Social Housing in California: Part 2

Maintaining the momentum for true housing system change in California

It’s mid August, which means the California legislature is back from summer recess. Bills which are still alive are now in the Appropriations Committee of the opposite side of the legislature, their final step before a floor vote. All told, bills have a month to make it out and onto the governor’s desk.

One pleasant surprise for me this session is that two of the three (unofficial) social housing bills remain alive. AB309 (Lee) would create a pilot social housing program on state-owned land. SB555 (Wahab) would compel the State housing department to produce a Social Housing strategy to build 1.2 million units of social housing in the next ten years.¹ While none of these bills are revolutionary - and AB309 has gone from a big plan for a new agency to a pilot program - this is the farthest I have ever seen any bill with ‘social housing’ in the name make it in California.

Now I am very much a glass half-full person - especially in writing - but my enthusiasm for the current possibilities around social housing comes from more than just legislation. The interest in social housing as an idea, as a vision for real systems change in housing, is growing. Hundreds of California housers and legislators have now gone on trips to Vienna and Copenhagen and Singapore and everywhere else in the world with a better housing system than California, and it’s starting to make a difference (shout out to Helmi Hisserich and Jennifer LeSar and others who recognize that seeing is believing). Regional agencies like the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) and the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) are hosting social housing webinars. Five years ago had you talked about social housing, people would have looked at you with blank stares. Now at least it’s in the atmosphere.

I’ve even learned to see the multiplicity of bills calling themselves social housing - or the Vienna-influenced ones like SB440 which do not - as a positive sign. Yes, it will be better when the equity, YIMBY and labor groups behind each bill can get on the same page, because the combination of the three bills - a plan, an agency with the power to carry out the plan, and a dedicated funding source for the plan - is a key legislative pathway to a new social housing system. But building this coalition is easier when all the groups actually are talking about and fighting over the same kernel of an idea. This, in California, is progress.

I wrote about Social Housing last year, and while the piece is obviously a bit dated, many of the observations hold up. We still need to move beyond ideology - we can’t build a social housing system based on very narrow beliefs about government or markets or even who is worthy of housing. We still need to see how social housing is about changing the system, not just building an agency or public housing by a European name. We still have a long way to go to design the specific mechanisms we need, from finance to industry ethics. We have work to do to design social housing to be mixed income as a system - but not always in every building, not always through cross-subsidization (just sometimes).

And we must, must, must build a social housing system that is mixed tenure. If social housing isn’t homeowners + rentals + supportive housing, if it isn’t CLTs + condos + limited-equity coops, it won’t work. Not in California in 2023. We need to deliver diverse housing choices to the most diverse place on earth.

I’ll come back to many of these specifics in the future, either by myself or with partners. But there are many things I have learned over the past year about what social housing could be - as an idea, and as a system - and it’s time to double down.

Building Momentum Beyond the Legislature

One of the interesting things about social housing is that it is the first housing policy discourse I can think of in a while where elected officials are out in front of most housers. Unlike other housing programs and ideas, which can sometimes take decades to go from housing minds to legislative bodies, this one went from a few ideas and working groups and an important paper and lots of tweets to a bill real quick. The State has had a Select Committee on Social Housing for a few years now, and I very much appreciate legislators willing to push towards the front on this idea.

Now it is time for housers to catch up. While I appreciate all the bills in their own way, none of them on their own will get us there. No matter what happens - whether both bills pass or don’t pass or only one passes, the real work to build new social housing systems and new social housing imaginations - has only just begun. Much of this work can only be done by professional housers making changes to our industry.

This is one of the reasons why I helped put together the May 26th webinar on Social Housing at San Jose State, the audio and transcript of which has been put out as the latest episode of Housing After Dark.

We featured three of my favorite housers

• Tomiquia Moss from AllHome

• Jennifer Martinez from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

• Regina Williams from our co-host, SV@HOME

in an attempt to expand the social housing conversation beyond the legislature and beyond legislation. Over the course of their careers, these three women have worked across the board in the public, private, nonprofit and philanthropic sectors, on everything from housing finance to tenants rights to supportive housing, working to build power and infrastructure to support affordable housing across a range of needs and communities. They are a part of the diverse set of institutions and professions we will need to be part of social housing if it is to become reality, and it was great to have them standing up and talking about what they see is possible. As Regina Williams says, “Systemic change is challenging,” but all three leaders left me with the clear feeling it is possible.

I urge folks to take a listen or a read, but there are a few important things that have stuck with me about what each of them said - mostly about social housing as systems change.

Social Housing as Systems Change

“I think if we are really going to look at social housing, we have to look at it in the context of a new paradigm. The tax credit environment, the commodification of housing, all of the incentives that real estate investors and hedge funds have and all the things that have a demand side priority. Overlaying a social housing framework on top of that kind of infrastructure will limit the utility of the idea.

I’m really interested in thinking about what else paired with some of these concepts and infrastructure would need to change in our broader housing policy in order for Californians to actually get the benefit of having enough housing for all. One of the takeaways for me is that these challenges will not be met by just investing more money into a system that is producing disproportionately inequitable outcomes. So social housing offers a model that does a system transformation. You actually have a financing system shift that doesn't maximize profit at every point of the life cycle, but enough to be self-sustaining.”

Tomiquia Moss

When you mention social housing, often the first thing people ask for - from veteran housers to people who just want housing - is what do you mean by social housing? This definition question has also become a definition problem - one of the reasons why we have so many social housing bills is that social housing’s select group of stalwarts not only can’t agree on a definition, but often believe that ‘defining’ social housing in their way is somehow part of the path to victory (it is not).

As I wrote last year, social housing is fundamentally about learning from abroad - something absolutely essential to the future of California. What Singapore and Vienna and the French and many other places have done isn’t build something called social housing. What they’ve done is build a better housing system. Better housing finance programs, better ways of multifamily homeownership, better ways of using state power to push through development more efficiently, better ways of incorporating modular housing and design innovations and energy transitions, and WAY better ways of building housing that serves low-income people. 

Vienna isn’t one program, it’s many. Singapore’s Housing and Development Board is a sprawling institution with very nuanced programs for single people and large intergenerational families and everywhere in between - all dependent on a massive network of private companies who design, build, and maintain housing. 

At the most basic level, social housing is just a European term for (most) subsidized housing. In American terms: 

SOCIAL HOUSING = 

• Housing owned by public agencies (i.e. municipalities, housing authorities) + 

• Housing owned by non-profits (i.e. housing associations, etc.) + 

• (Some) housing owned by residents (i.e. limited equity housing co-ops)² 

SOCIAL HOUSING ISN’T JUST THE HOUSING. It includes: 

• The housing itself 

• The residents of the housing

• The system that builds this housing - which could include a public sector developer, or a private developer owned or controlled by the public. 

• The system that maintains this housing

Under this definition, we already have a social housing system in America - in fact, the 2020 OECD report I just linked to ranks us in the ‘small social housing’ group (number 3 of 4 groups), which means between 2% and 9% of our housing falls into their definition of social housing. We have many of the types of social housing already, and many of the institutions and organizations needed. We’re missing some key pieces - like a public sector developer - but building a social housing system in the US doesn’t mean starting from scratch.

If we use this broader definition, we can see that social housing isn’t a single type of housing, with a single type of owner or subsidy or tenure or shape or size or population. This is a point I made last year, and it’s something that we need to emphasize. Social housing can be everything from homeownership to supportive housing, and must be to be successful. The best thing that social housing fans can do is stop trying to define it so narrowly, so specifically, and instead think about it in these broader terms.

When we move beyond the definition battles, we can start to see what I believe social housing really means to most of the advocates who fight for it - it means really changing our system. I like social housing in part because at its best, it is the only housing idea that really sees the whole picture. So many other aspects of our housing debates and discussion are important, but they focus on just a small piece of a vast and complicated system - land use reform, affordable housing funding mechanisms, housing rights for specific tenures, and onward. 

Everyone I know who fights for these housing pillars knows in their heart that there needs to be something bigger, something that weaves it all together and fixes the system. Social housing is the paradigm shift that Tomiquia Moss talks about. In the words of Jennifer Martinez, “It’s not just nipping around the edges and trying to tweak the current housing system. It’s really trying to reshape a whole paradigm of how we go about fixing a problem that is out of control.” This is absolutely essential to social housing, and why social housing is critical to our housing imaginations. 

Building the Social Housing Paradigm Shift

But social housing is more than big dreams. It’s about very specific changes in our mentality that are needed to make this paradigm shift possible - a ‘rewiring’ as Regina Williams puts it. In the language I used in a recent Substack, social housing is as close to a complete housing idea as we have - something that incorporates all your P’s, your building and financing and owning and maintaining and supporting of housing. It’s also, in its best version, a housing system change for most everyone who wants it or needs it and isn’t rich. 

One of the things that is essential to better housing systems abroad is that they have public sector agencies and authorities with the ability to lead on housing - both the institutional capacity to lead and the political willingness to do so. This is an essential part of the vision. In the words of Regina Williams:

“Social housing, for us, is about housing that is publicly produced, housing that is self-sufficient, and that serves a mix of household income ranges. … For me, social housing is really about the government, the public, being more invested in making sure that everyone has a home. It’s about decommodifying housing, and the government going as far as to carry out implementation to make sure that everyone has a home.” - Regina Williams

For me, the essential issue is seeing social housing as a system, and the public sector as a key leader of this system. This approach makes you realize that social housing is not government housing, but simply a better housing system in which government starts to play different roles. It’s the government working with nonprofit and for-profit actors to rearrange the chairs around the housing table. Social housing is a new dance number with mostly the same dancers, a transformation from the madness of our current capital stacks and corporate investor-ownership into more sane capital stacks and more resident- and community-investor ownership.

In a social housing system, all the nonprofit developers that are members of SV@HOME and a dozen other housing coalitions play a critical role in housing maintenance and delivery, just as they do now. So do general contractors and many for-profit developers and construction unions and pension funds - all of who are part of our current system. Look at Vienna and Singapore and you will see vast networks of companies and organizations that partner with governments to make housing work. We have similarly large building industry networks, full of talented people and vast resources. The key is having the ability to see how these groups can work together differently, so that, in Tomiquia Moss’s words, we can see what it’s like “for Californians to actually get the benefit of having enough housing for all.” 

In the meantime, we have the bills in front of us in the Legislature. I hope that the bills’ authors, our Legislative leaders and an ambitious governor can see the future in social housing, and work with bill sponsors on a historic compromise that sees California commit to doing housing differently. We can at the very least start the ball rolling on a social housing planning process, one that includes resources for pilot programs and for the type of outreach and learning required to move us towards a more ambitious - and more equitable and sustainable - housing future. In the words of Jennifer Martinez,

“...we just have to remember that it's possible to transform these systems. We've done it before. And we can do it now.” 

1. The third, SB584, would have created a new fund for social housing based on a short-term rental tax. See Zoe Klingmann’s detailed review of the three bills - with the older version of AB309

2. In most systems, the presence of subsidy would qualify something as social housing. In the US, that doesn’t quite work, because the largest housing subsidy is the mortgage income tax deduction, which most of us don’t think about as social housing. But what if we changed how we perceived this, and worked to rework this program so that it operated in a more social and equitable way?