On social housing, and housing justice

We've been mired in a housing crisis for a long while, largely of our own creation; how can we fix it?

The eviction crisis we always knew was coming has begun. Although to phrase the state of affairs in this way is to ignore the already-present pervasive unaffordability of a housing market which is all but inaccessible to young and working people, to forget past evictions and foreclosures as a result of almost any market shock: natural disasters, recessions on a large scale to job loss and underemployment at a granular level. The pandemic caused by novel coronavirus and its ensuing pandemonium has merely brought attention to and underscored the problems of housing in the United States, just as it has highlighted similar founderings in the availability and affordability of healthcare, employment and unemployment policy infrastructure, the social safety net/social insurance more broadly, and governance at all levels pertaining to public health and event-readiness.   

We have long had a housing problem, and a racialized one at that which stems largely from a series of exploitative policy decisions and developer imprudence/negligence (or rather, developer greed); from segregation and redlining, to urban renewal and its reification in gentrification which works against local economic development (urban renewal means negro removal, after all), to ghetto loans and the housing bubble burst (which hurt black people the most, and destroyed black housing wealth), and amidst faltering investment and support for public housing concurrent with stagnant wages, the aforementioned housing unaffordability and homelessness (which was already a public health crisis) have been exacerbated by the pandemic-related layoffs for public safety’s sake, resulting in the evictions we see today (in addition to policymakers obsessing over means-testing and lacking the political will to freeze rents nationwide and provide additional stimulus).

In the wake of a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement and calls for defunding police and redistributing those tax monies to the community, housing justice has been amongst the primary concerns; proponents of the Green New Deal have been pushing for public works projects to resurrect public and affordable housing as well. As part of this mission, House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently passed a repeal of the Faircloth Amendment in the lower house (which forbade the federal government from expanding public housing). 

Public housing at one point in time was the primary solution to housing affordability crises; its widespread institution in the United States as part of a series of New Deal measures to combat homelessness (alongside a tenacious tenant’s rights movement engaged in squatting, anti-eviction and anti-displacement action) provided homes for renters across the income distribution and rescued people from ceaseless foreclosures and evictions. However, government housing in the long run failed to create the poverty-eliminating home security expected of it, and the Faircloth Amendment represented the consolidation of interests against public housing and its perceived failures which led to the eventual teardowns of housing projects. 

These conditions, the unattainability of a home and the destruction of public housing, were predicated upon an underinvestment in said housing (more specifically, housing for black folks; projects were largely + explicitly segregated. White public housing was often well-maintained, until the white people left), in favor of a postwar movement towards subsidizing home purchases for white folks in the suburbs and highways for their cars to commute to and from city centers carefully and meticulously carved from their black surroundings. White middle class laborers and professionals, who were afforded the ability to leave, took advantage and left city tax bases (and city public housing rent collection) dry; rent rose to compensate which pushed more white people out who were enticed by the incentives of the suburbs until public housing was left for the black and destitute. We forget the definition of the word ghetto, and how specifically it applies to African-American neighborhoods: just as Jews were ghettoized in fascist European state in the 1930s and ‘40s, so too were black folks by policy which shunted them into inner cities and soon-to-be-dilapidated project housing, spiriting all the white folks away to capacious public and private new developments zoned so that single-family homes comprised the entire market and thus the spaciousness of the suburbs cloistered the city. 

The “failures” of public housing stem from this process, the centralization of black poverty into housing projects which suffered under dismal funding, segregation, and a lack of access to outside opportunity (due to aforementioned segregation); and because black people shut out of the housing market were also excluded from the well-funded white project homes and could not afford the rising rents meant to compensate for the white exodus from social housing, the rents became fixed to a share of income (which meant even less money flowing towards building maintenance, crime prevention, economic development, etc) and the damage done was hard to reverse. Even then, to view the results of the political sabotage of public housing, i.e.  the concentration of crime or the perpetually low incomes of residents or the abysmal public health outcomes associated with public housing as failures is to attribute to housing an almost magical power, to view providing a home (under many stipulations, ranging at times from denying housing for felons to denials for incomplete families, both statuses routinely visited upon black folks as a result of their criminalization and incarceration) as a salve for racism and class exploitation epitomized by falling wages relative to productivity and growing income and wealth inequality alongside incongruent increases in rent and property valuations. Beyond this, it is impossible to determine the treated effect on the treated of public housing, so to speak, because the black people damn near relegated to public housing did not have other options--the affordability crisis kicked off by urban renewal and segregation had long been in effect. 

Eventually, the towers which formed the outward image of public housing imploded (often in the name of being “tough on crime”), in keeping with government policy to clear “blighted areas” and “slums” (read: black neighborhoods) as solutions to a problem deeply rooted in governance and funding (and a problem which merely disperses and exacerbates once housing is gone, a problem which is seeded in the conditions of those who live in public housing as opposed to the housing itself). People resettled (though not into the new developments in the same area: they were still displaced, communities disrupted and disbanded) into smaller-scale government housing, from rowhouses to voucher housing (although only certain landlords would accept vouchers, another pitfall of the private market which results in re-institutionalized segregation).  

But public housing can and does work, despite its checkered past! There are examples both here and abroad which illuminate how we can use tax dollars to support low-income residents, including mixed-income housing and municipalization of private housing. Vienna is commonly held as the greatest worldwide success of social housing, precisely because developments were built and/or retooled for everyone in the city; slums weren’t cleared and replaced with brand-spanking-new developments for the urban elite, but instead upcycled into working and middle class housing, and new stock was continually constructed to maintain pace with population growth. Red Vienna describes the polity in the capital of Austria at the inception of this policy, a socialist state within a conservative (later fascist) nation which funded its de-commodified housing for all via taxes on the wealthy (luxury taxes + progressive income taxes, for the most part). And these constructions were beautiful and structurally diverse (although the criticism of towers as bland is unfounded considering suburban subdivisions which are equally bland/off-putting and repetitive in design; problem isn’t the architecture but the social infrastructure surrounding it). ⅗ of city residents live in government housing! In Berlin, the city has been buying up properties to convert to public housing and charging under-market rate rent to solve part of the affordability crisis which has come under prior neoliberal, marketizing reforms (and has instituted rent caps as well); this municipalization of housing stock and land is related to community development and land trusts (important later). In Austin, public housing has flourished and been deemed a success! In no small part due to a progressive polity not afraid to properly invest in itself, renting out local real estate at-market to fund its affordable housing complexes and instituting a new community land trust; other smaller housing agencies also enjoy similar outcomes and high ratings from HUD.  

The decommodification aspect of social housing is key in its protective nature, and is the reason for its proposal as a solution for housing folks and keeping them housed: building and renting out public off-market developments means people are insulated from market rent increases, and are not (necessarily) evicted due to delinquency on payments because rents can be tied to income (so long as taxation remains a steady source of funding) or otherwise frozen in crisis scenarios without needing to fight lobbies, landlords, and other private interests (which is what’s happening now; sidenote, did you know Nancy Pelosi is a landlord?). And government-provided housing also deals surprisingly and effectively with homelessness; the fundamental and most salient solution to the problems which relate to people not having homes is (drumroll, please): giving them homes.  

Public housing need not only be for the poor, as successful projects throughout Europe demonstrate, and an expansion of Section 8 (or voucher housing) in tandem with a restructured regulatory structure and dismantling of exclusionary zoning as proposed by Senator Cory Booker and current presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Biden could dramatically reshape the private housing market alongside the expansion of the public option by extending voucher benefits to all who qualify, and further helping working folks meet rents by changing qualification requirements and providing progressive vouchers across income groupings. 

Other public-ownership models have also proven themselves in the realm of affordable housing and development: community land trusts (CLTs) and co-operative housing promote decentralized community shareholdership, providing opportunities (in a geographically diverse set of areas, from Boston, MA to Albany, GA)  especially for underinvested communities to create shared wealth and economically progress their neighborhoods.

The fundamental idea behind CLTs is this: the community acquires land, typically through an incorporated non-profit, with decisions about the land made democratically. Community members, new and established, can lease land from the trust for 99-year terms (but cannot own the land) and are free to develop new homes and businesses on the borrowed land; the first CLT in the United States (New Communities), established in Albany by civil rights organizers influenced by kibbutzim structures in Israel and pre-existing black cooperative economics, protected and supported black farmers and homeowners through its use of shared land. The concept has spread to over 260 current adaptations: Bernie Sanders helped found the largest such housing-based trust, in Burlington, VT, and continues to advocate for CLTs as a measure towards affordable housing; the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury instrumentally pushed to be awarded the power of eminent domain by the city to force purchases of empty lots for neighborhood development into affordable housing (after the burning and clearing of properties in the 1970s and 80s).

Meanwhile, housing co-operatives, specifically limited equity cooperatives, have provided an opportunity for people and neighborhoods to acquire and become shareholders in homes while capping the appreciation on the home’s value to its purchased value + the value of material improvements on the property minus depreciation of the structure (hence ‘limited equity’) thus keeping the development perpetually affordable for new home-seekers to buy into. LECs propose an alternate view of property ownership in line with its decommodification and its fundamental role as shelter, and already exist in the U.S.; buying in constitutes a grant of voting rights on the collective property, but also a chance at developing equity and a right to occupancy.

For-profit housing has largely failed black people and working folks, and this has been laid explicitly bare by the ruthless evictions we’re witnessing as a result of a (necessary) government shutdown of the economy without an attendant/appropriate monthly stimulus payment and at a time when the homeless are at the highest risk outside of the incarcerated for COVID-19. Just as we consider an expansion of the welfare state for healthcare via Medicare-for-all, or at the very least a public option, it’d be useful to pay the same mind to our housing (and what’s good for our housing welfare is good for our economy!) The government has passed broad subsidies for homes before in the context of new housing developments (primarily in the pre- and postwar eras, which led to the creation and eventual despair of the initial public housing movement), and social housing at its inception was, and in many places throughout the country and around the world still is, popular and successful; it can be again.