🏡💚 People are talking social housing
May 3, 2024
Social housing is gaining momentum. It’s not just this newsletter — there’s a lot of people talking about social housing, in California and across the country.
Last year, California passed SB 555 as the first state social housing legislation in the US. Earlier this year, New York introduced an ambitious social housing bill led by a coalition of community and labor groups. In March, the Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) released a detailed report on Social Housing in California. And this past week, the Alliance for Housing Justice (AHJ) put out a fantastic video that illustrates how social housing could address the housing crisis.
Why has social housing been gaining so much attention? Surprise, surprise: years and years of local organizing to combat a housing crisis that is systemically entrenched. Explanations of social housing almost always start with a shared understanding of the root cause. A few snippets from the materials linked above:
SB 555: “The Legislature finds and declares all of the following: (1) The private housing market has failed to meet the needs of the vast majority of California residents, who are unable to afford market rents. Increasingly, housing speculation and financialization in the rental market is driving rents higher, even as new market-rate housing is produced.”
New York’s social housing bill (Senate Bill 8494): “While the private housing market has failed to build enough housing to create affordability across all levels of income in New York, private landlords have also seized upon the opportunity to rapaciously extract rents and profit at the expense of New Yorkers, who have witnessed extraordinary increases in the cost of living in recent years, the largest component of which is the cost of housing, which has increased at annual rates far in excess of gains to wages or income for working-class New Yorkers.”
OBI’s report: “Social housing has come to encompass a variety of programs and financing schemes, but all fundamentally move away from a reliance on private, for-profit motives that have failed to provide for California’s housing needs as a whole.”
AHJ video: “Everywhere you look, we’re being forced out of our homes by rent hikes and unsafe conditions, just so landlords and developers can make an extra buck.”
Fundamentally, people can feel the contradiction that comes with treating housing as a commodity for profit instead of as a social good. This has become even more apparent in recent years with the increasing acquisition and ownership of housing by corporate real estate and investment firms. We see how the legacy of racist policies in land use and housing access persist in our neighborhoods, perpetuated by an approach that is reliant on the private market and accompanied by policies that favor homeowners.
Social housing offers a model that directly confronts these issues. It creates decommodified housing that is permanently held by public or community entities, and forever protected from the speculative real estate market. It aims to address social and racial disparities through strategies that repair historic and ongoing racialized harms, while also serving a mix of income levels to meet the needs of all who need it. It’s a vision for housing as a human right.
You might also be noticing that green social housing is gaining momentum (it’s not just this newsletter!!), and how increasingly people are making the connections between climate and housing justice. The reintroduction of the GND for Public Housing is an explicit call to tackle the housing crisis and climate crisis together. And just two days ago, the city of Chicago approved a bond proposal that contains $115- to $135-million Green Social Housing Revolving Loan Fund (thanks in part to organizing and advocacy by a fellow GND Coalition in Illinois!).
In the AHJ video, the narrator (comedian/writer Jamie Loftus) says, “social housing can be new green construction, or resilient, eco-friendly renovated buildings — because we’re not just building housing for the present, we’re building the future as well.” I love this framing, and I think there’s still more we can say about how green social housing is a climate justice solution. It’s not just about how green the buildings are, but also how we build resilience in the face of increasingly severe climate impacts and disasters. It’s about how we keep communities stable, so that new investments to decarbonize and improve public infrastructure don’t lead to gentrification and displacement. It’s about returning land to indigenous and community stewardship.
Still, there are tensions that we’ll need to grapple with. As the OBI report discusses in depth, social housing proposals are not all the same, and should be assessed along different dimensions (they propose three principles of housing as a social good, social and racial equity, and participatory governance). The “green” parts of social housing will also be scrutinized — as too hard, too costly, too idealistic. While these tensions are not resolved by them, popular education and research materials like the AHJ video and OBI report help us to develop a shared language and framework for discussion. These discussions will play out in policy debates, narrative and messaging strategies that challenge dominant ideologies, and in our organizing conversations that move us from idea to action. Those are the tasks before us in our green social housing campaign. And we’re gaining momentum.
Just a couple GNDers marching for housing as a human right at Housing Now’s lobby day on Monday. That sign says “green social housing keeps CA healthy & affordable.”
WHAT WE’RE READING
Could Vienna’s approach to affordable housing work in California? (The Guardian)
Chicago approves $1.25 billion housing and development bond plan (Chicago Reader)
California group marches in support of affordable housing (KCRA 3) — news coverage of Housing Now’s lobby day
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