Social Housing: How a New Generation of Activists Are Reinventing Housing
Image Credit: RDNE Stock project on pexels.com
What is social housing?
by H. Jacob Carlson and Gianpaolo Baiocchi
What is social housing? The simple answer is that it is a systemic approach to providing homes that treat housing not as a commodity, but as a human right. But to make it more than just a slogan, you need policies and institutions to make that right into a reality.
Not so long ago, social housing was rarely discussed in the United States. But today there are over a dozen social housing campaigns across the country: from municipal efforts in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Seattle, Kansas City, and San Francisco; to statewide campaigns in California, New York, and Rhode Island, to mention a few. Some are grassroots campaigns; others are led by elected officials. Each seeks a unique path to meet the needs of their own localized version of the broader housing crisis.
Many reports, too, have called for social housing, including Right To the City, People’s Policy Project, People’s Action, Community Service Society, and the Center for Popular Democracy. Some point to large-scale, government-run rental housing, while others also explicitly include housing cooperatives and community land trusts. And among the most original proposals make an ecological case for social housing as a core part of a Green New Deal.
It makes sense that social housing is gaining popularity today. In the fallout of the pandemic, it looked for a moment as if US housing policy was about to fundamentally change. But in the end, governments dragged their feet and promised change stayed on the drawing board. But that hasn’t stopped movements from pushing. So, might a profound shift to social housing yet be on the horizon?
Vienna and the Birth of Social Housing
The staff and residents of Karl Marx-Hof, the famous public housing complex in Vienna, have seen an uptick in international visitors. The “people’s palace” houses 3,000 residents in 1,300 comfortable apartments, all in a pleasant and well-maintained complex that includes a large courtyard and ample common facilities.
When it opened in 1930, it was the largest residential housing project in Europe. Today a city streetcar line makes four different stops along the iconic kilometer-long façade. At the age of 93, it has a storied past but is also a powerful exemplar of Vienna’s ongoing commitment to housing. Visitors from the US cannot help but be shocked at the contrast with public housing at home, as Karl Marx-Hof seems to suffer from none of the problems of underfunding and poor quality that plague its US counterparts.
And while Karl Marx-Hof is a mandatory stop, what is actually more interesting is the broader system of social housing it exemplifies, which includes public housing, limited equity cooperatives, public developers, inclusive urban and environmental planning, excellent public transit, and extensive regulation and taxation of the private market. Nearly two-thirds of the city’s housing stock is considered social housing.
Local housing authorities expect the flow of visitors to increase this year as the city celebrates 100 years of social housing. In 2022, delegations from California, Hawaii, and New York visited the housing complexes, and now, for a second year in a row, there will be a course offered by the Global Policy Leadership Academy for elected officials and philanthropists interested in learning about the city’s success.
Attention to Vienna’s housing is not new, but interest from the United States is. Not since the founding of public housing in the US, when Vienna was also the standard housing expert tour itinerary, has social housing been so prominently part of US public discussion.
A Looming Housing Crisis
Why is social housing gaining US adherents? The reasons are not hard to discern. Evictions are up, while year-over-year rent growth for new leases of single-family rentals peaked at 16.7 percent in July 2021, and has remained in double digits since then. A leading driver of inflation, rent growth had a singular effect on rising prices.
Meanwhile, housing prices rose so fast in 2021 that, on paper at least, people could earn more from their home than from work. As many would-be homeowners were priced out, investors have swept in. At the end of 2021, investors bought 26 percent of single-family homes on the market, driven by the promise of higher rental incomes.
These problems stem from the contradictory demands for real estate as a commodity and housing as a social good. For housing activists around the country, the appeal of social housing is its promise to “decommodify” housing—that is, to shield housing costs and access from the private market.
But 1920s Vienna is not 2023 United States. Vienna’s social housing was created when the city’s hegemonic Social Democratic Party decided to discipline a weak real estate sector and build up a robust local welfare state. The broader development of welfare states in Europe was also in a period when a post-war housing boom, a powerful administrative apparatus, and an organized working class made public inroads into the market possible.
Even in Europe, in recent years investment in social housing has been on the decline; as much as a third of the original social housing has been privatized due to neoliberal pressures there. Legislative change is difficult, since the real estate industry has largely captured the state at all levels of government, creating what urban planner Samuel Stein calls “the real estate state.” Therefore, policy advocates in the US and beyond must contend with the task of growing a robust social housing system in the infertile soil of neoliberalism.
Advancing a Social Housing Vision in America
What is emerging today in US social housing campaigns is a mosaic of different variations of decommodified housing. Despite the debates on how to define it, for these campaigns social housing has three qualities: it’s nonspeculative, it’s democratically run, and it’s publicly backed. Nonspeculative means that the price of shelter and access to it are not determined by the market. Democratically run means that residents have meaningful say over their living conditions. Publicly backed means that housing has governmental resources, and institutions are ready to support a social housing sector. These qualities distinguish social housing from market-oriented programs like housing vouchers or the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit.
Today’s proposals are building on models and lessons from previous eras of social housing. In an era that we call Social Housing 1.0, governments felt that they could build big projects, and thus created and managed large-scale, nonmarket housing. This includes the well-planned and universalist government housing of many places in Europe, as well as the marginal public housing system in the US that only served the poor. These were almost exclusively rental properties.
But as neoliberalism eroded the capacity and willingness of governments to build housing, communities had to roll up their sleeves and do it themselves. In response to the market-based system’s failure to develop adequate affordable housing, we have seen the rise of cooperatives, nonprofit housing corporations, community land trusts, and tenant syndicates—in other words, housing provisions outside of the government.