Social Housing Goes to Washington
With the newly introduced Homes Act, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is pushing legislation to create the next generation of decommodified, dignified homes, including public housing and co-ops.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill on October 26, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)
Every first of the month, half the country’s renters hand more than 30 percent of their wages to their landlord. A quarter of them pay a majority in rent — a tremendous cash transfer from bosses to landlords that leaves tenants broke, exploited, and mad as hell.
In cities, towns, rural areas, and reservations across the country, renters are organizing for lower rent and better conditions. Through long-established organizations and newly formed autonomous tenant unions, they are standing up to landlords, pushing for stronger rent controls, and proving the power of organized tenants. Though their demands vary from place to place, the words used to describe the vision for a better future are increasingly the same: “social housing.”
In a country as large and diverse as the United States, it isn’t surprising that the precise meaning of those words varies somewhat from place to place, but in general, tenants are calling for housing that is decommodified, resident controlled, and widely accessible.
It can include rentals (like public housing, which is permanently affordable and outside the speculative market) and cooperatives (where residents own a share of their building but cannot profit much from its resale). It can be produced via new construction or by acquisition and conversion, as when a private rental building is bought by its tenants and turned into a limited-equity co-op.
But in all its variations, social housing is a far cry from our anti-social housing norm, in which homes are expected to generate monumental profits for their owners and disorganized tenants are subject to the petty tyranny of landlords.
Introducing the Homes Act
Up to now, organizing and legislative work for social housing has taken place at the city and state levels. For example, Seattle residents voted to create a municipal social housing developer, while the Rhode Island legislature opted to use COVID relief funds to create a state-level social housing program.
Today New York congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota senator Tina Smith have introduced new national legislation that, if passed and funded, would go a long way toward making real the social housing revolution.
The Homes Act of 2024 would create a Housing Development Authority (HDA) for the entire country. Housed under the federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) agency but operating autonomously, the HDA’s sole mission would be to build, buy, renovate, and operate social housing, which it defines as housing with public, nonprofit, or resident ownership; permanent protections and affordability; community control; and deep sustainability and accessibility. It would be governed by a board that includes not only expert appointees in housing and the environment but also its residents and members of the unions that build and support it.
The HDA would be a flexible vehicle, modeled after a 2020 Urban Democracy Lab report entitled “The SHDA — A Proposal.” It could build social housing itself; it could buy anti-social housing and convert it into social housing, then operate it itself or pass it on to tenant, labor, or community groups; it could finance social housing projects operated by state and municipal housing agencies or Public Housing Authorities; or it could finance social housing projects initiated by tenant, labor, and community organizations or by Community Land Trusts.
While the mechanisms are flexible, the standards for housing are fairly strict. In order to achieve the goals of decommodification and fair housing, at least 40 percent of the homes it creates must be affordable for those with the lowest incomes (defined as 0 to 30 percent of the local Area Median Income, or AMI). Another 30 percent can be available to people under 80 percent of AMI. (For context, the average New York City household makes 71 percent of AMI.) The final 30 percent are not income-targeted at all.
Rents in social housing are set at 25 percent of renters’ incomes — 5 percentage points lower than the standard for “affordable housing” in the United States today, but in line with older norms about how much tenants should be expected to pay for housing. Rents cannot rise more than 3 percent or the annual Consumer Price Index, whichever is lower.
All housing would come with strong protections against discrimination and unwarranted eviction and would have elected tenant associations in every development. The homes would be built and maintained with strong labor standards, ensuring that there would be no union busting, independent contractor scams, or substandard wages in social housing. They would be held by the HDA in perpetuity, and neither the buildings nor the land could ever be privatized.
Under the Homes Act, broad swaths of tenants would have an explicit right and opportunity to convert their homes into social housing. In a section on “Community and Tenant Opportunity to Purchase,” the bill enables tenants in various kinds of federally backed housing to convert into a social housing model of tenants’ choosing whenever their building is up for sale, privatization, or demolition.
At the same time, the bill would build on Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal for Public Housing by repealing the dreaded “Faircloth Amendment” (which blocks federal funding for new public housing development beyond what already exists) and drawing funds to bring existing public housing into good and sustainable condition.
Taken together, the bill represents a bold platform for preserving, converting, and building social housing across the country. If it were funded at the level of the Mortgage Interest Deduction, our country’s single highest housing expenditure by a long shot, and one of our most regressive, it would produce between 1 million and 1.8 million green social homes over the course of a decade.
Policy Through Organizing
The housing system sketched out in the Homes Act looks nothing like what we are used to in the United States. Though we have an important social housing legacy, we have never normalized decommodification as the cornerstone of our housing system.
Introducing legislation like the Homes Act does not accomplish that goal in and of itself, but it offers us a concrete depiction of what that transition could look like. It also highlights the severe disjuncture between what our housing and urban planning system does right now — promote private profits in real estate while minimizing the public provision of housing — and what we need it to do.
The goal of legislation like this is not to pass it immediately, since no sober person would expect the current US Congress to line up in support. Nor is the goal to supplant the messy work of organizing with the schematic and technical language of legislation. Instead, the point is to inspire organizing: to show that the status quo is not the only way our housing could operate, to give tenant organizations a concrete and affirmative vision to build toward, and to offer socialist candidates for office a platform to run on.
Only through mass organizing can legislation like the Homes Act move from a distant vision into an imminent reality. And it is only because of the mass organizing that is already happening that a bill like this is being introduced today.