Social Housing Principles:

Social housing is a public option for housing. Social housing is permanently and deeply affordable, under community control, and most importantly, exists outside of the speculative real estate market. Social housing can exist in different forms. It can be owned by public entities, residents, or mission-driven nonprofits. It can be occupied by renters or homeowners. It includes public housing, community land trusts, new construction, existing affordable housing, and conversion of current market-rate housing, and should meet the scale of the housing crisis.

The Alliance for Housing Justice defines social housing as follows:
• Socially owned. Social housing must be owned by public entities (cities, housing authorities, counties, states, or the federal government), tenants, or mission-driven nonprofits, such as cooperatives and community land trusts.
• Permanently de commodified. Social housing must be protected from for-profit investors and the speculative market. It must never be resold for profit. It should be treated as a human need, not a commodity to provide profit to landlords or investors.

• Permanently affordable. Social housing must be permanently affordable to all, even the lowest income residents, including residents with no income. It should be deeply affordable. No social housing resident should pay over 30% of their income on housing costs.
• Under community control. Social housing must be developed, owned, managed, and operated in a way that is accountable to residents, the community, and the public. Residents should have a direct role in management and decision-making, including through tenant unions.

• Anti-racist and equitable. Social housing must be designed to promote racial and gender equity and end displacement of communities of color. Immigration status and criminal records should not disqualify people from residence. Social housing should be planned to advance the access of marginalized communities to greater social and economic opportunities, by equalizing these resources across geography.
• Sustainable. Social housing should be built using green construction methods according to the principles of energy-efficient design. It should include the renovation and sustainable rehabilitation of existing buildings for energy efficiency and disaster resilience.

• High quality and accessible. Social housing must be high quality and built to last. It should be accessible to all people regardless of age, physical need, or other factors.
• With tenant security. Social housing should be operated within a set of practices that protect tenants from evictions and displacement, such as rent regulation, just cause protections, the right to counsel, the right to organize, and more.

Social housing must be owned by residents, a public entity, or a mission-driven nonprofit, not a for-profit developer. Examples of social housing ownership structures include public housing, community land trusts, limited equity tenant cooperatives, and international social housing systems.

Public housing is the primary form of social housing in the United States and often the only source of affordable housing for America’s lowest-income families. 1.2 million families currently live in public housing. However, our government has, time and again, chosen to disinvest from public housing – and done so in racially discriminatory ways – causing too much to be in a state of extreme disrepair.

Residents have reported being mistreated by management and criminalized by the police. Despite legal requirements to the contrary, public housing residents often don’t have much say over their living conditions. Current public housing residents also face eviction if their incomes rise too much. Any social housing program must include public housing and its residents by returning the program to its original promise of high-quality, stable, affordable housing for all residents.

Currently, over 225 community land trusts (CLTs) exist in the United States. CLTs are nonprofit, democratically governed organizations that provide shared equity opportunities for communities. By separating the ownership of a structure from the ownership of the land it sits on, CLTs are able to provide permanently affordable housing to both homeowners and tenants.