Social Housing For All:

America’s rising rents and increasingly unaffordable housing costs are infamous, epic—and deeply felt by millions of families in every corner of the country. In the world’s wealthiest nation, over half a million people are homeless. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, over 20 million renter households were charged unaffordable rents. In fact, a full 30 percent of renters nationwide can only afford to pay rents that are $600 or less per month.

Yet over the past 10 years, our communities lost at least 4 million deeply affordable homes renting in this price bracket, to rent increases, conversions into other uses, and demolitions. Our country needs affordable housing production more than ever. Instead, high-end luxury rentals are a growing share of construction, accounting for as much as 80 percent of new housing in 2020.

At the root of our housing problems is a corporate stranglehold over all aspects of housing finance, production, and provision—as well as over our nation’s housing policy-making. Real estate acquisitions by the largest corporate landlords, predatory investment, and housing speculation have only skyrocketed in the past decade. Wall Street landlords and speculators target low-income Black and Brown communities, disproportionately subjecting them to eviction, rent gouging, and health violations. The real estate industry has exerted its political influence to oppose renter protections, promote deregulation, and gut public housing. While renters have lacked sufficient political power in our government institutions to counter these dangerous trends, tenants across the country are increasingly organizing to demand a new course.

Now more than ever, all levels of government must step up to produce the deeply and permanently affordable housing that we need. Policymakers must wake up to the fact that the for-profit, private sector is incapable of creating deeply affordable housing at scale. We cannot continue to rely on for-profit development to solve problems that it is in fact driving. Without decisive intervention, the devastating harms of corporate profiteering in our housing market will only increase. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Social housing is a public option for housing that is permanently affordable, protected from the private market, and publicly owned by the government or under democratic community control by non-profit entities. Around the world, robust social housing programs have successfully ended affordable housing shortages; expanded democratic accountability and equitable housing access; and raised whole populations out of poverty and into prosperity. This report lifts up principles and practices of model social housing policy, drawing on powerful and proven real-world examples that have worked, in order to chart a course for guaranteeing housing as a human right in the U.S.

The federal government must provide $1 trillion over ten years to fund the construction of 12 million new social and public housing units. Social housing policy in the U.S. must put low-income communities of color first; these communities are disproportionately cost-burdened and have the least access to quality housing. Public housing in the U.S. is a critical source of deeply affordable housing for the lowest-income families.

Yet policymakers have subjected our public housing to severe disinvestment for decades, and its residents to racist criminalization and over-policing. Instead, the federal government must prioritize expanding quality public housing—under democratic control and resident management. It must allocate at least $180 billion over ten years to fully fund repairs and retrofits in existing public housing while making subsidized housing accessible to people with records and regardless of immigration status. It must end policies and practices that harass residents or that harness policing to facilitate eviction.

Social housing offers effective, proven, and lasting solutions that powerfully and transformative address the roots of our housing crisis:

• Social housing production is the solution for our severe and growing lack of deeply affordable housing. Examples prove that government-led construction of social housing has succeeded in creating massive amounts of deeply affordable housing, whereas the private sector has failed. Upfront public financing for public construction of social housing under government or non-profit ownership—not tax breaks to private developers and investors—is the only way we will produce the sheer amount of affordable housing we need.