Sacred Headwaters #33: Social Housing
Housing unaffordability is in large part driven by financialization, but financialization is a macro-scale process with a complex network of drivers. How can we escape it and decommodify housing?
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Issue #33: Social Housing
This is the third issue in a series on housing that draws connections between climate policy, housing affordability, and the financialization and commodification of housing over the last four decades driven by the neoliberalization of global financial markets and housing policy.
Issue #31: “Housing Policy is Climate Policy” (Feb 15th, 2021)
Issue #33: Social Housing (Mar 15th, 2021)
In the last two issues, we’ve explored both how housing affordability is a critical leverage point for climate mitigation (and many other things, including racial equity) and how a global process of financialization has fundamentally changed the landscape of housing around the world, commodifying it as an investment asset and the growth of a global affordability crisis.
Like many of the complex human and more-than-human systems we read about in this newsletter, the changes in housing that financialization has driven and continues to drive may seem intractable: when land use policy and housing is inherently a local issue, but financialization is both nationally and internationally driven, how can anyone hope to create change? There are, of course, policies at a national level that mitigate or accelerate financialization and its inflationary effects on residential real estate, something that can be seen clearly in comparisons like this (at least if you’re familiar with Canadian macroeconomic policy):
But the reality is that financialization is a process that has taken hold of many aspects of the global economy and even at a national level, mitigation can only go so far. So how do we de-commodify housing and treat it as a human right, something it has been recognized as since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948? (It’s also been more explicitly codified as a human right in some national laws around the world: here’s Canada’s; still pending in the US).
There are a few answers to this question that we’ll explore in this issue, but I want to focus first on public housing. Today in the US, when you mention “public housing,” people think of “the projects:” dilapidated apartment buildings in urban areas inhabited by low-income, generally racialized communities. This perception belies a complex and racist history of exclusion, disinvestment, and abandonment, but it also leaves out a rich history of publicly built and managed housing: most global north countries, including the US and Canada, developed huge inventories of public housing in the post-war era that were meant for people of all income classes. In the UK in 1979, almost 1/3 of households lived in public housing. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CHMC) was supporting the construction of 250,000-275,000 housing units per year from 1976-1982 and was heavily involved in building public and social housing units from its founding in 1945 until about 1990. I’ve written before about what happened (in most but not all wealthy countries) and how we managed to succumb to cultural amnesia about government services so quickly, but the important message here is: we’ve had thriving ecosystems of public housing in the past and the collapse and subsequent erasure of those ecosystems coincided with the growth of financialization and commodification of housing. There’s no reason we can’t embrace public housing again as a solution to the growing housing crises faced around the world.
You may have noticed that I changed the name of this issue from “Public Housing” to “Social Housing” before posting it. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but “social housing” represents a superset of which public housing (publicly owned and operated) is a component. Mironova and Waters, for the Community Service Society of New York, “define social housing models as those that strive to achieve permanent affordability, social equality, and democratic resident control.” In practice in North America today, this “includes public housing, nonprofit-managed rentals, and…cooperatives on land stewarded by community land trusts,” but it’s a broad term that encompasses a variety of housing models employed throughout the world. These models share a goal, which is to collectively work to de-commodify housing and treat it as a human right rather than an opportunity for wealth accumulation.
In this issue, we’re going to explore both public housing and the broader concept of social housing by looking at examples of both around the world. We’ll also look at some of the proposed ways we might resurrect social housing in the countries in which it’s been dismantled, allowing us to preserve and recreate affordability and better work to mitigate ecological and social justice crises.
Social Housing in the United States (25 minutes)
People’s Policy Project, Peter Gowan & Ryan Cooper
This report has two chapters. You’re welcome to read the first one (“The Affordability Crisis”), but this issue is focused on the second chapter, “The Case for Municipal Housing.”
This report from the People’s Policy Project covers two relevant things: first, it looks at three places where the post-war boom in social housing continues to thrive: Vienna, Finland, and Sweden. Each of these governments has a different approach and each approach has its own pros and cons, but they are living, breathing examples of vibrant social housing ecosystems that support diverse segments of the local population. In Vienna, 60% of residents live in municipal housing and there’s a large amount of government support for other solutions like non-profit housing cooperatives. Public housing also allows Vienna to pursue really exciting sustainable social innovations like building explicitly car-free housing projects with communal bike repair workshops.
The second thing this report does is propose a grounded strategy for the United States to rapidly build out a public housing inventory managed by municipal housing authorities and supported and financed by the federal government. The authors propose that the US build ten million housing units in ten years that cater toward a broad range of incomes. These homes would be built by municipal “housing authorities,” a model where municipalities own housing corporations that build and manage public housing. The last section of the report makes it clear how inexpensive (relatively speaking) this would be over the long term since maintenance costs discounted debt servicing rates provided by the federal government could easily be covered by rents.
One last note from the report that hits home for me, as I’ve been advocating for a housing authority in my community and we have an excellent example of a successful one just north of us: municipal governments needn’t wait until there is a large federal program underway to launch their own housing authority as there are a variety of ways that public housing can become self-financing.
Representative Ilhan Omar introduced the Homes for All Act in the US in 2019 that proposes, among other things, to build 9.5 million public units over ten years.
How to Fix Housing for Everyone Except Corporate Speculators (5 minutes)
Gianpaolo Baiocchi & H. Jacob Carlson
The original title on the NYT website was what I have written above; they changed it to “What Happens When 10 Million Tenants Can’t Make Rent?” shortly after posting it. The authors have also written a white paper on this subject.
This short article proposes a slightly different approach to a federal build-out of social housing than the People’s Policy Project report. The authors call for a Social Housing Development Authority (SHDA) that would facilitate the creation of a public and social housing sector through acquisition of what they call “distressed real estate.” Basically, they call for taking real-estate related insolvency crises — like the foreclosure crisis of 2008 and the (so far) slow-motion rental crisis of the pandemic — and leveraging them as opportunities to purchase, sustainably retrofit, and permanently protect the affordability of the units that are affected. Instead of building a massive supply of municipally-owned, federally financed housing, the SHDA would facilitate the transfer of existing housing into the “social housing sector” and support a variety of ownership structures (ranging from community land trusts to non-profit management to municipal ownership) as made sense in different locales. This strategy is not incompatible with simultaneously building large amounts of new housing and in fact, it’s likely a case where the best choice is “both-and:” the SHDA could serve to dampen the fiscal shock from real-estate related insolvency while leveraging that effort to support housing affordability instead of bailing out banks, and large-scale public housing construction could be simultaneously build supply in the many cities where shortage is a significant driver of cost.
Four Models of Decommodified Housing (40 minutes)
Homes For All Campaign, Right to the City Alliance. Gianpaolo Baiocchi et al
Read chapter 3 of this report, pages 22-53.
We’ve touched on some of the models of “social housing” beyond public housing, but haven’t gone into any significant detail. This report chapter does exactly that, exploring four models from around the world for “decommodified housing.” As we’ve read over the last few weeks, the housing market has been thoroughly financialized and commodified and escaping or halting that process is not straightforward; the models this report explores are able to exist within, but isolate themselves from, the broader environment of market housing, some with government support, some without. They protect housing from use as an investment asset and work to preserve permanently affordable and inclusive housing in the face of macroeconomic trends that push against those goals.
The point is that engaging the market is unavoidable, but each of our examples does so in ways that shield the housing from speculation and ensure stable, permanently affordable homes.
If you’re not familiar with community land trusts (CLTs), there are some amazing examples in the US, the largest of which was founded in Burlington, VT under Senator Bernie Sanders’ mayoralty. They’ve shown immense promise for preserving affordability, protecting tenants and homeowners from financial shocks, and encouraging longer-term planning and holistic community development. The authors of this report argue that none of these models is a “one-size-fits-all solution,” but that each can provide guidance and support for development of locally-led, democratically governed solutions for collective land governance and affordability.
For more info on some CLTs and LECs in the US, “CityLab University: Shared-Equity Homeownership” is an ok place to start.
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