​Taking stock of the housing crisis in D.C. and across the country, it’s not difficult to see that something has to change: As housing and living costs rise, more people than ever are spending at least half of their income on rent. More than one in ten D.C. residents face housing insecurity, and demand for housing programs, like emergency rental assistance, remains sky-high.

At the same time, disinvestment in traditional public housing has led to the vacancy of thousands of those units. That falls in part at the feet of the federal government, whose budget priorities have made clear that it’s not interested in being a landlord. Instead, it has shifted to paying for housing vouchers, which recipients can use to find their own apartment on the private market. 

These trends – burdensome housing costs and the planned obsolescence of public housing chief among them – have prompted a growing chorus of leftists to urge lawmakers to reimagine what communities look like and how they’re developed. In short, they’ve started a push for social housing.

At once foreign and familiar, “social housing” is an umbrella term for nonmarket, publicly-owned housing that is accessible to people across the income spectrum. It’s a somewhat fuzzy concept that can look different depending on how it’s designed, but the most well-known example is in Vienna, Austria, where the government owns roughly a quarter of the housing stock through mixed-income, amenity-rich complexes. 

“To fight and to solve this problem, we have to we have to look at it systemically, and that’s what social housing does,” says Will Merrifield, who has practiced housing law for about 20 years and represented tenant groups as an attorney with Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. Merrifield left the group to run for a seat on the DC Council, and later founded a group called The Center for Social Housing and Public Investment.

“[That’s] opposed to taking the approach of, you know, ‘we’ll fund one affordable housing project here in Southeast D.C., we’ll all show up and cut a ribbon and celebrate how progressive we are as a city.’ That’s a joke. And that’s the way we’ve done things, and it cannot continue,” Merrifield says.

By 2021, state legislatures in California and Maryland had introduced bills to adopt social housing. The next year, Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George introduced a bill before the DC Council that would establish a social housing program in a “Green New Deal.”

Lewis George’s bill would create an executive-level agency under the purview of the D.C. mayor responsible for the construction and maintenance of mixed-income housing developments, with the idea that tenants paying market-rate rents or higher would subsidize the rents of tenants in the same development paying less. 

Lewis George proposes establishing income guidelines that would allow developments to dedicate one-third of their housing for people making less than 30% of the area’s median income, another third reserved for people making between 30 and 50% of the area’s median income, and the final third reserved for market rate tenants. Developments would also have tenant leadership boards to help shepherd management of the complexes, as well as strict environmental and fair labor standards, like net-zero emissions and on-site solar power banks. 

Five other councilmembers co-sponsored the bill, and in late November, At-Large Councilmember Robert White held a roundtable on how that proposal might play out in D.C.

How is social housing different from subsidized housing developments that already exist?

In some ways, social housing doesn’t look so different from mixed-use, mixed-income planned communities that have become more popular in recent years, like those with ground-level amenities, requirements for green recreation space, and progressive energy standards.

But there are several key factors, like how it could be financed, managed, and owned, that distinguish it from existing developments.

Unlike traditional public housing, which is owned by the federal government and managed by quasi-independent local government agencies, like the DC Housing Authority, social housing is owned by local governments themselves. 

That’s an important distinction, says Eliana Golding of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute. 

“DCHA is an agency that is separate and independent from the D.C. government. It administers federal programs, it gets a lot of its funding from the federal government, and [while] it has an oversight body appointed by the D.C. government, it is technically independent from the D.C. government. And as we’ve seen, one of the consequences of that is that there is a real challenge to accountability and transparency there,” Golding says. “So I think the hope behind social housing is that there’s more accountability measures built into it, because it’ll be owned by the D.C. government.”

Because Lewis George’s proposal would build out resident councils that have power over the management of their buildings, they would be empowered, for example, to help hire a new property management company if they are dissatisfied with the existing one. 

Also unlike public housing, which has income restrictions mandating that only the lowest-income residents are eligible to live there, social housing relies on a mixed-income model. In Vienna, for example, tenants start out by paying 20-25% of their income toward rent, but aren’t required to move out when their incomes increase. Studies indicate that creating mixed-income communities of stably housed people improves mental health outcomes for lower-income residents, in part because it reduces anxieties around crime, social isolation, and moving.

Depending on how social housing developments are financed, they could also maintain longer-term affordability. The most popular federal subsidy for affordable housing construction is the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, which eligible developers can receive only after agreeing to reserve a certain number of units for below-market-rate rents. But LIHTC properties are generally only required to preserve affordability requirements for 30 years, after which a property owner can convert their building to market rate. While LIHTC helps get new development off the ground, it’s an imperfect way of creating permanent affordable housing.

“[People say], ‘the way we’re doing affordable housing is the way we should continue to do affordable housing, because … this is the way that this country has determined that we should attack the affordable housing crisis. And that’s the problem,” Merrifield says. “A lot of these programs are, you know, Reagan-era programs that have come about after the dissolution of traditional public housing. And they’re not effective, and the housing crisis in the United States is expanding. And it’s eating people alive.”

What could social housing look like in D.C., and what are the practical barriers of creating it? 

Merrifield has pointed to Montgomery County, Maryland, D.C.’s neighbor to the north, to what a viable social housing program could look like. Using a revolving $100 million fund, the agency is planning to produce 750 units of housing over the next four years, with part of that earmarked for people who make less than the area’s median income. Its first building, the 268-unit Laureate, opened last spring. 

The county’s Housing Opportunities Commission, a government body that acts like both a developer and housing finance agency, put up money for development costs through a $50 million bond. It charged a significantly lower rate of interest than is common for projects of this scale – think 5% rather than 15% – cutting the cost of construction. HOC projects are also exempt from property taxes, reducing costs further.

Because this model doesn’t rely on federal subsidies like the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, the affordable units are permanently affordable. 

The caveat with this model is that it did not produce the type or scale of affordable housing D.C. desperately needs: Only about 30% of the Laureate’s units are rented below market rate, with the vast majority of that earmarked for people making about half of the area’s median income. (That’s about $1,700 for a one-bedroom apartment.) Lewis George’s bill, for example, is calling for “deeply” affordable housing, which is accessible to people making 30% of the area’s median income or less. 

The up-front costs of social housing programs aren’t cheap, and even some progressives argue that a time of budget cuts and fiscal austerity probably isn’t the best time to launch a relatively untested program that would require sustained investment.

When Maryland Del. Vaughn Stewart introduced a social housing bill in 2020, for example, that proposal asked the state to create a $2.5 billion bond. 

“We are seeing evidence, constantly, of how financially strapped the District government says it is when it comes to implementing social services and human services programs [like ERAP and SNAP]. And seeing all of those programs on the chopping block feels like it’s a challenge or a threat to a movement that is trying to implement a huge, innovative new program that will likely cost up front, you know, tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars,” Golding from the Fiscal Policy Institute says. “That’s just like something that we’re contending with as a coalition – the political and financial realities of the District.” 

And D.C.’s budget projections for the next four years don’t look promising. Yesim Sayin, executive director of the DC Policy Center, believes the District is in for a “tremendously difficult” budget crunch over the next four years. 

Sayin points out that it’s expensive enough to build affordable housing, let alone developments that, like the kind Lewis George is proposing, have additional layers of environmental and labor requirements built in. 

“Just getting to affordable housing is hard. Getting to affordable housing plus 28 other things on my wish list is even harder,” says Sayin, referring to the additional climate and labor goals attached to Lewis George’s social housing proposal. 

Then there’s the math of determining subsidy bands. Of her back-of-the-envelope math for a building that mostly houses people making below 50% of the area’s median income, Sayin says, “it’s impossible arithmetic … The rents that [would have to be] imposed on the non-subsidized group is so high that they probably will walk away and do something else,” she says.

Finally, none of this can happen without the political will to pursue it – and because Lewis George’s bill would create a new agency under the purview of the mayor, Golding notes that it would require buy-in from the Bowser administration, which appears unlikely for now. 

Colleen Green, director of D.C.’s Department of Housing and Community Development, testified in opposition to social housing during November’s roundtable on the bill, saying that the costs are too high for the amount of housing it would produce. 

But that doesn’t satisfy Merrifield, who says that D.C. residents deserve a government with the vision capacity to tackle the affordability crisis. “If we’re trying to solve the affordable housing crisis, we have to understand that the private market is not going to do it, and it’s going to take government intervention,” he says. “We should have expectations for our government to help try to solve the vast issues of inequality in Washington, D.C., housing being one of the things at the top of the list that causes that inequality. We should expect our government to be able to do that.”