Social Housing and the Strong Towns Approach (Part 1)
This is Part 1 in a multi-part series on social housing. Read Part 2 here, and stay tuned for future installments!
A member of our Strong Towns Facebook Group posed the question recently: "Should ‘social housing’ be a component of the Strong Towns ideal?"
Social housing is on a lot of tongues lately, and for good reason. The American housing market is in overdrive, with millions struggling to make rent or living in fear of displacement. Millions more are priced out of a preferable housing situation into a deeply suboptimal one—such as sharing an overcrowded apartment, living with parents well into adulthood, or enduring a punishing commute. In many cities, almost all new homes built by the private sector serve the high end of the market.
All of this fuels a pervasive sense that the housing market has failed in a deep, fundamental way. One response you can have to this is that aggressive state intervention is warranted: that we should fill the housing shortage through the direct, state-led construction of homes.
Public housing in the author’s neighborhood in Florida. (Source: Author.)
What Is Social Housing?
The term “social housing” is a deliberately broad term for not-for-profit housing that is built, subsidized, and/or run by the government. Many social housing proposals would serve people with a mix of incomes rather than exclusively the poor. Social housing includes traditional public housing, but also hybrid models. It can be for ownership as well as rental. In some definitions, social housing might be owned or operated by a nonprofit or a resident-run cooperative, rather than strictly a government agency, though the concept typically implies public-sector involvement.
Who’s Pushing to Build It?
Dramatically expanding social housing in the U.S. has long been a popular idea on the far left, but as rents escalate, the idea has recently entered the mainstream in a way not seen in decades. Prominent politicians are pushing for the repeal of the federal Faircloth Amendment, which prohibits the expansion of local public housing inventories, as we discussed on an episode of our Upzoned podcast in 2021. And proposals are floating around for truly massive investments in new social housing. Here are recent opinion pieces in The American Prospect and Jacobin, to give you a sense of the conversation that is out there.
Perhaps the highest-profile political push below the federal level right now is in California, where assembly member Alex Lee of San Jose has introduced a bill that would create a statewide, public-sector housing developer. Here you can read a case for the California proposal from housing activist Darrell Owens.
How might we think about social housing as Strong Towns advocates? I’m not going to try to convince you of a simple pro or con position. I think reasonable people can arrive at different conclusions. As with anything, all the interesting questions are in implementation.
Here’s what I want you to come away with. First, social housing is a reasonable, serious, proven idea with a lot of precedents around the world. It’s not, as you may have heard, some ticket to commie dystopia.
But what it is not is a magical Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for the failures of the market. I see some advocates invoke social housing as a silver bullet, a way to avoid having to think very hard about the deeper structural causes of the housing crisis or how to fix them. Typically, that means statements like the following:
"We don't need any more market rate housing.”
“The market will never meet the housing needs of non-affluent Americans.”
“Only social housing can solve the housing crisis.”
In reality, the very same problems that bedevil the effort to get abundant, affordable market-rate housing to exist are going to make it hard to deliver affordable social housing at any sort of scale. And, conversely, the better the housing market functions and the more responsive it is to demand, the more effective a complementary social housing program is likely to be.
But first, let’s complicate the one and only thing most Americans think they know about social housing. Which is that it’s an unmitigated disaster.
Public housing in the author’s neighborhood in Florida. (Source: Author.)
Mythbusting: “But Hasn’t Social Housing Proven a Miserable Failure in Practice?”
Reports of social housing's failure have been greatly exaggerated.
Social housing around the world takes a diverse range of forms, and you can find it playing a huge role in the housing mix in many places. This includes prosperous cities with robust market economies, such as Vienna, Austria, where 62% of residents live in social housing. The city directly owns and manages over 200,000 housing units, and tightly regulates over 200,000 more, and Viennese of all incomes and walks of life live in them. Meanwhile, in Singapore, the government subsidizes the vast majority of housing construction, and most of these units are offered for sale—again, to residents across the income spectrum.
Places like Vienna and Singapore treat social housing as a broad social program serving the mainstream of society, the way we think of public hospitals or community colleges. From there, one finds a spectrum of policies, and vast differences between countries, from places where social housing serves all incomes and is a large part of the housing stock (Austria, The Netherlands, Denmark) to places where it is more limited in amount (Belgium) or more targeted towards the poor to various degrees (the UK, France).
The United States is an outlier among high-income countries. In America, we have historically treated social (“public”) housing as a program for the poorest of the poor. And our public housing program was saddled with uniquely insurmountable barriers to success from the very beginning.
The 1937 legislation that created the federal public housing program sought to ensure that public housing would not compete with the private sector, so these complexes had rents set, by law, 20% lower than the minimum charged for “decent, safe, and sanitary” housing by private providers.
Political support was weak for something that middle- and upper-class Americans didn’t feel a stake in. Neighborhood opposition ensured that almost 100% of public housing was built in the poorest neighborhoods, and in overwhelmingly non-white ones. (Chicago’s public housing authority lost an infamous racial discrimination lawsuit over this practice.)
By the 1950s, these neighborhoods—subjected to redlining and to white and middle-class flight—were in economic freefall, with crime and unemployment spiraling. As the residents of public housing became more economically and socially isolated, these projects became intensified microcosms of their surrounding communities’ social ills. With low rental revenue, public housing authorities were unable to fund basic maintenance, and living conditions deteriorated. In the 1960s, public housing residents staged high-profile rent strikes in protest of these conditions. Those who could leave did so, deepening the despair and dysfunction in the projects they left behind.
None of this was an inevitable consequence of the public-sector nature of these projects, as the European experience shows. It was the result of the broader economic and social collapse of the communities surrounding them—a collapse brought on by the Suburban Experiment.
In the U.S., according to leading public housing scholar Ed Goetz, public housing has been a story of “quiet successes drowned out by loud failures.” Most Americans have heard of the failures: crime-ridden, hellish projects in giant, alienating compounds of high-rises, with names like Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini-Green. Most of these were demolished by the 1990s, their residents either relocated or simply lost track of, left to fend for themselves in the housing market.
Somewhere in between failure and success lie the ongoing struggles of America’s largest public housing agencies. It won’t surprise a Strong Towns reader to know that mammoth scale, top-down decision making and bureaucracy seem to magnify management problems. Of today’s 1.2 million American public housing dwellers, 500,000 live in New York City alone, and unfortunately the NYCHA has staggering maintenance and funding problems to address, even as it is a critical source of low-income housing in America’s largest city.
As for the other 700,000? Contrary to what you’ve heard, a lot of public housing doesn’t look like some pit of despair but simply apartments like any other. A lot of the more successful programs share features: they’re in smaller cities, they consist of smaller-scale and scattered buildings rather than massive, monolithic “projects,” and they’re fairly under the radar. You might live down the street from public housing and not know it.
What is certainly true is that any effort to establish widespread new social housing in America is going to happen under the long shadow of the troubled American public housing program, in a political sense if nothing else.
Read Part 2 of this series here!
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