Battleground State Voters Want Rent Control and Social Housing
Despite being a key issue, housing remains oddly absent from national politics, and this presidential election is no different. Candidates shouldn’t leave Americans’ hunger for progressive housing reform on the table.
Tenants' rights advocates protest in outside a hearing is held in Martinez, California, on Wednesday, February 1, 2017. (Paul Chinn / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
As the presidential campaigns gear up over the summer, one topic remains curiously underdiscussed: housing. Despite the ever-worsening crises that continue to afflict renters in the US housing market — from the affordability and tenant rights crises to the homelessness crisis — the subject of housing remains mostly relegated to state and local elections. One exception is President Joe Biden’s call for Congress to pass a national 5 percent rent cap on rental units owned by corporate landlords, which Democratic nominee Kamala Harris echoed at a recent campaign rally in Atlanta. While the mentioning of a rent cap is a significant messaging victory for the tenant movement, the passage of such a proposal would be subject to Congressional approval, which seems unlikely in the current Republican-controlled House.
The political failure to meaningfully discuss and address housing issues is perhaps not surprising given the government’s general deference to real estate interests, largely owing to the fact that the real estate lobby consistently ranks among the country’s biggest political donors. But it is both a major shortcoming within Democratic politics and a missed opportunity. Polling data repeatedly shows widespread popular support for progressive interventions into the housing sector, ranging from rent control measures to public investment in expanding affordable housing, including a public option.
Moreover, a “Swing State Housing Poll” conducted in April by the Center for Popular Democracy Action, Right to the City Action, and HIT Strategies among registered voters in five battleground states — Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania — demonstrates the potential of making housing a key issue in the upcoming election. According to the poll, voters say they experience the cost of rent and housing as being among the least talked-about issues by politicians. Yet roughly 60 percent of voters surveyed — and 82 percent of renters — say that addressing housing costs would significantly improve their lives. For renters, this outperforms all other polled issues, including immigration and crime, which have garnered far more attention in national campaigns.
Meanwhile, the poll shows that renters, who tend to be younger, more demographically diverse, and more favorable toward progressive policies, continue to be less enthusiastic voters than homeowners. This discrepancy suggests significant potential to redress the “turnout gap” between renters and homeowners through policies and messaging that directly address renters. With rent costs being the single most important issue for renters, DaMareo Cooper, co–executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy Action, says there is a clear opportunity to activate the renter base in battleground states:
Housing is the highest monthly expense for most households, and there are so many people who are suffering under these conditions, under an economy being geared toward corporate interests, that this amounts to a base. We know the potential of these folks. If [Democrats] are clear about how strongly an election is going to change people’s actual material conditions, if they talk to people about what matters to them, this could be a force, even if you just close that [turnout] margin a little bit. The folks at the margin are the margin of victory in our country right now.
In the absence of substantial, effective legislative intervention, the housing sector has become increasingly stratified. It should come as no surprise that addressing the realities of the contemporary housing market — growing corporate consolidation of residential real estate, insecure tenancy for working-class and increasingly middle-class tenants, the prevalence of rent gouging, unsafe living conditions, and rising eviction filings, as well as the growing criminalization of the unhoused — has become a priority for voters. While these issues are not new, they have only been exacerbated by the pandemic and its inflationary aftermath.
Not only do the voters surveyed in the “Swing State Housing Poll” want housing to be at the forefront of politics, but they also want a paradigm shift in housing policy. Seventy percent of voters — and 78 percent of renters — state they are more likely to vote for a candidate who supports rent stabilization, while 72 percent support government funding for the creation of social housing to address rising housing costs.
Moreover, such interventions poll significantly better than the market-based paradigm that has dictated federal housing policy since the 1970s, which is defined by programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and Section 8. These programs, which surrender control over where, when, and for whom affordable housing is provided to private landlords and developers, will funnel $10 billion and $32.7 billion, respectively, into the for-profit housing market in 2024 alone. These programs are clearly failing to solve or alleviate the crises related to housing. That failure and the overwhelming popular support for an alternative suggest a dire need for a fundamental shift in housing policy.
Such a shift should draw inspiration from the tenant-led social housing initiatives that are proliferating across the country. This revitalized, growing movement demands decommodified homes that are publicly, collectively, or nonprofit owned, permanently affordable, and democratically controlled by their residents and/or the community. This includes public housing, community land trusts (CLTs), cooperative housing, or mission-driven nonprofit housing. These distinct housing models provide blueprints for alternatives to the hypercommodified housing system, positing that the provision of housing should not be subject to the whims of profit-motivated landlords and developers but a fundamental right, extending beyond affordability to control over one’s own home.
Considering the crucial role such decommodified housing can play in the rental housing sector, as well as the popular support from voters on both sides of the aisle, there’s not only common sense but also political potential in investing, up and down the ballot, in messaging — and, more importantly, in policy — that supports the expansion of social housing.
Social Housing Campaigns Proliferating
Another recent report from a coalition that includes PolicyLink, the Debt Collective, Tenants Together, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, Alliance for Housing Justice, and other organizations provides a helpful overview of the current state of the housing movement, documenting different social housing campaigns from across the United States alongside some recent victories. The victories include the establishment of the Seattle Social Housing Developer, which will build publicly owned, permanently affordable housing; California’s Stable Affordable Housing Act, which mandates a government study on social housing; Kansas City organizers’ acquisition of a $50 million bond for affordable housing; and the widespread establishment and expansion of CLTs.
These campaigns, as well as others described in the report, illustrate the variety of social housing configurations that can be replicated by tenants in different contexts, all of which coalesce around decommodification, public funding, community control, and deep, permanent affordability. Jasmine Rangel, senior housing associate at PolicyLink, told Jacobin:
We see that social housing isn’t a one-size-fits-all model, apart from the basic principles. Localities need the freedom to be able to embed those principles in a way that matches their local housing market needs, because the housing market in Miami isn’t going to be the same as the housing market in Kansas City or the Bay Area or Seattle. Social housing gives us the flexibility and the tools to adapt to our local housing markets, and we see people using models like CLTs or housing cooperatives to address their housing crisis. But another thing we highlight in the report is the nature of diverse campaigns and organizing.
Featured in the report are contributions from local organizers describing a range of approaches, tactics, and stages of organizing in different geographic contexts. In Texas, for instance, the Texas Organizing Project is seeking to organize tenants statewide while lending support to local candidates and campaigns, such as the passage of an affordable housing bond in San Antonio and Harris County’s use of $15 million in American Rescue Plan funds to purchase over one hundred single-family homes for the county’s CLT. In Connecticut, the Connecticut Tenants Union has established a Social Housing Committee to determine the best path to win social housing and define what “resident control” means in practice to ensure its implementation in both nonprofit and publicly owned housing.
Meanwhile, organizers in Los Angeles point to the Hillside Villa Tenant Association’s yearslong struggle, which demonstrated the potential of cities leveraging eminent domain to acquire LIHTC-funded buildings with expiring affordability covenants and convert them to social housing. And Bay Area organizers highlight how Moms 4 Housing, a collective of formerly unhoused black women, occupied vacant, foreclosed property owned by a real estate developer in Oakland. As a direct result of the Moms’ occupation, the property was subsequently sold to Oakland Community Land Trust and turned into transitional housing for unhoused mothers and their children.
There have also been organizing efforts to establish a Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) or Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA) in places such as Tacoma Park, Maryland, the Inland Empire, California, New York City, and Washington, DC. Such legislation grants tenants or the community — usually nonprofits such as CLTs or limited equity housing cooperatives — the right to make the first offer on a building if the landlord decides to sell. The option could potentially prevent displacement and preserve affordability while creating opportunities for decommodification and tenant control.
Meanwhile in Providence, Rhode Island, which just experienced the highest year-to-year rent increase nationwide, the group Reclaim Rhode Island has launched a campaign for a statewide public developer, alongside an effort to organize tenants across the state. The public developer, inspired by a model from Montgomery County, Maryland, aims to create permanently affordable mixed-income cross-subsidy housing — an arrangement in which higher-income tenants subsidize the rents of lower-income tenants — using a revolving fund to support the continuous production of social housing. A $120 million housing bond stands on the ballot in November, $10 million of which has been authorized for a public development program and could provide an initial base for the revolving fund.
The Providence proposal has secured political support from progressives, some moderates, and local unions, especially building trade unions given the potential for unionized construction jobs, demonstrating the potential of building cross solidarity around social housing. Daniel Denvir, cochair of Reclaim Rhode Island and host of the Jacobin podcast The Dig, spoke about the alliance:
We’re hopeful that once we get a public developer off the ground, and it’s more tangible that this means jobs for union members, that the political support for it will grow even stronger, even more consequential — that we can get to a point where there’s a virtuous cycle of renters and workers benefiting from social housing and therefore advocating for the state of Rhode Island to invest more and more money in social housing.
These social housing models, policies, tactics, and campaigns, alongside others across the country, operate in tandem to create an alternative housing system that repositions housing as a public good and a fundamental right — liberated from exploitation, extraction, and profiteering.
Supporters frequently invoke Vienna, Austria, as a model for this vision. More than half of the city’s 1.8 million inhabitants live in one of the city’s 220,000 public housing units or 200,000 cooperative units built with municipal subsidies. As a result, rents, even in the for-profit market, are significantly lower than in many other European capitals and most, if not all, major US cities. Roughly 80 percent of Vienna’s inhabitants qualify for subsidized housing, given the generous income limit and only two-year residency requirement, and social housing rents are limited to 20–25 percent of tenants’ income.
Although even Vienna’s housing sector has not been entirely immune to recommodification efforts, the city underscores the dramatic impact a commitment to affordability, tenant rights, and housing as a public good can have on overall livability and housing quality, while helping to combat inequality and homelessness. Considering the dire nature of these issues across the country, politicians should explore interventions at both the local and federal level to improve conditions for tenants and promote social housing growth. Tenant and social housing movements have provided recommendations for where to begin.
Multifaceted Federal Intervention
For starters, such measures should include a national rent cap, but preferably one more ambitious than Biden’s original 5 percent proposal. A policy memo from the recently launched Tenant Union Federation proposes that Biden direct the Federal Housing Finance Agency to require an annual limit of 3 percent on rent increases in Government Sponsored Enterprise–backed properties, a move that would affect eight million households nationwide. This points to a broader opportunity available to the federal government for making stronger tenant protections and affordability regulations a condition of federal housing financing.
To support the expansion of social housing, meanwhile, organizations such as Research to Action Lab have called for more federal funding for the development of permanently affordable housing at the local and state level, and many propose reforms to current funding programs like LIHTC. Such reforms could include emphasizing permanent as opposed to temporary affordability and expanding the percentage of tax credits awarded to nonprofits (currently 10 percent).
Moreover, there are different proposals for the federal government to develop social housing directly. The Center for Popular Democracy Action supports establishing an Office of Social Housing under the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The office would help create HUD-assisted social housing, track and monitor programs, and expand supportive infrastructure for social housing, such as public banks and public land banks. Similarly, others propose creating a Federal Green Social Housing Development Authority, which would expand social housing stock through new construction or by purchasing and rehabilitating distressed properties with tenants vulnerable to exploitation. It would subsequently transfer those units to the social housing sector under tenant control.
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently reintroduced the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, which would invest up to $234 billion in the public housing sector over a decade. The plan would address the $70 billion maintenance backlog to update and decarbonize existing public housing units. It would also repeal the Faircloth Amendment, which effectively precludes federal funding for an expansion of public housing stock, support the construction of new public housing units, and mandate tenant control and labor union contracts, creating 280,000 unionized jobs in the process.
Another strong proposal from the tenant movement is the National Tenant Bill of Rights, developed by the Tenant Union Federation, the National Housing Law Project, and the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Establishing seven baseline tenant protections in the rental housing market, the proposed bill of rights addresses the application process, the lease, and actual tenancy. It includes the right to a fair application, a fair lease, freedom from discrimination and harassment, a habitable home, reasonable rent and cost, safeguards against eviction, and the right to organize. Enshrining such rights would help redress the severe power disparity between tenants and landlords in the rental housing sector and provide increased stability and protection against discrimination, homelessness, and uninhabitability.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, and other measures such as federal action to regulate corporate landlords and increase transparency of ownership are equally paramount. These proposals, however, could be leveraged into messaging and policies leading up to and following the election. Prioritizing progressive housing reform bears significant potential to help Democrats activate renters in battleground states.
In the meantime, the social housing movement continues to grow. Jasmine Rangel from PolicyLink told Jacobin that the next steps toward expanding the social housing movement involve a convention of several of the groups mentioned in the report, strengthening the network of social housing advocates, practitioners, and organizers, and expanding and deepening ties with labor and climate justice groups. Rangel said, “That’s where I see the social housing movement growing: having different movements see themselves in this movement and having housing people see ourselves in their movements as well.”