Since its establishment during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, American public housing has been riddled with contradictions. Americans who don’t live in public housing want more of it, as long as it isn’t nearby. Public housing is so in demand that there are years-long waiting lists, yet conservative columnists say things like, “Housing projects radiate dysfunction and social problems outward, damaging local businesses and neighborhood property values.” Public housing is federally run, yet locally administered. It’s a lifeline, and also has, from the beginning, been a tool for racial segregation and eviction of non-white Americans from their homes.

In Los Angeles, a new crop of progressive City Council members are pushing a different way of thinking about public housing, one that requires a reimagining of the entire concept. “Social housing is a model that fundamentally contradicts the notion of housing as a commodity and instead treats it as a social good,” says Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez. Hernandez represents Council District 1, which includes recently gentrified neighborhoods in Northeast Los Angeles like Highland Park—where Hernandez was born and raised—as well as some of the city’s most densely populated neighborhoods, like Westlake and Pico-Union. The latest in this effort is a motion “aimed at expanding the city’s capacity to establish a large-scale social housing program, including pathways for low-income home ownership,” says Hernandez.

Social housing is more a set of principles than a specific program; the basic idea is to provide housing that operates outside the real estate market, with the aim of creating affordable, equitable, and permanent housing. That means that housing would be owned not by landlords or real estate companies, but by cities, housing authorities, governments, or arrangements like cooperatives. Social housing cannot be sold for profit; it should be available to all, regardless of income (or lack thereof); and rents, if applicable (more on that later), should comprise no more than 30 percent of a tenant’s income. That last part is important in Council District 1, where Hernandez says over half of renters are above that line, and at least a quarter spend more than 50 percent of their income on rent.

Also importantly: social housing is not strictly for those with low incomes. In Vienna, Austria, which has been repeatedly highlighted as a “renter’s utopia,” social housing allows for middle-income people to afford houses as well. Deranged real estate markets have placed home ownership out of the reach of plenty of middle-income people, too, and social housing is a way to opt out of that toxic system.

Social housing wants to totally reshape our idea of what housing is: not an investment, not a dream, but a social good.

Los Angeles is in an unusual position at the moment, one that Hernandez, along with fellow Councilmembers Nithya Raman and Marqueece Harris-Dawson, want to take advantage of. “The biggest barrier facing social housing programs right now is funding,” says Hernandez. “Financing affordable housing in the U.S. is limited, competitive, and it expires. So, we have to think out of the box.” In 2022, Los Angeles voters voted overwhelmingly for Measure ULA, which increased taxes on the transfer of homes that sold for over $5 million—a mansion tax, sort of. Measure ULA brought in nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in its first year. A provision of that measure ensured that a big chunk of that money will go toward affordable housing that could never be sold to a for-profit entity.

Hernandez, Raman, and Harris-Dawson co-introduced a motion in late May “aimed at expanding the city’s capacity to establish a large-scale social housing program, including pathways for low-income home ownership. It calls upon the L.A. Housing Department to identify financing tools to support and operate social housing,” says Hernandez. This seems like a small thing: a motion in a City Council directing the local housing department to find new financing tools. It isn’t. It’s a great chance to use quite a bit of suddenly available money to enact policies that could make it possible for long-time residents to not only survive, but permanently thrive, in some of the most rapidly gentrifying parts of the country’s second-largest city.

“If we’re going to expand and put the full weight of the city behind this model, we have to dispel the misconceptions that many people have about social housing,” says Hernandez. Public housing projects have, in addition to the very real good they’ve done in providing housing, also long served to concentrate poverty, segregate people of color, and profit the real estate industry. Social housing wants to totally reshape our idea of what housing is: not an investment, not a dream, but a social good.

Top image via Getty

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