you know, the pushback.
Axel-Lute: Since we’re mentioning financing, I want to bring up a question Fernando had mentioned earlier about public banks, lower expectation of returns without maybe some of the issues of the larger bond market. I just wanted to open the floor for ideas about what seems to be working at the state and local level, or what you think about interim steps where people are engaging with the market in the meantime.
And I want to call out Grounded Solutions’ Homes for the Future project, in which they are just buying homes back from the corporate landlords and renting them for a little while so that they can pay back the investors, but at a very specific rate, not 16 percent. And then they’re going to go into community ownership.
So that’s a way trying to engage. And right now [we have] a system that we don’t want to be operating this way in the long run, but not waiting until it’s gone to be trying to get some homes back and under community control. What’s your vision of financing this, when we have that political will to make it happen?
Tarleton: There was a question earlier about what’s happening at the local and state level that is positive. And I don’t think everyone would agree with this, but I think the work that Seattle is doing, Chicago is doing, to create public developers and fund those public developers, is a great interim step forward. We need mechanisms to create this housing and creative financing solutions that are not ideal.
This is going to be messy. There are going to be steps along the way that do not meet all of our threshold ideas of what this housing should be, but that help us build that broader base. So I just wanted to throw out those two examples, as you know, steps in that direction that may not be perfect, but are useful.
Martí: Alluding back to the question of scale, and how we scale up .. Is it more direct subsidies? Is it public bank financing? Whatever the tool is, there is a question which in my previous job, we’d go back and forth about. You know, how much do we talk about the scale of need, and what the numbers are that we should be investing in the housing that we need. So folks in the social housing circles, they love to talk about Vienna. Vienna is the cat’s meow of social housing, and one of the numbers that’s often thrown out is 60 percent of Vienna housing, all the housing, is socially subsidized in one way or another, between publicly owned housing, cooperatives, and other kinds. You look at a bunch of other cities that have done relatively well, 60 percent ends up being this number that’s often thrown out, or that it’s what is being produced.
I don’t know how this looks in other states, but California requires every region to develop what’s called a regional housing needs assessment. And it’s a number that’s done every eight years. And it says this is how much housing we should be producing, based on economic growth and demographic changes and job growth. And lo and behold the number that they come out with every eight years is that 60 percent of the population cannot afford market rate housing. Sixty percent of all the housing being produced ought to be some kind of subsidized housing if you were to adequately house everyone in that region, where they would not be spending more than (and we can quibble about where they came up with it) 30 percent of their income in housing. And so we have metrics that we can use. We know the scale of building that we should be building, or taking over those vacant units that either the state or the capitalists are holding off from the supply, in order to house everyone adequately.
So there’s a number we can figure out, and that number will change depending on the region and housing costs and whatever. But we now have what those should be. And then we can start to say, OK, how are we going to get that money? Are you going to take that money to build housing, or are you going to double your police force? Or are you going to tax sales of multimillion-dollar properties, or whatever it might be? That is the revenue source that will get to meeting that goal.
Axel-Lute: All right, we’re going to end with that vision in front of us: Sixty percent of our housing as social housing.
Thank you.
About the Moderator
Comments