There is so much natural beauty in Seattle. The city’s glimmering skyline strikes a sharp juxtaposition with the Cascade Mountains, which fade gently into the horizon, almost like a watercolor painting. Sometimes, you walk up a street, turn a corner, and all of the sudden, the snow-capped peaks of Mount Rainier come into view. Water, too, is everywhere — the city’s grid is dotted with inlets, bays, creeks, and lakes.

Seattle is built with the adventurer in mind. Olympic National Forest and Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest are both within two hours of the city, making it easy for Seattleites to get outside. But adventure is also available within city limits; around 11% of the city’s land is dedicated to park space, leaving Seattleites with miles of open space to run, climb, walk, and play in. In Discovery Park, the city’s 534-acre crown jewel, there are nearly 12 miles of hiking trails, making it one of the few urban parks in America where you can truly escape the city. The city’s impressive trail system, with projects like the Burke-Gilman Trail, the Green Lake Loop, and the Cheshiahud Loop, is also a major boon, delighting cyclists and runners alike.

Seattle’s Discovery Park

With so much going for it, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Seattle is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the United States, with the population growing by around 20% in the last 10 years. What is less surprising, however, is that the city is experiencing a multi-faceted housing crisis of terrifying proportions.

Seattle is facing a serious housing shortage. Despite the city’s rapid population growth, 66% of the city’s land is still zoned for single family housing, though recent zoning reforms now allow between 4 to 6 homes to be built on these lots. These reforms alone, however, have proven to be insufficient; between 2021 and 2024 Seattle produced an average of 7,875 housing starts, while the city’s population grew by an average of 15,171 people per year over that same time frame. Considering that the majority of these new units were studios and one-bedrooms, this rate of housing production is seriously inadequate to keep up with the city’s rate of growth. Concerningly, more recent proposals to increase housing density in the city have faced serious opposition, leading Mayor Bruce Harrell to scale back housing production targets in Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan.

Furthermore, rents in the city have skyrocketed. Seattle’s Fair Market Rent, a HUD statistic used to determine payments for housing assistance programs, has increased by $715 dollars in the last five years, skyrocketing from $1,523 in 2021 to $2,238 in 2025. Of course, low-income tenants have been disproportionately impacted – nearly 65% of renters making below 100% of the city’s Area Median Income are rent burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing. The 55% of Seattleites who rent their homes have also been hurt by widespread rent-fixing; 800,000 leases in Washington State were priced using RealPage, an algorithmic tool used by landlords to inflate market rents, between 2017 and 2024. To combat this, the Seattle City Council did ban use of RealPage in June of this year, but this does not negate the widespread harm the software’s widespread use in Seattle has already caused. Fortunately, some (modest) relief is on the way for tenants — Washington State did recently implement statewide rent regulation. However, the policy, which restricts annual rent increases to either 7% plus inflation or 10% (whichever is lower), is fairly weak, and excludes common housing typologies in the region, like single family homes and new construction units.

As high rents push more and more Seattleites towards the brink, the need for affordable housing in the city continues to grow. Recent estimates show that there are only 23 units of affordable housing available for every 100 extremely low-income families in King County, which is home to Seattle and many of its inner-ring suburbs. Concerningly, Seattle’s affordable housing industry isn’t prepared to meet the moment — it is strapped for cash, losing supply, and is incapable of producing new units at scale. Local affordable housing developers are losing money on their projects or facing other serious financial issues, as post-pandemic economic trends like inflation, rising interest rates, and economic insecurity amongst tenants drive up costs and lower rent collection rates. Due to these challenges, some affordable housing developers have even made the unsavory decision to sell off their buildings to private equity investors or advocate for the loosening of the city’s tenant protections, putting the homes of low-income Seattleites at risk. At the same time, the number of federally subsidized units in the Seattle region actually decreased between the 2000s and the 2010s, worsening competition for the city’s scarce affordable housing supply.

As rents continue to rise, rent burdens continue to grow, and affordable housing production continues to stall, thousands of Seattleites have been pushed out of their homes, neighborhoods, and communities. Consequently, Seattle’s homeless population has soared, with King County’s total homeless population increasing from 11,199 in 2019 to 16,868 in 2024. But Seattle has been steadfast in ignoring its own culpability in rising homelessness; instead, the city has subject those living on the street to constant encampment sweeps. Although there is only one shelter bed for every two people experiencing homelessness in King County, Seattle conducted over 2,500 encampment sweeps in 2024, costing the city a staggering $32.5 million. To make matters worse, nearly 90% of encampment sweeps in 2024 were categorized as an “obstruction”, which absolves the city from providing the people they displace with social services. This approach has actually taken resources away from solutions that bring people inside, such as expanding the number of non-congregate, high quality shelter beds (under current Mayor Bruce Harrell, the number of shelter beds in the city has decreased each year) or address the root cause of homelessness, such as providing folks with stable housing.

With homelessness on the rise, affordable housing in decline, and housing production stagnating, it’s clear that Seattle’s existing solutions to the city’s burgeoning housing crisis aren’t working for the average person. While the city’s tech-driven elite cautioned against drastic changes, calling for tweaks to existing programs, many Seattleites understood that something entirely new was necessary to build a city where housing could actually be seen as a basic right instead of something to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. They understood Seattle needed social housing.

Affordable Senior LGBTQIA+ Housing in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Neighborhood

On a sunny August evening, I met Seattle organizer Jeff Paul by the Lenin Statue in the city’s Fremont neighborhood, hoping to pick their brain about the House Our Neighbors (HON) campaign, a group that's been fighting for social housing as a solution to Seattle's housing crisis for the past several years. Paul, a long-time organizer with the campaign, explained that HON was initially formed to oppose a business and real estate driven 2021 ballot measure deceptively called “Compassion Seattle”, which would have required the city to clear all homeless encampments from public spaces as long as 2,000 new units of emergency housing were built. The campaign sharply divided the housing field; some non-profit organizations serving low-income Seattle residents were placated by the promise of new units, and partnered up with Compassion Seattle.

Homeless folks, however, were able to see through the plan, arguing that the promise of new units was an unfunded mandate to justify rendering homelessness invisible across the city. As organizers with the campaign began having conversations with their neighbors about why Compassion Seattle was harmful, the brokenness of Seattle’s existing housing infrastructure inevitably came up. So, gradually, campaign members began to brainstorm what a new housing ecosystem could look like in the city, investigating a range of global housing models. As Paul described it, HON wanted to pose a positive vision for housing in Seattle, one where all people could afford to stay in their homes without threat of displacement or crushing rental burdens.

The municipally-run social housing program in Vienna, Austria, which houses around half of the city’s residents struck a particular chord with HON, perhaps because it is so fundamentally different from any large-scale affordable housing programs in the United States. While most American housing programs, such as public housing or Section 8 housing vouchers, are only available to those making very low incomes, Vienna’s social housing program serves a wider range of the city’s population, with 80% of the city’s population qualifying for a unit. Unlike American public housing, however, no one is forced out of their unit if they start earning above the income limit. Paul, who visited Vienna with HON in 2024, also gushed to me about the robust communal amenities provided in most of the city’s social housing developments. On-site kindergartens and communal kitchens have reduced caregiving pressures on many Viennese women, while libraries and theaters have provided residents with opportunities for cultural enrichment. In Seattle, a city with very few neighborhoods allowing mixed-use buildings, amenity-rich social homes like those built in Vienna could prove to be a huge boon for future residents.

Ultimately, Vienna’s robust program proves that, when done correctly, social housing can be beautiful, deeply affordable, and widely popular. If social housing is readily and widely available to people, there will be a strong, innate base that will fight to expand, improve, and protect this housing. The political base for social housing in Vienna has insulated the city’s program from the (deeply unjust) attacks and funding cuts that have plagued public and subsidized housing programs in the United States, ensuring that social homes in the Austrian capital remain high-quality for generations to come.

Determined to buck this trend, HON became interested in pursuing a municipal, universalist social housing program back in Seattle. After “Compassion Seattle” was removed from the ballot by a judge due to legal issues with the proposal, the campaign pivoted towards this vision, and began working on its own ballot measure, one that would create a public development authority (PDA) capable of directly developing mixed-income, permanently affordable housing across the city.

In drafting their ballot measure, “I-135”, Ben Ferlo, an economics graduate student and organizer with the campaign, told me that HON used flexible, non-prescriptive bill language that would allow the authority to be adaptable in the wake of political or economic shifts. While the proposed Seattle Social Housing Developer (SSHD) would be required to build affordable housing for a wide range of incomes, including extremely-low, very-low, low, and moderate income Seattleites, the ballot measure did not include strict income bands or income limits. Due to the wide range of incomes that the SSHD is allowed to serve, Ferlo emphasized that the SSHD hoped to use “cross-subsidy”, a model where the higher (but still permanently affordable) rents paid by more affluent residents help to offset the lower rents paid by lower-income residents, to keep the public development authority financially stable.

The authors of I-135 also wanted the SSHD to provide residents with a degree of stability that is unfathomable in private sector housing; the authority would provide permanently affordable housing to people at all income levels, with rents set based on tenant incomes as well as building operations, maintenance, and loan service costs. Furthermore, tenants are not supposed to spend more than 30% of their income towards rent, protecting SSHD residents from onerous rent burdens. The SSHD would also offer robust tenant protections; tenants cannot be evicted due to changes in household income, and must undergo a restorative justice process before losing access to their unit.

Furthermore, to insulate the SSHD from the pressures of the private market, it must be the exclusive owner of any housing it acquires or produces, preventing the authority from selling off units or entering risky public-private partnerships. The ballot measure also gave the social housing authority a right of first refusal for public land, requiring the city to prepare a feasibility study to consider if public land should be transferred to the SSHD before selling it off to a for-profit entity. With the understanding that land acquisition costs are prohibitively expensive in a high-market city like Seattle, this process potentially makes it easier (and cheaper) for the SSHD to acquire property. Lastly, the authority was required to provide residents with opportunities to participate in decision-making about their homes, and build to green building and Passive House standards.

To govern this public development authority, a thirteen-member board was proposed, with two members appointed by the City Council, one member appointed by the Mayor, one labor-affiliated member appointed by the Martin Luther King Jr. County Labor Council, one member appointed by a local community organization, and one member with green development expertise appointed by the city’s Green New Deal Oversight Board. Lastly, seven of the board’s members were to be social housing residents, who would be elected to the board by those living in the city’s social housing developments. However, with the understanding that the public development authority would not immediately have tenants, the ballot measure gives the Seattle Renters’ commission the initial authority to appoint resident representatives. The ballot measure also put the city on the hook for supporting 18 months of initial start-up costs for the social housing developer, allowing the authority to get off the ground before consistent revenue sources were identified.

Of course, to win the public development authority, HON first had to get their initiative on the ballot, something that posed initial roadblocks. Initially, the campaign, which had to collect thousands of signatures to get their measure on the ballot, had hoped to get on the November 2022 ballot, a major midterm election that would likely have a more progressive voter base. However, the campaign was not able to collect the required number of signatures to get on the November ballot, and instead was placed on the ballot for a February 2023 special election with lower projected turnout. Additionally, the campaign was unable to pair their initial ballot measure with a funding source due to legal issues, which led to bad faith attacks about the authority’s financial viability from the Seattle Times and other pro-business organizations. While the authority did have bonding power, a potentially potent source of funding for social housing construction, many folks doubted that bonds alone could meet the authority’s funding needs.

To overcome these challenges, HON built a broad, diverse coalition to push for social housing. Ben Ferlo, the economics graduate student and HON organizer, emphasized that the campaign’s success came from the breadth of their coalition, which included socialists like Seattle DSA members, pro-housing organizations like Tech 4 Housing, labor unions like PROTEC17, and organizations representing homeless Seattleites, like Real Change. To get I-135 on the ballot, volunteers across the coalition spent months gathering the necessary petition signatures, providing the campaign with another opportunity to help people understand what a social housing developer could do for them. In the months leading up to the February 2023 vote, HON scaled up their outreach work, building a large-scale, grassroots canvassing operation that knocked thousands of doors across the city.

According to HON co-executive director Tiffani McCoy, talking to Seattleites about social housing was easy, telling Dwell Magazine “Renters are burdened. People don’t know how much longer they can afford to live in the city. They don’t know what the next rent increase will be. There’s massive market volatility, and there are really no high prospects for home ownership. And even if there was, people are economically vulnerable and wages are not keeping up with the cost of living.” On Election Day, McCoy was proven right — Seattleites did really want social housing. 57% of voters supported the I-135 measure in February of 2023, making Seattle one of the first American cities with a dedicated social housing developer.

Coalition members were obviously thrilled by this huge victory, but they still had a lot of work to do. A board had to be appointed, an office had to be found, and an executive director had to be hired. Some steps towards building out the SSHD were taken quickly; an initial 13 member board was appointed by the Seattle Renter Commission, Mayor Bruce Harrell, the City Council, the MLK Jr. County Labor Council, El Centro de la Raza, and the Green New Deal Oversight Board in April of 2023. But HON had to figure out a way to pay for its social housing program. Some, like State Senator Frank Chopp, a long-time housing champion, proposed that funding could come from the State Legislature, but this funding stream never materialized.

Instead, HON chose to pursue a second ballot measure, one that would create a 5% “excess compensation tax” to fund social housing development. Under this proposal, which is predicted to raise over $50 million a year, businesses would pay the 5% payroll tax for each Seattle-based employee paid over $1 million annually in salary, stock, and bonuses. This, of course, scared big business. And when big business gets scared, so does current Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, and (most of) the city’s moderate City Council.

So, of course, Seattle’s monied elite came together quickly to mount an aggressive, deceptive campaign against what was ultimately a moderate revenue ask — especially in a state like Washington, which has no income tax. After HON successfully collected tens of thousands of signatures to get their new measure, Initiative I-137, on the ballot, business groups like the Seattle Chamber of Commerce pressured the City Council to create a counter-measure to the “excess compensation tax” proposal. In a particularly heinous move, the City Council voted to delay I-137, moving it from the November 2024 ballot to a lesser-known February 2025 special election in order to buy more time to draft a counter-measure that would satisfy Seattle-area businesses like Microsoft and Amazon.

The alternative proposal that the City Council ultimately put forward changed the way voters were asked about social housing on their ballots. First, voters were asked if they supported dedicating payroll tax revenues towards the city’s social housing authority. Voters then chose between two proposals to fund the authority — Proposition 1A, the “excess compensation tax” put forward by HON, or Proposition 1B, the Council’s alternate proposal, which would have allocated $10 million dollars from existing payroll taxes to the authority each year, leaving it with only 20% of the funding it would have gotten under Proposition A. Furthermore, Proposition B would have prevented the authority from building mixed-income housing, as city funds were required to serve those making 80% of Area Median Income or less.

Unsurprisingly, the city’s business class immediately opened up their pocketbooks to try and block Proposition 1A from passing. Amazon and Microsoft both gave $100,000 to “People for Responsible Social Housing”, an organization seeking to block the new payroll tax from being implemented, while Seattle’s Chamber of Commerce and T-Mobile gave the group $40,000 and $20,000 respectively. People for Responsible Social Housing used this corporate money to send out deceptive mailers, many of which featured current Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, claiming that Proposition B would allow the city to produce social housing without raising taxes. This, of course, ignores the fact that the SSHD would only get $10 million dollars each year in revenue from Proposition B, hardly enough to develop a significant amount of housing in a city with high construction costs.

HON was quick to highlight People for Responsible Social Housing’s corporate backers, holding a rally in support of Proposition 1A in front of Amazon’s headquarters. Building off of growing resentment against tech billionaires in the city, the coalition also sent mailers highlighting Microsoft and Amazon’s attempt to block a robust social housing program in the city. This approach seems to have worked on voters — when Seattleites headed to the polls on February 11th, they voted for Proposition 1A by a nearly 20 point margin, creating a strong political mandate for a well-funded, universalist social housing developer. The power of organized people won out over the power of organized money.

Since HON wasn’t able to combine a ballot measure authorizing the authority with a revenue source funding it, the campaign was put in the strange position of building a social housing authority while also fighting for a secondary ballot measure to fully fund it. While campaign volunteers were collecting signatures and knocking doors in support of Proposition 1A, HON also had to push for a functional SSHD. Seattle’s business-backed Mayor and City Council certainly weren’t eager to offer help. While an initial 13-member board was appointed in 2023, the SSHD wasn’t able to hire a CEO, the authority’s first full time staff member, until the summer of 2024. The city also stonewalled the SSHD on its contractual obligation to pay start-up costs for the authority over 18 months, only covering a year of the SSHD’s initial expenses. The city was also slow to dispose of funds to the SSHD, forcing the authority to essentially operate without any financial support for months on end. As a result, it took the authority over a year to get an office space and develop a website, let alone make additional hires, like a chief financial officer, or project managers capable of helping the SSHD analyze the viability of future projects.

Other growing pains surfaced for the SSHD; the board struggled to comply with the State’s Open Public Meetings Act, failing to post agendas for their monthly board meetings. More recently, multiple board members resigned, alleging that the authority’s CEO engaged in abusive, racist behavior. While these allegations are serious, concerning, and should be fully investigated, the resignations left the board with three vacant positions, some of could not be filled for months while members of the Seattle City Council obstructed appointments to the Renters Commission in the hopes of giving it landlord representation. Furthermore, Seattle has also been slow to set up the infrastructure necessary to collect the “excess compensation tax”, with a spokesperson for the mayor claiming that funds will not be made available to the SSHD until early 2026, even though the tax is retroactive from January 1st, 2025.

Unsurprisingly, social housing opponents, like the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, have hit the SSHD hard for its perceived shortcomings, arguing their early missteps are somehow proof that the developer as a whole is doomed to fail. These attacks, however, are disingenuous for several reasons. While the Seattle Chamber of Commerce has been extremely critical of the SSHD for its failure to publish meeting agendas in adherence with the State’s Open Public Meetings Act, it hasn’t spoken up about the business-friendly City Council’s aggressive crackdown on public comments at meetings. Clearly, the Chamber only has issues with public access when it serves their own political will. Furthermore, the SSHD cannot (and should not) be expected to function without access to the funds it has a contractual right to. If the city continues to nickel and dime the SSHD, it won’t be able to hire the staff they need to support the board, meet open meeting regulations, or even think about developing projects. It’s hard to expect a social housing developer to succeed when the government actively wants it to fail.

But there is a big, bright light gleaming at the end of the tunnel for the SSHD. First of all, more money is finally on the way; after dragging their feet for nearly a year and a half, Mayor Bruce Harrell and the City Council finally approved a $2 million bridge loan to the developer, giving it a crucial infusion of funds allowing the SSHD to staff up and look towards actually producing or acquiring housing. Even more encouragingly, voters in Seattle’s August 5th primary rejected business-friendly elected officials — Katie Wilson, a progressive mayoral candidate (and social housing advocate), outperformed incumbent Bruce Harrell by 10 points. Progressives fared similarly well in the City Council; left-leaning Council Member Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a proud supporter of Proposition 1a, absolutely crushed her moderate opponent, while Dionne Foster, the former executive director of the Progress Alliance of Washington, outperformed City Council President (and Seattle Chamber of Commerce darling) Sara Nelson. While Seattle’s top-two primary system means that these moderates will still move on to the November general election, they face an uphill battle with the city’s electorate. Furthermore, if insurgent, pro-social housing progressives like Wilson and Foster beat their moderate opponents, government support for the SSHD will increase, putting the authority in a better position to succeed.

At the same time, HON is still pushing forwards with its vision for well-funded, deeply affordable, universalist affordable housing. The organization has begun to look at potential development sites for social housing projects, even partnering with an architecture firm to create renderings for a potential publicly-owned rental project on a city-owned site in Seattle’s Northgate neighborhood. The 35-unit proposed project combines a range of housing typologies, including 2-bedroom townhouses, 2-and-3-bedroom apartments, and “co-living” units, which have shared kitchen and bathroom facilities. It features two ground floor amenity spaces and an interior courtyard, providing young children with a safe place to play. The project would also meet sustainability goals; the development would be built to Passive House standards, and the site is located near the Northgate Light Rail station, likely reducing car dependency.

Picture Credit: House Our Neighbors and Neiman Taber Architects

This kind of project, which would combine different types of housing and accommodate a wide range of incomes, is nearly unfathomable in most parts of America, due to a combination of inadequate government support, onerous zoning regulations, limited affordable housing programs, and lack of political will. It is beautiful and spacious and green, things we don’t typically associate with affordable or social housing in the United States. Thanks to projects like these, Seattle may finally be the American city that starts to disprove long-held cultural misconceptions about “affordable” housing: that it is poor-quality, ugly, unsafe, and undesirable. It just needs the institutional support necessary to carry out its political mandate.

During my conversation with Ben Ferlo, the economics student and HON organizer, he compared the social housing developer to USPS. If Americans could only ship packages using private companies, like United Parcel Services, Fedex, or DHL, he argued, it would be a lot more expensive to send mail. Having a public option brings down prices for everybody. He told me he hoped that the city’s social housing authority could do the same sort of thing for housing. Of course, the metaphor also works well with regards to funding; USPS deliveries are likely to become less reliable due to Trump’s massive cuts to the agency. Similarly, social housing will be less attractive to folks if it’s not well-funded, lowering its likelihood of success.

While I’d never quite thought of it in this particular way, Ferlo’s argument seemed similar to Catherine Bauer’s in her landmark 1934 book, Modern Housing; government-built, high-quality social housing should directly compete with the private market to bring down prices and improve housing quality for everyone. And one day, if we build enough social housing for all of our neighbors, maybe — just maybe — we can crowd the private market out. But for that to work, social housing needs support. Seattleites have been loud and clear that they want social homes in their city — the overwhelming support for both I-135 and Proposition 1A proves that. Now, it’s time for the city government to step up. The city government must accelerate its plan for collecting the “excess compensation tax” and work towards getting those funds to the SSHD, so the city can finally get the social housing it has been fighting for.

Over the past 90 years, New York City’s Mayors have played a central role in shaping the housing market. Some mayors sought to weaken the power of the real estate state; in the 1930s, Fiorello LaGuardia crafted an innovative (and for many decades, well-run) public housing program that fused federal, city, and state funds in an attempt to eliminate slum districts across the city. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) would go on to become the largest public housing authority in the nation by a large margin; the number of people living in NYCHA is approximately equivalent to the entire population of Orlando. In the 1950s, Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. tried to solve the joint problems of housing affordability and middle-class flight to the suburbs by helping the State Legislature to craft a large-scale middle-income rental and co-operative housing program now known as Mitchell-Lama. While Mitchell-Lama is not without its problems (the program was substantially weakened by an opt-out provision that allows units to go market-rate after their loan period ends), but it still provides tens of thousands of deeply affordable units for families across the city. During his two terms as Mayor, Bill deBlasio froze rents for rent stabilized tenants in 2015, 2016, and 2020, which helped protect New Yorkers from being priced out of their homes and neighborhoods.

Other mayors chose to reshape the housing market in ways that strengthened the real estate state, seeking to shift housing policy in subtle ways that disproportionately benefited landlords, the real estate lobby, and speculators. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s, Ed Koch used the J-51 tax break, initially designed to support property renovations in low-income housing, to encourage developers to convert affordable housing into higher-end units.2 This directly reduced the supply of naturally occurring affordable housing across the city, including single room occupancy (SRO) buildings, which often housed New Yorkers at risk of homelessness. In the 1990s, Rudy Giuliani created the tax lien sale, where the city sells the right to collect delinquent property taxes and water debt at a discount to predatory, private investors, who tack exorbitant fees, fines, and interest rates onto the debts families already owe, This speculative practice pushes vulnerable homeowners deeper into debt, and often leads to foreclosure.

Andrew Cuomo, the leading candidate for New York City Mayor in most major polls, is committed to strengthening the real estate state. As governor, he stalled for years on strengthening the state’s rent laws, allowing tens of thousands of units to exit rent stabilization. Unsurprisingly, the real estate state is returning the favor; landlords have given $2.5 million to a super PAC deceptively called “Housing for All” that’s spending its money blasting pro-Cuomo (and anti-Zohran Mamdani) ads across our TV screens.

Although he does have a 29-page housing plan on his website, it was written with assistance from ChatGPT, and mostly concerns how Cuomo would tweak around the edges of existing programs, such as expanding the city’s development rights transfer program and expediting housing review processes.

So what would housing actually look like if Cuomo was Mayor? Let’s read through the lines of his cryptic, typo-ridden, AI-written housing plan to find out.

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Is Cuomo Actually Serious About Building Housing Supply?

Cuomo’s plans to build new housing in the city are, at best, half-assed. He claims he’ll build or preserve 500,000 units of housing over the next decade, most of which he wants to be affordable, but offers few solutions to actually get to that number. Sure, he supports advancing the Midtown South Mixed-Use Plan, which could create almost 10,000 units of housing between West 40th Street, and West 23rd Street, but that plan is already in motion under the current administration. He seems supportive of office-to-residential conversions, but offers few solutions to actually incentivize these conversions beyond pushing the Department of Housing, Preservation and Development (HPD) to streamline its review of these projects, and making the Office Conversion Accelerator Program permanent.

In many ways, Cuomo has more plans to not build housing than to actually build it. Buried in his unnecessarily verbose housing plan is a commitment to avoid pursuing “…further zoning changes in these low-density neighborhoods, at least until the impact of recent rezoning efforts are absorbed in these areas.” This commitment absolves certain (largely affluent and white) neighborhoods from building new (and perhaps more importantly, affordable) housing, while further concentrating housing production in a small handful of neighborhoods that have produced tens of thousands of units in the past decade and a half. This is particularly concerning for affordable housing, where projects have typically been concentrated in neighborhoods where poverty levels are higher than city averages, as opposed to being evenly distributed in communities across the city.

Furthermore, we can’t even count on Cuomo to push for new development in higher-density affluent neighborhoods. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Cuomo came out against the beleaguered (and as of today, formally extinct) Haven Green project, which would have provided 123 units of housing for homeless seniors on the site of the Elizabeth Street Garden, a small open space in NoLita. Admittedly, at face value, this situation may seem like something of a Sophie’s choice, forcing the city to choose between preserving green space and building desperately needed affordable housing. In Cuomo’s interview with the New York Times, he alluded to this apparent dynamic, saying: “In general, I think it’s a mistake to close gardens and green spaces. You know, quality of life. Find a vacant site that is not a green space. A city-owned site that really is suitable for affordable housing.”

But Cuomo, as the governor of the State for much of the period during which the Haven Green developers were in litigation with the garden, should know that this narrative intentionally obscures basic facts about the controversy. For one, the site, which has long been owned by the city, was never intended to be a green space in the first place. In the 1990s, at a time when the City was coming out of an economic recession, and still possessed a high volume of vacant land, the city began leasing the lot to Allan Reiver, a gallery owner who used the site to store sculptures. As the city’s stock of publicly-owned vacant land dwindled throughout the 90s and 2000s, then-mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed that the site be developed as part of a redevelopment plan in the early 2010s. In response, Reiver, who hoped to maintain his lease over the site and prevent new development, opened his space to the public in the hopes that park visitors would join him in the fight against this proposed housing development. He, of course, was right.

Cuomo also seems a bit too eager to jump at the idea that there are other, comparable city-owned sites where this project could have been developed. City owned land has become an increasingly rare resource for affordable housing development, as the city’s stock of vacant land gradually gets developed into affordable housing. This land is particularly rare in high-cost, affluent areas of New York, such as NoLita, where the Elizabeth Street Garden site is located. For years, garden enthusiasts like Robert DeNiro and Patti Smith (along with run-of-the-mill Lower Manhattanites) have claimed that they weren’t against new affordable housing, they were just opposed to it on the garden site. But the primary alternative site they propose, 388 Hudson Street, is also slated for a different affordable housing development. If the Haven Green project had been moved to the Hudson Street site, it would have lowered the reduced the already minimal number of affordable housing units the neighborhood was supposed to provide.3

While the Haven Green project is seemingly dead, Cuomo’s insistence at preserving the Elizabeth Street Garden shows just what kind of mayor he’ll be in land use fights — he’ll pursue a speculative, inequitable style of development much like that of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Like Bloomberg, Cuomo will stick up for NIMBYs in wealthy, mid-to-high density neighborhoods like parts of Brownstone Brooklyn and Manhattan, and homeowners in low-density neighborhoods.

So where will Cuomo build new housing?

With Cuomo’s reluctance to stand up for new development in rich neighborhoods, and his abject refusal to build new housing in low-density neighborhoods in mind, it feels increasingly likely that a Cuomo administration will recreate the same mistakes as the Bloomberg administration did on housing. Much like Cuomo, Bloomberg refused to build more in low-density neighborhoods, and largely avoided upzonings in white, affluent communities. Instead, the Bloomberg administration built two different types of housing in two different types of neighborhoods. As previously mentioned, affordable housing was concentrated largely in poor neighborhoods that had already produced massive amounts of subsidized housing over the past few decade, such as like East New York and the South Bronx. On the other hand, due to large scale rezonings, new, high-end, market rate housing was largely concentrated in neighborhoods actively undergoing gentrification, like Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Long Island City and Downtown Brooklyn.

The Bloomberg administration rarely pushed for affordable units in these upzonings, instead arguing that the construction of new rental units would reduce demand for lower-cost units with fewer amenities, helping to gradually drive down average rents. However, studies have shown that this phenomenon, often defined as “filtering”, is unlikely to happen in neighborhoods undergoing gentrification due to the extreme market pressures many of these neighborhoods were facing at the time.4 As more and more people are attracted to an area they previously wouldn’t have considered moving to, demand increases across the board, and landlords realize they can raise rents in low-amenity buildings, making even drastic increases in housing supply less likely to have a moderating effect on rents. This certainly was the case in Greenpoint/ Williamsburg, an area that Bloomberg infamously upzoned in the early aughts, housing stock grew by 23% in the years following the rezoning, but rents rose by an even more significant margin, rising by 80% in the first decade of the 21st century.5 Of course, this doesn’t mean that no new housing should be built in these neighborhoods — it merely means that relying on the market alone to provide “affordable” housing in gentrifying communities is a complete farce.

As Mayor, Cuomo will likely enrich his real estate donors by doubling down on Bloomberg’s approach, encouraging upzonings in gentrifying neighborhoods across the city. And while the City does have more tools at its disposal to encourage developers to construct affordable housing than it did during the Bloomberg administration, such as Universal Affordability Preference, which allows developers to obtain a 20% density bonus if all additional units built are affordable at an average of 60% of Area Median Income, these tools alone will not be enough to keep people from being displaced. And Cuomo, the largest beneficiary of real estate money out of all mayoral candidates, will not be brave enough to investigate new potential tools that could reduce the power of landlords and developers, like supporting efforts to create a state-level Social Housing Development Authority devoted to the production of mixed-income, mixed-use affordable housing.

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Is Cuomo Serious About Ending Homelessness?

Cuomo doesn’t really cover homelessness in his Chat-GPT written housing plan; instead, he’s released a separate “Mental Health and Homelessness” plan where he seeks to cover the issue. His insistence upon linking homelessness and “mental health” is fundamentally problematic, because it feeds into the idea that all homeless individuals are either struggling with severe mental illness or substance abuse disorder, a misconception that drives stigma around homelessness. Furthermore, it means that Cuomo’s “solutions” to New York City’s homelessness crisis don’t address the needs of all New Yorkers; instead, they are largely focused on removing homelessness from the public eye.

To address the city’s homelessness crisis, Cuomo plans to build supportive housing, expand access to safe haven shelter beds, expand both residential and forensic psychiatric care facilities, and use the city’s power to involuntarily commit individuals to inpatient psychiatric facilities. Of his five main solutions, only two actually provide homeless individuals with permanent to semi-permanent housing: building supportive housing and expanding access to safe haven beds. The rest involve involuntarily committing homeless New Yorkers to understaffed, overcrowded psychiatric facilities where they may experience more trauma, and are likely given few resources to avoid homelessness upon their discharge. Furthermore, there are serious civil rights issues regarding long-term, forced hospitalization, particularly when patients are forced to take medications or undergo medical procedures that may have serious side effects, such as electro-convulsive therapy.

There are alternative solutions to involuntary commitment, however, including Housing First, an evidence-based policy that involves providing homeless individuals with housing without requiring that they abstain from substance use, enter the shelter system, or meet any other restrictive requirements. The program’s ethos revolves around the idea that for many homeless people, it is easier to address mental health issues or substance use challenges after they have accessed stable housing. It has a higher success rate than traditional programs serving homeless populations — between 70-90% of Housing First participants remain stably housed two to three years after receiving services, compared to 30-50% of participants in traditional programs. Despite this, Andrew Cuomo does not see the policy as a major part of his homelessness plan, arguing that “…Housing First is not a silver bullet”. Instead, under a Cuomo administration, more and more of our homeless neighbors are likely to face long-term, involuntary psychiatric commitments.

A Note On Cuomo’s Record on Homelessness

It’s a bit ironic that Cuomo seems very concerned with the threat that street homelessness poses to New Yorkers’ safety; his record shows that he is actually to blame for much of the city’s homelessness crisis. In 2011, Cuomo cut off state funding in 2011 for a rental voucher program known as Advantage, which led then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg to eliminate the program all together. Advantage, which Bloomberg started in 2007, offered 15,000 New Yorkers rent subsidies for up to two years to help people move out of shelters. The program was imperfect; Advantage was justly criticized it for its short time limit and work requirement for voucher holders, but most advocates argued that they wanted to see the program improved, not eliminated all together.

Unsurprisingly, getting rid of the program had an immediate, negative effect on homeless families. Between 2011, when the program was terminated, and 2013, the shelter population in the city skyrocketed by 35%. As a result, when deBlasio came into office in 2013, he gradually began to recreate a voucher program, building what is now known as CityFHEPS. As Governor, Cuomo denied multiple requests to help fund the CityFHEPS program, despite its growing cost to the city. While Cuomo does commit to funding CityFHEPS in his housing plan, he does cast doubt on the city’s financial ability to continue supporting the program, raising concerns about the future of this vital voucher program, which currently supports over 50,000 New Yorkers.

Is Cuomo Serious About Protecting Tenants and Vulnerable Homeowners?

New York City is unique for its fairly widespread tenant protection programs, which are an absolute necessity in such a high cost municipality. The city’s long-standing rent stabilization program, which is largely controlled by the State Legislature, is perhaps the most important protection available to tenants in the five boroughs. Tenants living in rent-stabilized apartments, which typically include units built before 1974, receive some protections, including limits on how much one’s landlord can increase rent each year, and a guaranteed right to renew one’s lease. The limit on how much a landlord can increase a stabilized tenant’s rent each year is determined by the Rent Guidelines Board, a nine-member city government agency that analyzes the average cost of living for tenants and the average cost of operations for landlords to establish a rent increase that is supposedly fair to both parties. For many New Yorkers, rent stabilization has acted as a powerful anti-displacement tool, helping keep families in their communities amidst ongoing gentrification. But Andrew Cuomo, who would appoint the members of the Rent Guidelines Board as mayor, certainly doesn’t see the policy in this light, posing a serious threat to stabilized tenants.

In his AI-written housing plan, Cuomo seeks to brand himself as a champion for tenant protections. claiming he had a central role in expanding the state’s rent stabilization law in 2011, 2015, and 2019. This, of course, is a lie — Cuomo was a primary obstacle to passing tenant protections through the State Legislature for most of his first two terms.

For years, Cuomo allied himself with the Independent Democratic Conference, a group of rogue Democrats who caucused with the Republicans in exchange for illegal stipends and committee chairmanships, to box the Democratic Party out of the majority in the State Senate. This allowed Cuomo (and the IDC) to block progressive legislation, such as strengthened rent laws, without having to directly say that he opposed them. Of course, this kept Cuomo’s real estate donors happy — it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Cuomo, a booster of the real estate state, received over 12.3 million dollars in campaign contributions from the real estate industry while serving as governor.

For years, Cuomo preserved a number of loopholes that allowed apartments to deregulate and exit rent stabilization. In both 2011 and 2015, years when Cuomo claimed that he “strengthened” rent stabilization, vacancy bonuses, which allowed landlords to increase rents in stabilized units by up to 20 percent when tenants moved out, and high-rent decontrol, which allowed landlords to pull units above a specific rent threshold from rent stabilization once the unit was vacated, remained part of the program. As a result, the city lost tens of thousands of rent stabilized units between 2011, when Cuomo was elected Governor, and 2019, when the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act was passed (much to Cuomo’s chagrin).

It is important to note that Cuomo was Governor when the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which meaningfully strengthened rent stabilization in New York City by closing the vacancy bonus and high-rent decontrol loopholes and clamping down on landlords’ ability to permanently raise rents for making renovations. But he shouldn’t get any credit for getting it over the finish line. That credit belongs to both an increasingly pro-tenant state legislature (due in large part to the defeat of the IDC), and a mass movement of tenants, who came up to the State Capitol by the thousands to demand stronger tenant protections. With that in mind, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Cuomo has tried to distance himself from the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, arguing in his housing plan that the bill “had unintended consequences” that prevent landlords from raising rents. And it should be even less surprising that Cuomo, a candidate who has sold himself out to the real estate state, is now the only major candidate in the Democratic Primary who has refused to commit to freezing the rent for stabilized tenants this upcoming year.

Throughout his spotty housing platform, Cuomo also claims he’ll strengthen enforcement of rent stabilization laws and Good Cause Eviction ( a bill he notably fought back against while governor). But his own record suggests that he is not equipped to fully enforce these laws. In 2012, Cuomo formed a Tenant Protection Unit within the State Department of Homes and Community Renewal (DHCR) to investigate landlord fraud, discrimination, and illegal deregulation of stabilized units, but the division was notoriously ineffective. As Charlie Dulik noted in a recent piece in Hell Gate, studies show that DHCR took an average of 10 months (almost the length of a one-year lease!) to resolve a tenant's complaints. Perhaps more concerningly, 15 percent of all complaints weren't even assigned to an investigator within two years, leaving many tenants without help to fight back against landlord harassment or fraud. Of course, this can partially be attributed to Cuomo refusing to give his Tenant Protection Unit the resources it needed to operate successfully — the taskforce only had 25 staffers to investigate landlord fraud across the entire state.

Follow the Money

Cuomo’s housing policies leave a lot to be desired. His commitments to build new housing are decidedly weak and play into long-term, inequitable patterns of development. His proposals to address homelessness are likely to increase the stigmatization of homelessness while offering few people permanent housing, while his commitment to policies that protect tenants are extremely weak.

At this point, it’s clear what’s driving Cuomo to craft such bad housing policy — the real estate moguls who are bank rolling his campaign. Housing for All, a deceptively named $2.5 million dollar super PAC supporting Cuomo, is primarily funded by the New York Apartment Association, an organization that lobbies city government and the Rent Guidelines Board on behalf of landlords. The organization’s CEO, Kenny Burgos, applauded Cuomo’s claim that, if elected, he would "blow up the Department of Housing, Preservation, and Development (HPD)” at the first debate, arguing that “(HPD) is bringing on layers upon layers of violations to owners”. To make matters worse, many of Cuomo’s biggest landlord donors, such as Peter Fine and Douglas Eisenberg, are actively being sued over conditions in their buildings by the Department of Housing, Preservation, and Development (HPD), raising questions about whether these donations are an attempt to curry favor with Cuomo, and weaken HPD’s ability to enforce housing code violations.

Despite the vagueness of Cuomo’s policy proposals, one thing remains crystal clear. Andrew Cuomo’s housing plans are designed to benefit (and strengthen) the real estate state, not the needs of every day New Yorkers who can’t find an apartment they can afford to rent. If we elect Cuomo, we can expect years of stalled progress on building new homes across the city, ending homelessness, and actually enforcing our city’s housing laws. If we choose a different path, maybe (just maybe) we can finally win a city where there is actually housing for all.

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However, she pointed out that, in the years following World War 1, many European nations and cities, such as England, Germany, and the city of Vienna, actively sought to ameliorate this problem, pursuing innovative housing schemes that produced better quality homes at a lower price.2 As Bauer noted, these housing programs saved money while raising living standards. In Austria, for example, the Viennese government the city saved money by keeping the cost of land low through rent restrictions, allowing the government to purchase large swaths of land for a negligible sum.3 This allowed the city, which developed 60,000 units of “modern” housing between 1925 and 1934, to invest these surplus funds in community planning, as most Viennese housing developments included co-operatively run stores, playgrounds, libraries, and even health clinics, improving residents’ overall quality of life.4

On the other hand, Bauer pointed out that little has been done to solve the housing crisis in the United States. She argues that while European nations built 4,500,000 units of “modern housing” in the decade after World War I, the American real estate market doubled down on speculation.5 As a result, American housing remained unsanitary, overcrowded, and far too expensive for the average family.6 To solve this problem, Bauer asserted that the government should intervene in the housing market to ensure new developments are well-planned, meaningfully affordable, thoughtfully designed, and removed from speculative markets. “The primary problem,” she wrote, “is to provide as many good new houses at as low rentals as possible….it should be entirely possible to build new homes, that are actually and in the long run, cheaper than the bad and wasteful old ones.”7 

Furthermore, Bauer drew inspiration from the housing programs that countries like Germany and the Netherlands were implementing during the postwar period, highlighting how these programs could be adapted to work in America.8 Through her analysis of European initiatives, Bauer identified several key elements of successful “modern” housing programs: public investment in housing development, access to subsidy for low income households, and civic control over the form, quality, governance, and financing of government-backed housing.9 She also argued that a successful program must be fairly universal in scope, providing housing for the working and middle classes, instead of solely those with the lowest incomes.10

The Britz Horseshoe Estate, a Weimar-era “modern” housing project in Berlin

Bauer’s emphasis on universalism was unique among housing reformers, as American housing programs have typically been limited in ambition, scope and reach.11 Even today, federal housing assistance programs like Section 8 and contemporary public housing have strict income caps, but lack the funding necessary to benefit all Americans who are eligible for these programs.12 By treating housing as a form of universal social insurance, Bauer believed the United States could guarantee that all of its citizens, particularly members of the working class, had access to dignified, adequate housing that they could afford.13 Furthermore, Bauer understood the threat of creating a “two-tier” policy framework, where the affluent receive widely-supported housing subsidies in the form of tax breaks, while the most vulnerable among us can only access housing benefits that are poorly regarded by politicians and the media class.14

Catherine Bauer was also painfully aware of the challenges “housers”, or people like Bauer who were committed to creating dignified homes for the working class, would face when fighting for a public housing program in the United States. She recognized that the American obsession with owning one’s home often demobilized working-class tenants from demanding a public housing program, as these people instead hoped to one day purchase their own property.15 As a result, housing reform movements in the United States up until the 1930s had largely been run by “disinterested specialists”, like social workers, architects, and bureaucrats.16 Bauer convincingly argued that these “specialists” were typically affluent and rarely were directly impacted by poor housing conditions themselves. As a result, she convincingly argued that only a mass movement, led by “consumers” of housing, could win a public housing program. Working people would have to organize across racial and socioeconomic lines to develop clear, concise demands for better housing conditions, something Bauer identified as a major challenge in a nation obsessed with homeownership.17

Catherine Bauer’s work went far beyond simply writing Modern Housing; she took a job as the executive secretary of the Labor Housing Conference, an organization founded by unions like the Philadelphia-based American Federation of Hosiery Workers, to help build the housing movement she had called for throughout her book.18 Earlier that year the Hosiery Workers had taken advantage of a temporary Public Works Administration (PWA) loan program to build a modern, limited-equity housing project known as the Carl Mackley Houses, and were interested in establishing a permanent public housing program that could help them build similar projects.19 Bauer had always understood that the interests of labor and the housing movement were deeply intertwined; a federal housing program would create opportunities for union workers to obtain both better housing and well-paid employment, both of which were in short supply amidst the Great Depression.20

Though she had little prior union experience, Catherine Bauer was an incredibly effective spokeswoman for the Labor Housing Conference. She travelled all over the country to distribute pamphlets and speak with workers about the importance of a permanent housing program at union halls from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, quickly winning over major labor leaders.21 Bauer was dogged in her pursuit of labor support for a public housing program; at a key point during the campaign, she simultaneously contacted the state federations of labor in Delaware, Maine, and Nevada, claiming that each state was the only one in the country that had failed to publicly endorse a housing program.22 Unsurprisingly, each of the three state labor federations quickly issued a public endorsement.

While innovative, PWA-financed projects like the Carl Mackley Houses were exciting to Bauer and the Labor Housing Conference, the loan program was temporary, making it important to establish a permanent public housing program in the United States. However, housing advocates were divided on how to approach new legislation. Some housing advocates, including those involved with the settlement house movement, argued that the most important role of a public housing program was the eradication of “slum” neighborhoods.23 As a result, these reformers, who were mostly wealthy white women with little interest in radically reforming the real estate industry, believed that having control over the working class’s living environment would improve “behavior” and “civic spirit” in less affluent neighborhoods.24 On the other hand, “housers” like Bauer were more interested in empowering the working class to take control of their housing, while also seeking to limit the ability of the real estate industry to make speculative profits.25

Catherine Bauer in 1933.

By the mid 1930s, both the National Public Housing Conference, which represented members of the settlement house movement, and the Labor Housing Conference, which represented “housers”, were working with U.S. Senator Robert Wagner to draft legislation creating a permanent public housing program in the United States. The National Public Housing Conference had gotten to Wagner first, cajoling him to introduce legislation that would have enabled localities to receive modest subsidies for the construction of low-rent housing in March of 1935.26 The National Public Housing Conference bill also unsurprisingly valorized slum clearance, linking new public housing construction with the demolition of areas reformers deemed “unsanitary.”27 Bauer and the Labor Housing Conference were dissatisfied with Simkhovitch’s bill, believing its federal powers were insufficient, and began working on their own, alternate legislation.28 As a result, the Labor Housing Conference’s bill differed from Wagner’s initial legislation in several key ways.29 Firstly, Bauer had ensured the Labor Housing Conference’s draft bill would allow publicly financed housing to be built outside of designated “slum” districts, arguing that these restrictions would kneecap public housing in the future.30 Her draft bill also created a new, independent authority to administer public housing, mandated a fair wage standard for all housing projects built by the authority, and enabled the authority to finance co-operative and limited-equity housing.31

Ultimately, much of the Labor Housing Conference’s draft bill was eventually adopted by Senator Wagner, who was impressed by Catherine Bauer’s dogged advocacy.32 After two unsuccessful attempts to pass the legislation in 1935 and 1936, due largely to real estate lobbying, Senator Wagner was able to secure President Roosevelt’s endorsement for a public housing program before the 1937 congressional session.33 This, along with continued organizing from the Labor Housing Conference and members of the National Public Housing Conference, helped get a public housing program across the finish line in the fall of 1937. The Housing Act of 1937, the program Bauer and her comrades had spent years fighting for, finally established a public housing program in the United States. The bill created the United States Housing Authority (USHA), a federal body empowered to grant hundreds of millions of dollars of low-cost loans to local housing authorities.34 These municipalities used this loan money to invest in the large-scale development of public housing in the United States, producing well over a million units for low-income people across the country.35

However, today, 90 years after Modern Housing was published, and 87 years since the Housing Act of 1937 was passed, accessing decent, dignified, and truly affordable housing is still a clear challenge for many Americans. Why is this the case, when Catherine Bauer’s landmark legislation, the Housing Act of 1937, passed through Congress? The answer is simple - the real estate industry and politicians did all they can to keep Bauer’s legislation from being implemented successfully.

Unsurprisingly, the real estate industry is partially to blame. When the Housing Act of 1937 was being pushed through Congress, real estate lobbyists fought to water down the legislation, with organizations like the National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB) making the deceitful argument the that a public housing program would ruin America’s legacy of freedom.36 Ironically, the real estate lobby had no issues with New Deal era interventions in the housing market when they benefitted — organizations like NAREB were vociferous supporters of programs like the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC), which helped keep real estate buoyant throughout the Great Depression.37 Bauer herself acknowledged the detrimental impact that real estate had on her legislation; in a 1957 piece on the state of public housing in America, Bauer herself argued that real estate lobbying prevented public housing authorities from using resources in new or creative ways. To Bauer, this dynamic left public housing authorities “clinging desperately to the beleaguered [public housing funding] formula, instead of trying to improve it in the light of experience and public attitudes.” 

At the same time, however, equal responsibility lies at the feet of the lawmakers who acquiesced to the demands of real estate lobbyists, as their concessions reduced the quality of public housing, and restricted its reach through means-testing. Once the Housing Act of 1937 reached the Senate, conservative legislators quickly mobilized to kill elements of the bill that were most central to Bauer’s universalist vision. Almost immediately, the section on co-operative and limited equity housing, a part of the legislation Bauer strongly valued, was struck from the bill, limiting the types of housing that this new authority could build.38 An amendment introducing an “equal elimination” clause, which required public housing authorities to destroy or repair “slum housing” each time they built new units, was also passed, limiting the volume of housing some authorities could produce.39 The legislation was also weakened by an amendment from arch-conservative Harry Byrd, a southern Democrat who placed harsh limits on construction costs.40 This amendment forced local authorities to cut corners in order to ensure their projects came in under budget, lowering the quality of public housing.41

The Governor Al Smith Houses, a high-rise public housing development in Lower Manhattan

Lastly, conservatives in the Senate passed an amendment placing strict income limits on public housing.42 On its face, the means-testing of public housing makes some sense – it is absolutely vital that public housing is built largely for the most vulnerable among us, particularly if housing is to truly become a basic human right in the United States. However, history has shown us that means-tested social welfare programs like Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) have constantly been targeted for devastating budget cuts by conservatives in Washington D.C..43 Unsurprisingly, this pattern has proven to be true for public housing; the federal government became increasingly unwilling to invest in the program by the 1960s, as public housing tenants across the country became more and more racially diverse. As funding dwindled, many public housing authorities began to run at a deficit, making it hard to keep up with rapidly rising maintenance costs. 44

At the same time, mass media seemed determined to prove that public housing had failed, running countless news stories about crime and “disorder” in these developments, which soured many Americans’ view of the program.45 Of course, this created a perfect storm for conservatives (and moderate Democrats) to dismantle public housing during the late 20th century — during the 1980s, the Reagan administration slashed federal housing funding by 70% in spite of increasing poverty levels amongst public housing tenants.46 By the 1990s, pillorying public housing was a fully bipartisan issue; Democratic president Bill Clinton advocated for the passage of the Faircloth Amendment, a modification to Bauer’s Housing Act of 1937 that essentially barred public housing authorities from increasing the number of units in their portfolios.

Today, much like in the 1930s, housing is, once again, under siege. Decades of deregulation and privatization of the housing market has pushed homelessness rates to their highest point since the Great Depression. Speculation is worse than ever, as private equity firms like Blackstone have become America’s most powerful landlords, purchasing over 300,000 units of housing across the United States. Of course, private equity’s speculative investment in real estate directly harms tenants; in California, rents skyrocketed by up to 63% per year while Blackstone spent over $14 million to block rent control initiatives in the state between 2018 and 2020. At the same time, landlords across the country have happily adopted YieldStar, a price-gouging algorithm that encourages property managers to raise rents at breakneck speed.

Unsurprisingly, the ever-escalating cost of housing has not resulted in better quality homes; 6.7 million Americans still live in physically inadequate housing, or homes that have at least three major structural deficiencies and/or lack plumbing, electricity, heat, or hot water. Millions more are exposed to a whole host of pollutants, such as lead, asbestos, nitrogen dioxide, and dust, in their homes. Tragically, public housing residents are disproportionately vulnerable to dangerous living conditions thanks to the violence of budget cuts from conservatives in Washington D.C.; entire complexes now face major building deficiencies, such as prolonged heat outages, rodent infestations, lead, mold, and lack of hot water, conditions that cause a direct threat to human life.

The housing landscape undoubtably feels bleak right now — if you’re a tenant, you yourself are intimately aware of this. But there is still hope. Tenants have begun to organize across the country, building the housing movement Bauer so passionately called for throughout Modern Housing. In Kansas City, 200 tenants recently went on rent strike with the KC Tenants’ Union, demanding collectively bargained leases, better living conditions, rapid repairs, and a rent cap on federally financed units. This summer, tenants in Louisville, Kansas City, Connecticut, Bozeman, and Chicago banded together to form the Tenant Union Federation, a nationwide coalition of tenant unions that will help renters fight for dignified living conditions. In cities across the country, like New York City, Burlington, and Oakland, organizers have established community land trusts, organizations that can steward permanently affordable, decommodified housing.

Furthermore, many of these organizers have begun translating their demands into actionable legislation, crafting policies that closely mirror Bauer’s proposals in Modern Housing. Many of these policies concern social housing, a model that closely mirrors the “modern” housing Catherine Bauer called for in the 1930s. Much like “modern” housing, which Bauer described as housing that is well-planned, non-speculative, subsidized, and community-controlled, social housing seeks to eliminate the profit motive from the domestic sphere.47 Today, social housing organizers are fighting for housing that is decommodified, equitable, independent from the pressures of financial markets, resident controlled, and deeply (and permanently) affordable, much like the “housers” of the New Deal era.

Auspiciously, there is now a growing appetite for social housing in the United States. Municipalities across the country, such as Atlanta, Seattle, and Chicago have passed bills creating public developers or social housing funds, once again bringing the government into more direct involvement with housing development. This movement has also gained steam at the state level; earlier this year, New York State Assemblymember Emily Gallagher, a democratic socialist, and Senator Cordell Cleare introduced legislation to create a statewide Social Housing Development Authority. Their proposed authority would be equipped with the power to build, acquire, rehabilitate, and administer high-quality, deeply affordable housing to New Yorkers at a wide range of incomes, a goal that is closely in line with Catherine Bauer’s vision for a universalist housing program. Similar proposals have been introduced in other states, such as California and Rhode Island, where policymakers have come to see a public developer as a potential salve to affordability crises in their region.

Perhaps most promisingly, social housing has now made its way to the national stage, as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Tina Smith (D-MN) have introduced the Homes Act, a bill that would create a federal Housing Development Authority (HDA). This authority, which would operate within the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), could both directly develop new social housing and purchase market-rate housing and convert it into social housing. The authority would be funded by a $30 billion investment annually - the same amount the federal government spends on the Mortgage Interest Tax Deduction - as well as a revolving loan fund. 10% percent of this funding would be allocated towards housing in rural communities, while another 5% of this funding would be dedicated to Tribal housing, ensuring that social housing funds are fairly distributed across the United States. Research from the Climate and Community Institute estimates that the Homes Act could build or preserve 1,250,000 units of social housing — which is equivalent to the number of housing units in the entire state of Kansas.

Importantly, the Homes Act recognizes the responsibility the federal government must assume to improve living conditions in public housing. Decades of financial austerity and government negligence have left many public housing tenants living in unhealthy homes, as local authorities cannot afford to make basic repairs. The Homes Act would actually invest in public housing for the first time in half a century — the bill would authorize substantial funding to public housing authorities across the country with severe capital backlogs, finally allowing many of these authorities to make long overdue repairs that are necessary for resident safety. Furthermore, the Homes Act would repeal the Faircloth Amendment, actually enabling public housing authorities to build again for the first time since the Clinton Administration.

With the understanding that housing needs vary substantially across communities, the Homes Act authorizes the HDA to develop a wide range of housing typologies, including publicly-financed rentals, limited-equity cooperatives, homes stewarded by community land trusts, and more traditional homeownership opportunities. The bill also supports groups interested in creating their own housing — the HDA would have the power to finance social housing projects devised by tenant unions, labor organizations, and non-profits, in addition to those proposed by local housing authorities. Tenants who want to purchase their building and convert it to a limited-equity co-op could also receive financial assistance from the authority, an exciting step towards the decommodification of market-rate housing. The HDA’s ability to produce and finance a diverse range of housing models would have excited Catherine Bauer, who unsuccessfully advocated to incorporate cooperative housing and union-initiated projects into the Housing Act of 1937.48

The Homes Act also acknowledges the central role that labor must play in any successful housing movement, something Catherine Bauer espoused throughout her career with the Labor Housing Conference. As a result, the legislation promotes the use of union labor, requiring all construction and repair jobs to be in compliance with both the Davis-Bacon Act and prevailing wage standards. The Homes Act also requires that any construction project worth over $25 million dollars has a project labor agreement, helping to ensure that on-the-job conditions are safe and dignified. These strong pro-labor legislative provisions have helped to reactivate coalitions between housing organizers and unions, which played a vital role in passing the Housing Act of 1937. While a formal coalition like Bauer’s Labor Housing Conference has not yet been assembled, major labor unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have all endorsed the Homes Act.

Ocasio-Cortez and Smith’s bill also ensures that future social housing residents have not only strong tenant protections but also the right to democratic control of their homes. All HDA housing would have to follow “just-cause” protections, insulating residents from retaliatory evictions and protecting their right to organize. Furthermore, source of income discrimination, or the refusal to rent units to tenants with housing vouchers, would be banned in HDA housing. Since source of income discrimination is only illegal in 17 states, and enforcement of these laws are typically weak, HDA housing could become an important resource for voucher-holders who struggle to find dignified homes. Furthermore, tenants would be given democratic control of their homes; all developments financed or built by the HDA would have elected tenant associations. These provisions, which closely mirror what Catherine Bauer called “civic control” in Modern Housing, actually give tenants the power to control their living conditions, something that is rare in a speculative and exploitative real estate market.49

Lastly, the bill has stringent protections to ensure housing remains permanently affordable; for rental units, housing costs would be set at just 25% of residents’ income, and would not be able to increase by more than 3% per year. For homeowners and co-op shareholders, housing costs would be kept low through shared-equity models, where the resale values of property is restricted to ensure affordability is preserved. Furthermore, the bill has strong, binding affordability provisions to ensure a wide range of working-class Americans can access social homes. Importantly, the bill makes a strong commitment to housing the most vulnerable among us; 40% of the homes produced by the HDA must be targeted to those making less than 30% of area median income (AMI). Another 30% of units must be targeted to those making between 30 and 50% of AMI, while the remaining 30% of units has no income targeting requirements whatsoever.

The income mix that Ocasio-Cortez and Smith propose guarantees that the HDA is universalist in scope, while also prioritizing the needs of the most vulnerable among us. And, at least for American housing policy, this shift towards universalism is a radical departure from the idea that our homes are commodities to be bought, speculated on, and sold to the highest bidder. As Catherine Bauer argues in Modern Housing, universalist housing policy is important because it encourages this shift in thought, allowing housing to instead be treated like a public utility, or something the government is expected to build and invest in for the benefit of the people.50 The Homes Act allows us to imagine a world where government-financed housing is seen as social insurance, a basic benefit that all people can count on to support them, instead of a means-tested program that is constantly threatened with budget cuts.

90 years after she published Modern Housing, Catherine Bauer’s fingerprints can be seen throughout Ocasio-Cortez and Smith’s bill text. In fact, the Homes Act adopts many of Bauer’s proposals that were cut from the Housing Act of 1937, such as the provision of federal funds for the construction of limited equity cooperatives and union-initiated housing projects. Passing this legislation would finally bring Bauer’s vision for the Housing Act of 1937, a bill she hoped would make housing a public utility in the United States, to life, nearly nine decades after this legislation passed through Congress.

Of course, passing this legislation won’t be easy. The real estate industry, which doles out hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions each election cycle, is a major opponent of the bill. Conservatives will almost certainly claim that the Homes Act is a threat to the “American Dream” of individual homeownership — a dream that has arguably been dead for more than two decades. People with power and money will argue that the Homes Act is too expensive, even though we spend the same amount on the Mortgage Interest Tax Deduction every single year.

To win the Homes Act under these unfavorable conditions, housing organizers should heed Catherine Bauer’s advice — “disinterested specialists” like policy wonks, urban planners, and architects, will not build successful movements for social housing.51 Instead, social housing organizers must build movements by organizing those who are actually impacted by speculation, landlord exploitation, and unsafe living conditions: people experiencing homelessness, rent-burdened Americans, and those facing foreclosure. To finally win the “modern” housing that Catherine Bauer fought for during the New Deal, the multi-racial working class and labor unions must build a mass movement to demand the homes we’ve always deserved.

Love It or List It, a long-standing favorite of my parents, is the first home improvement show I can remember watching. In each episode, the two hosts, Hilary, an interior designer, and David, a real estate agent, meet with a family that has issues with their current home. After hearing what the family is looking for, Hilary is given a budget to make repairs to the family’s existing home, with the hopes of having them stay put, while David is given a budget to help the family look for a new home. Hilary often faces a number of challenges, like unexpected issues with the existing house that eats up her renovation budget, but she reliably makes at least some of the changes the family was hoping to see. While the renovations are underway, David takes the family on tours of newer, often larger homes in and around their neighborhood. At the end of each episode, the family returns to their current home to see the renovations Hilary has done, and learn how much their home has increased in value before deciding if they are going to stay in their current home or move. Oftentimes, David will show a family a nearly perfect home that is slightly outside of their budget, but the increased value of the family’s current home brings this once unthinkable price point within reach.

Promotional Image for Love It Or List It

In my family, part of the Love It or List It ritual was guessing which option the homeowners would choose. Both of my parents consistently (and more often than not, accurately), guessed that the family would choose to sell their house and move into a place that was bigger, better, and more expensive. I often guessed that the family would choose to stay in their homes, as I was easily swayed by the impressive renovations Hilary managed to pull off with a limited budget. But what I didn’t understand as a 10 year old was that Hilary’s role was not so much to convince families to stay in their fixer-uppers – it was to raise their property values, so they could sell their homes to the highest bidder. In essence, Hilary is helping families turn bigger profits on their homes, so they can move into the property of their dreams — just one example of how HGTV makes regular Americans believe they can aspire towards domestic bliss and financial solvency.

My parents are far from the only people who watch HGTV religiously – in 2016, the year of the Trump-Clinton election, HGTV garnered more viewers than major news networks like CNN. In a time where it felt like American society was collapsing in on itself, millions distracted themselves with visions of gleaming hardwood floors, an open floor plan, and rustic, sliding barn doors. In times when the world feels like it’s spinning out of control, HGTV feels safe, comfortable, and warm to many of its American viewers – who wouldn’t want to escape into a world where your home always looked nearly perfect, and your biggest concern was if the third bathroom you’d been hoping to add to your house is within your renovation budget? 

In the United States, homeownership has always been a status symbol. For the first several decades of American history, certain states restricted voting rights to property-owning white men, with the state of North Carolina not abandoning this practice until 1856. In those days, owning property meant that you had power to make decisions about the direction of the country, a right that was withheld from the multiracial, landless working class.

Of course, homeownership  was not broadly accessible back then – between 1890 and 1930, the homeownership rate in America was around 47%.  Of course, marginalized Americans faced many more hurdles when trying to purchase a home, as racial covenants in property deeds restricted African-Americans, Asian Americans, Jews, and people of Latine origin from owning property in neighborhoods across the country. While these covenants are no longer enforceable, they can still be found in many property deeds, a living example of the many ways the American Dream has been violently stripped from the hands of communities of color. 

When the American government became actively involved in subsidizing homeownership in the years following the Great Depression, only White, middle class families could expect to benefit. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, a public agency established by the Roosevelt administration to provide (white) Americans with government-backed mortgages, played a central role in this process. For white families, HOLC was a lifeline – the corporation purchased mortgages that were subject to immediate foreclosure, and then reissued these mortgages with long repayment periods to ensure families could make their housing payments. 

On the other hand, Black families were systemically locked out of government-subsidized homeownership programs, as HOLC created lending risk maps in hundreds of cities, where predominantly Black neighborhoods were redlined, or systematically identified as “too risky” for mortgage lenders.  While the federal government was helping white Americans build decades of generational wealth by backing their mortgages, it deliberately prevented Black Americans from benefitting from these same initiatives. The American Dream has always been built on a foundation of white supremacy.

But the racism that is baked deeply into the American property system hasn’t stopped Americans from striving towards homeownership – and why would it? American society is still fundamentally oriented towards the needs of homeowners – you can write off interest payments on your mortgage to lower your taxes each year, but no similar benefit exists for renters. Plus, homeownership still has an outsized role in the American psyche – it has come to symbolize stability, financial responsibility, prosperity, and personal success. A 2022 study commissioned by the polling firm YouGov confirms this – 74% of Americans rated homeownership as the most important symbol of prosperity, above having a successful career, a family, or a college education. Perhaps most importantly, however, we have been spoon-fed decades of propaganda that promises us we will be able to sell our homes for more than we bought them for, making housing a valuable asset for the families that scrape together enough money to buy.

In recent years, HGTV’s home flipping shows have become an increasingly popular element of the channel’s programming. For example, the show Flip or Flop, starring the (now-divorced) husband-wife duo of Christina Hall and Tarek El-Moussa, was one of HGTV’s most popular shows, attracting more than 90 million viewers over its decade-long run. At the beginning of each episode, Christina and Tarek, who work in Southern California, purchase a dilapidated, inexpensive home from a bank auction or a foreclosure sale, often at a steep discount. They then spend tens of thousands of dollars renovating the home, in the hopes of selling it for a substantial profit. While the couple often faces substantial setbacks during their renovation process, such as mold infestations, structural issues, and electrical failures, they invariably are able to “flip” the homes they purchase, selling them for much, much more than they purchased them for. 

In Flip or Flop, success is measured by the amount of profit Tarek and Christina are able to squeeze from the houses they renovate, not by the appropriateness of the home for families in the area. In fact, the show rarely focuses on the families who move into the homes Tarek and Christina transform, instead centering on if the renovation can stay on budget, or if the home can be sold at the couple’s desired value. As a result, Flip or Flop (and the countless other similar programs that HGTV airs on a weekly basis) teaches us to see our homes as a financial asset that can be bought and sold to the highest bidder for a profit instead of the places where we live, raise our families, and spend time with loved ones. By valorizing the exchange value we can get for our homes in the future instead of the use value we can get from our homes in the present, shows like Flip or Flop lead us to believe that we must consistently invest in our homes to make them the most valuable assets they can be. 

Unsurprisingly, Tarek and Christina got into the home-flipping business immediately following the 2008 financial crisis, as years of predatory lending practices, which specifically targeted low-income, Black and brown homebuyers, finally burst the housing bubble and sent the American economy into a tailspin. Of course, Flip or Flop does little to acknowledge that the homes Tarek and Christina transform, most of which are sold at auction or through a foreclosure sale, were once owned by families, many of whom were likely victims of subprime mortgages or predatory lending. These families, who lost their homes when they couldn’t keep up with their mortgage payments, are victims of the same false promise that HGTV sells to us with charcoal gray kitchens and walk in closets – that homeownership is a foolproof ticket to the middle class.

And while the previous owners of the homes Tarek and Christina flip have to scramble to find new housing they can afford, the hosts of Flip or Flop seek to ratchet up housing costs in the communities around them, making housing more and more unaffordable for the masses. Naturally, the hosts of Flip or Flop practically never lose money on their ventures to gentrify all of Orange County, California; during the show’s first seven seasons, the couple only failed to profit  on a single project.

There is a clearly dark underbelly to the house-flipping shows that have come to dominate HGTV’s airwaves – shows like Flip or Flop, which is based in Southern California, and Good Bones, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, are based on the premise that there are profits to be made by renovating the lowest cost homes in a given market. Tarek El Moussa, one of the co-hosts of Flip or Flop, justifiably came under fire in 2023 for evicting tenants of a 16-unit rent-controlled apartment complex in North Hollywood so that he could convert the property to a luxury, 138 unit, mid-rise building with just 14 affordable units.

In a now-deleted Instagram video, El Moussa jubilantly described what would happen to the development site without regard for its current tenants, claiming “I’ve been flipping houses a long time and — and this project is hands down the biggest flip I’ve ever done… On the rooftop, there’s gonna be a pool, cabana chairs. I mean, just an incredible location. An incredible building — and this is Hollywood, man. This is where everybody wants to live. So we got so lucky to find this land because finding land like this in North Hollywood, it’s literally impossible, and we got real lucky.” Of course, El Moussa had little sympathy for the people who WERE already living there, refusing to negotiate with the Hartsook Tenant Association, and angrily responding to emails from those who disagreed with his plan. 

HGTV’s other home flipping shows share the obvious undercurrent of gentrification – Good Bones, a show hosted by the mother-daughter duo of Mina Hawk and Karen Laine, primarily focuses on home flipping projects in gentrifying Fountain Square. Once an inexpensive neighborhood of Indianapolis, Fountain Square has faced a rapid increase in median rents as the area has become popular amongst artists and restaurateurs. And while Hawk and Laine claim that their purpose is to “rescue” abandoned homes in Indianapolis, their actual imprint on the neighborhood has been much more mixed. As Hawk and Laine renovate home interiors, replacing rotten wood with gentrification-grey shiplap, rents in the neighborhood have skyrocketed, and property values have increased nearly fourfold. Many residents are unable to keep up with the rising costs of rent and property taxes. Families have suffered displacement from Fountain Square, and many artists can no longer afford rent in the community – the HGTVification of the neighborhood has put its price point beyond reach. 

And while Hawk and Laine may claim that they just want to revitalize the neighborhood by renovating abandoned homes, the reality of the situation is that they are speculating on potentially valuable property – they are cheaply purchasing abandoned homes from the city, renovating them, and selling them at a profit to whatever white, college-educated family can afford them. Unsurprisingly, Hawk and Laine also founded their company in the years surrounding the 2008 financial crisis, a time when millions of low-income Americans, many of whom were people of color, found that their mortgage was “underwater”, as the value of their mortgage exceeded the value of their home. Ultimately, it is hard to ignore the speculative nature of Hawk and Laine’s project, as the foreclosure crisis put them in a position to profit off of the homes former Fountain Square residents could no longer afford. 

In 2013, then president Barack Obama declared in a speech that "...the most tangible cornerstone that lies at the heart of the American Dream, at the heart of middle-class life is the chance to own your own home." But this dream has slipped further and further away for many young Americans – while nearly 80% of those over 65 years old own their home, under 40% of Americans under 35 can say the same. While (white) Baby Boomers benefited immensely from subsidized programs like government-backed HOLC mortgages and the GI Bill, millennials and Generation Z are facing a very different economic landscape when it comes to finding housing they can afford. Many millennials graduated high school or college and entered the job market during the Great Recession (which was ironically triggered by unscrupulous, speculative lending patterns), which put them on thin financial ice, forcing many people to simply accept the first job they were offered, regardless of pay. And while members of Generation Z like myself graduated high school or college into a more favorable job market, student loan debt has become an increasingly insurmountable hurdle to financial stability.  Naturally, younger Americans are waiting longer and longer before they buy a home.

Ironically, however, young adults have long been a loyal section of HGTV’s viewer base, with 20-and-30 somethings making up around 55% of the channel’s fervent fans. Young HGTV viewers report liking the channel’s aspirational content, like transforming a dilapidated house into a shiny new dream home, allowing young people to fantasize about the interior design decisions they can make if (and only if) they ever manage to purchase a home. But as home prices hit all time highs, and the federal minimum wage remains fixed at $7.25 an hour, the increasingly elusive American Dream of homeownership seems to be further and further away from most young adults, even if HGTV offers a convincing escape. For young HGTV aficionados, watching hours of home renovation shows can almost simulate the experience of purchasing a home themselves, a milestone young adults are half as likely to achieve as their parents were. 

Furthermore, as a television channel that centers itself on the domestic sphere, HGTV has long catered to women, who, under traditional gender roles, hold responsibilities for the maintenance and upkeep of the home. It should not be surprising that women make up 67% of HGTV’s viewership, but the channel also promotes an unattainable level of domestic perfection. Spotless, gleaming kitchens, perfectly organized closets, and spacious, clutter-free living rooms are a hallmark of any HGTV renovation project. For women, especially working mothers, who are still burdened with the expectations of maintaining the home, caring for children, AND going to work, HGTV shows can provide an escape to a world where there seem to never be any dishes in the sink. Yet in the real world, the implausibility of constantly gleaming hardwood floors and perfectly manicured lawns becomes instantly clear, though it doesn’t preclude American society from adopting impossibly high standards for the care and keeping of the home.

HGTV, then, is perhaps the American Dream’s most effective propagandist, producing hours upon hours of television that gives Americans hope that they too can drastically increase the value of their homes and sell them to the highest bidder. In shows like Flip or Flop and Good Bones, the hosts seem to always profit off of their seemingly risky home improvement projects, encouraging everyday Americans to speculate on the value of their own homes.  When we want to escape from the realities of the world around us, there is no more natural comfort to the American psyche than a genre of television that promises us a world with heightened property values, spotless kitchens, and nuclear families. Perhaps some of these shows are even designed so that everyday Americans can aspire towards a perfectly curated domestic sphere, pushing people to believe that if they sink enough money into their homes, they just may ascend to some sort of perverse, domestic nirvana, one where suburbia reigns supreme, and growing property values is perhaps the only hot-button political issue. It convinces young adults that they too can aspire towards homeownership, and teaches us that curating our homes is the best way to express individualism (though HGTV shows have been shown to mute interior design). Maybe if we weren’t all so obsessed with increasing the value of our own homes, we’d be more focused on building tenant unions, organizing in our own communities, or fighting for the government to invest in dignified housing for all of our neighbors, not just the few who are wealthy enough to purchase their own homes.

In 1934, writer, architectural critic, and overall smart lady Catherine Bauer published her manifesto, Modern Housing, which focused on the failures of the American housing system in serving the needs of working families, especially when compared to newly introduced innovations in Europe. And despite the fact that Bauer’s book is nearly a century old, the last paragraph of Modern Housing rings especially true in our contemporary, HGTV obsessed society. She writes, “If only a small part of the vast energy which was once directed toward individual home-ownership were now organized to demand a realistic program of modern housing — the best dwellings that planners can plan and that labor and materials can build (and we have an abundance of all three) – then there would be an American housing movement indeed.” As we continue to struggle towards building a mass movement for high-quality, universal, deeply affordable social housing in the United States, I shudder to think of what Bauer, one of the brightest housing minds in American history, would have thought of our relationship to HGTV.

This project, called Startblok Zeeburg, is one of Amsterdam’s many shipping container communities, which help both refugees and young people by providing them with low-cost housing for a five year term. Startblok developments are democratically controlled – all residents are expected to play a role in managing their community, and tasks like cleaning common spaces, organizing weekly get-togethers, and welcoming new residents are split amongst the Startblok’s denizens. The development’s unique demographic blend of young Dutch residents and recently arrived refugees has been lauded by the World Habitat Awards and other non-governmental organizations for helping refugees integrate into Dutch society.

Amsterdam is not the only city that has turned to shipping containers as a solution to its local housing crisis – the mode has become popular globally, with projects popping up in Johannesburg, South Africa, Atlanta, Georgia, and Barcelona, Spain. Proponents of this new housing model often cite its flexibility, replicability, and low costs; since shipping container homes are pre-fabricated, modular construction methods, where a building is mostly manufactured in a factory and then transported to the building site, can be used. As a result, supporters argue that modular construction is quicker and less expensive than traditional, on-site construction, which can help cities both rapidly build new housing and facilitate affordability. 

Startblok Zeeburg, a complex of shipping container apartments in West Amsterdam

Modular construction advocates, including ever-controversial New York state representative and uncomfortably close ally to Mayor Eric Adams, Jenifer Rajkumar (D-Queens), have pushed for 3-D printed housing in New York City, claiming it will bring down construction costs and make housing more affordable. Rajkumar, who has called for drones and 3-D printers to “fly like swarms of bees constructing skyscrapers”, is the latest voice in a chorus proclaiming their allegiance to modular construction, hoping that the cheap construction costs will somehow conjure an endless stream of new housing.  In fact, she is so smitten with the model that she’s introduced yet another taskforce bill in the New York State Legislature (which, by the way, has exactly zero co-sponsors) to study the potential for 3D printed homes in New York State. Of course, her bill calls for developer giveaways, as her legislation pushes the task force to recommend “government inducements” to encourage the adaptation of this new housing model.

But should we join the choir of 3D printing devotees? Should we pray at the altar of shipping container construction? Does this construction model truly provide dignified, deeply affordable housing to all people?

Of course not.

Shipping containers have lots of structural challenges – building codes in most cities are not designed to support homes built from steel boxes, and the construction materials are prone to producing environmental toxins like mold and mildew. In Ealing, a middle-class district in London, dozens of formerly homeless families spent years in Meath Court, a hastily built apartment complex constructed from prefabricated shipping containers, where indoor temperatures regularly got up to 34 degrees Celsius (a whopping 93 degrees Fahrenheit). Children living in the complex developed heat rash from the brutal conditions, and the small size of shipping containers often meant that apartments were extremely cramped. Conditions regularly got so bad that the Ealing Council had to decommission Meath Court, controversially leaving tenants with just weeks to find a new home. In Brighton, another city in the south of the United Kingdom, residents living in shipping container homes constructed by the Brighton Housing had the inverse problem – their homes were too cold in the winter. 

Even shipping container projects like Startblok in Amsterdam, an initiative that has been received more warmly by residents than the developments in London and Brighton, have faced their own issues. In late 2023, a large fire broke out at Startblok Riekerhaven, Amsterdam’s landmark shipping container development, leaving 135 of the complex’s homes either completely destroyed or uninhabitable. Concerningly, it took firefighters nearly 5 hours to get the blaze fully under control, indicating that the city’s pre-fabricated homes may not be up to fire code. Sure, shipping container homes may be cheaper, but at what cost to residents themselves?

And 3-D printed homes aren’t without their own issues – in late 2023, an Iowa City construction firm had to tear down a partially-printed single family home due to major structural issues. Both vertical and horizontal cracks were found in the home’s concrete foundation, stoking fears that the completed building would not be safe for human habitation. And despite Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar’s strange diatribes about drones printing skyscrapers out of thin air, the reality of the situation is that few multifamily projects can utilize 3D printing, due to size limitations associated with the technology. Currently, 3D printers are better primed to replicate the dreary realities of suburban sprawl than the glistening skyscrapers that tower over Grand Central Station – and it’s unclear if better technology is coming anytime soon. 

Why, then, are people so quick to embrace niche modular construction models as a solution to the housing crisis if it hasn’t made housing more dignified? Obviously, not all modular construction models are as distinctly problematic as 3D printing or shipping container buildings, but the reason people have embraced modular construction seems simple to me. The real estate establishment wants to spend as little time, money, and resources as possible paying construction workers and housing our most vulnerable neighbors. 

For large real estate firms, cutting construction costs by skimping on workers’ salaries is attractive for several reasons – it reduces the power of the building trades while also maximizing their profit margins. Modular construction projects, like 3D printed homes and shipping container apartments, typically require fewer workers, and often offer lower wages, a major threat to construction unions that have spent decades winning livable, dignified wages for their members. And workers are already paying the price, as developers of Studio One Eleven, an affordable housing development built from shipping containers in Los Angeles, California, found that they were able to cut construction costs by a whopping 36%, mostly by reducing labor costs. Similar cost reductions, reaching up to 30%, are common in 3D printed housing projects, also due to low labor costs. 

It also shouldn’t be surprising that alternative modular construction models have become “solutions” to homelessness and housing instability – the private sector does not want to invest in high quality housing for these people because it does not make them a profit. Instead, modular construction companies seek out lucrative government contracts or other subsidies to ensure they still make money at the end of the day, while often failing to maintain minimum housing standards. And if you follow the money, real estate and financial capital are unsurprisingly pouring resources into these new cheapskate construction models. Large firms producing 3D printed homes such as ICON have raised nearly $200 million from venture capital firms, while billionaires like Warren Buffet have invested heavily in modular construction. 

At the same time, however, these models have also become lucrative solutions for cash-strapped municipalities who have little money to invest in new housing construction, as funding for the police consumes ever-larger slices of the urban budget pie. With many American cities unable to raise their own revenues without state permission, municipalities are forced to stretch their (often limited) housing budget further and further, making the shipping container house a cheap way to build as many units as possible.

Our homeless and inadequately housed neighbors deserve dignified housing, not poorly-tested homes built by drones and printers or boiling hot shipping containers that are vulnerable to mold. They deserve high-quality homes built by well-paid, union workers. And there are ways that we can produce lots of this housing at scale today, as long as governments are willing to value the basic need for housing over the profit margins of big banks and real estate magnates. 

At the federal level, the Faircloth Amendment could (and must) be repealed, which would allow municipalities to construct new public housing units at scale. Due to the size of the federal government’s budget (and the volume of military aid the United States sends to genocidal states like Israel), it is undeniable that America can afford to spend more on housing its population through the direct construction of publicly funded homes. Of course, for a new public housing program to be successful, more extensive long-term funding from the federal government and direct mechanisms for democratic, tenant control of public housing authorities will need to be integrated into HUD’s operations. New York City alone has $77 billion dollars in unmet capital needs across its expansive public housing portfolio – and a repeal of the Faircloth Amendment should be accompanied by federal funding to address this dire deficit. If fully funded, public housing has the ability to offer high-quality, deeply affordable, and dignified housing to its denizens, and must be a massive piece of our national “solution” to the housing crisis.

Bushwick Houses, a New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) Public Housing Development

At a more local level, American states can follow the lead of New York State, who's recently proposed Social Housing Development Authority cuts back on development costs not by skimping on labor, but by eliminating unnecessary fees. Instead of relying on public-private partnerships or loans from profit-seeking lenders, the authority would invest public funds to create permanently affordable homes. Since private developers, banks and other private investors will only finance affordable housing projects that allow them to profit, lenders often charge high interest rates, while developers issue hefty developer fees that make affordable housing projects more expensive. A recent study by Hunter College graduate students (including myself) showed that eliminating developer fees alone could reduce overall development costs by around 10%, making SHDA housing more affordable for prospective residents. The authority would also have the power to issue interest rate subsidies, where loans for SHDA projects would receive more favorable interest rates than what would be available on the private market, reducing the total cost of the SHDA’s loans. Notably, the SHDA’s financial model accounts for a fully unionized workforce, proving that decommodified, dignified homes can be built by organized labor. 

The increasing popularity of niche modular construction models, like 3D printing and shipping container housing, within planning and political circles speaks volumes to the state of the American affordable housing market. Politicians like Jenifer Rajkumar and developers like Jason Ballard, the CEO of ICON, a modular housing company, can praise these construction models for their “innovative technologies” all they want, but these models are popular because they’re cheap, they cut labor costs, and they maximize developer profits. To cut development costs in a way that will benefit everyday people, we’re going to have to fight for it.

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Housing has also become a source of stress for many working-class Britons; housing costs, which already consumed the largest slice of household budgets in the United Kingdom, continue to skyrocket. The average home price has hit £375,131, an all time high, while rents have increased by an average of 9% nationwide in just one year. And while real estate executives and slumlords rake in growing piles of cash by hiking the rent each year, working class tenants in the United States and the United Kingdom are losing their homes — homelessness spiked by 12% in the U.S. and 14% in England during 2023, at least partially because of the catastrophic rise in rents.

Thatcher’s fingerprints are all over the United Kingdom’s ever-worsening affordability crisis — her administration introduced a harmful policy called “Right to Buy” in 1980, which allowed those living on council housing estates (the United Kingdom’s version of public housing) to purchase their homes at an extremely steep discount. Thatcher’s policy also prevented local councils from using proceeds from Right to Buy sales on new public housing development, so the policy drastically reduced the nation’s public housing stock. Furthermore, as the rent revenues of local councils shrunk drastically, social housing rents began to skyrocket, forcing council tenants who did not participate in Right to Buy to help subsidize their neighbors’ home purchases. The scope of Thatcher’s signature housing policy was massive —the Treasury made 47 billion on the sale of council homes, money which has not been reinvested in meeting the housing needs of Britain’s working class. More concerningly, 4.5 million council homes have been transferred to private ownership over the last 44 years, making it harder and harder for families in need to find suitable homes. Today, council housing waiting lists are so long that it can take families up to 55 years to be placed, showing just how severely the British state has neglected its most vulnerable denizens.

“No single piece of legislation has enabled the transfer of so much capital wealth from the state to the people.”

- Michael Heseltine, Housing Minister under Margaret Thatcher, on Right to Buy

Right to Buy was also paired with a number of interventions to deregulate financial markets, which worsened the policy’s already harmful effects. Restrictions on mortgage lending were removed, pushing working-class families to accept risky home loans if they opted to purchase their council home. The housing budget was slashed, falling by £310 million in 1985 alone. Furthermore, weak regulations in the housing market made it possible for corporate slumlords to snap up loads of Right to Buy properties and rent them out on the private market for a steep premium. As investigations of the British housing market have shown, more than 40% of homes first sold through Right to Buy are now rented out in the private market. Yet for Thatcherites, this would hardly be considered a failure — wealthy landlords are making larger and larger profits each year on a privatized asset. The Tories don’t care that the dearth of social homes is making it harder and harder for people to get by, even if they’re on housing benefits — instead, they’d rather work towards cutting those benefits, and pushing the working class closer and closer to precarity. Increased profits for slumlords were just an added bonus.

Manning House, a council house building that has lost units to Right to Buy

Thatcher claimed that Right to Buy was a step towards making the United Kingdom a “property-owning democracy”, but in reality, it was an attempt to shift the way Britons saw housing. Thatcher didn’t want the home to be understood as a place where families lived; instead, she worked tirelessly to transform the house into a valuable financial asset. Those who “worked hard enough” (or more realistically, had family support or a high-paying job) to get on the property ladder were to become part of the asset class; a group of people who were intensely invested in local property values in the hopes of one day selling their homes at a (speculative) profit, and therefore were less likely to support “socialistic” policies.

But home purchasers were arguably not the primary beneficiaries of Right to Buy. Of course, most of the windfall from Right to Buy lined the pockets of big banks and the private rental sector, as the deregulation of the mortgage market and the privatization of council homes created new assets for the financial sector and corporate landlords to speculate on. State-sponsored homes were converted into free-market rentals, and the working class tenant was left struggling to keep up with their ever-growing housing costs. Ultimately, Thatcher did not create a “property-owning democracy” — she created a dictatorship of speculation, financialization, and capitalistic exploitation where it was unthinkable to consider that the state could have an active role to play in ameliorating Britain’s housing needs. Speculation, ever-growing profits for the real estate sector, and privatization became just as central to British life as the monarchy.

Decades of Tory dominance has created an untenable, unsafe, and unaffordable housing market for most working-class UK denizens. And no singular event symbolizes this failure better than the Grenfell fire, an entirely preventable and harrowing crime the British state committed against the working-class residents of a large tower-in-the-park style council estate in June of 2017. At Grenfell, 72 people lost their lives because the building’s hyper-flammable cladding, which was selected by the Conservative-led Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to cut costs and make the building more attractive to the wealthy residents of Kensington who lived nearby, made the fire especially severe.1 Building supply companies maximized their profits, while the local council cut its costs, showing just how perverse public-private partnerships and profit motives can be in the housing sector. And of course, this disaster can be at least partially linked to Thatcher’s reign of deregulation — her administration slashed building code regulations, which allowed ACM, the highly flammable cladding material used at Grenfell, to be used throughout the country, even though it was banned in most other European nations.2

A memorial to the victims of the Grenfell fire on the estate’s site

And residents themselves knew the Grenfell fire did not come out of nowhere — tenants were exceedingly aware of the horrifying risks that decades of austerity, deregulation, and marginalization of the council housing sector posed to their homes.3 While tenants, including Eddie Daffarn, the co-founder of the Grenfell Action Group, had consistently voiced concerns about fire risk, no action was taken by the Tenant Management Organization (TMO) or the local council. Instead, organizers like Eddie were villainized by these institutions for simply trying to keep their homes safe. After the fire, decades of Tory austerity and marginalization of council housing tenants, the poor, and the working class was brought to light, but this acknowledgement came at an unspeakable cost.

Forty years of Tory housing policy led Britain on a crash course towards one of the world’s largest housing disasters, as deregulation, state retrenchment, and mass speculation made housing less accessible, more expensive, and less safe. It pushed nearly 1 in 5 Britons to go on housing benefits just to stay in their homes, and it stole the lives of 72 vibrant community members who were murdered by the state in the Grenfell fire. At the same time, Tory housing policy made developer profits skyrocket, as the nation’s nine largest developers paid £1.8 billion to their shareholders in 2017, a nearly 400% increase in profit for British real estate investors since the 2008 financial crisis.4

With all of this considered, it should be no surprise that, as housing costs continue to rise, UK voters sought a different way forward in their recent election on July 4th, 2024, electing a Labour government for the first time in fourteen years. But as Keir Starmer’s Labour Party assembles its large majority in Parliament, one question remains — does Labour, an ostensibly left-leaning party, offer working-class families a meaningful solution to Britain’s decades-long housing disaster? Or will Starmer’s Labour Party continue speeding down the road to the United Kingdom’s next deadly housing disaster.

If you were to take a historical view of the Labour Party, there would be reason for optimism that Starmer’s administration would push for meaningful change to the UK’s housing system. The party, which has traditionally been a political home for left-wing voters, has a legacy of pushing for strong social programs, like public education, nationalized industries, social security, and the NHS. The Labour Party also played a prominent role in the development of the United Kingdom’s social housing sector; between 1945 and 1951, the Labour government led by Clement Attlee constructed over 800,000 council homes, with nearly 200,000 homes built in 1948 alone.5 In the postwar period, Nye Bevan, Clement Attlee’s Minister for Health and Housing, advocated fiercely to ensure these homes were decent and dignified, pushing for multiple bathrooms in each flat, along with wrap around services by council estates, like schools, laundry facilities, and houses of worship.6 Ultimately, post-war council estates provided decent, affordable, and decommodified homes for millions of families, and showed the Labour Party’s initial commitment to using the tools of the state to meet housing needs, to fight back against developer speculation, and to make housing a public good.7

Golden Lane Estate, a council estate built in the post-war period

But the Labour Party has changed drastically since the Attlee premiership in the late 1940s — eleven years of Thatcherism left gaping holes in Attlee’s social safety net, while also making it almost unthinkable to propose that the state should intervene in private markets for the public good. So, of course, the Labour Party abandoned its commitment to rebuilding the welfare state or providing public goods, and New Labour was born.

Tony Blair’s Labour Party, which first won a Parliamentary majority in 1997, did not embrace the obligations of the state to provide dignified homes for its citizens — instead, it embraced free markets, homeownership, and large scale voluntary stock transfer, a policy where council housing developments would be transferred to charities or non-profit organizations. Large scale voluntary stock transfer became a particularly prominent part of New Labour’s housing program, as council homes were at least partially privatized to generate revenue for repairs.8 While the policy raised £14 billion in revenue for estate repair, it also represented a classic, neoliberal approach — instead of investing in the existing welfare state, New Labour sought to pass on its responsibilities to non-state actors, like non-profits, in the hopes that they could absolve themselves from the state’s responsibility to build and subsidize housing.9 Of course, these policies should come as no surprise — Blair himself is a huge landlord, with a property portfolio valued at over £33 million.

In 2015, the Labour Party took a brief, blissful sojourn from the politics of neoliberalism, instead electing bona-fide socialist Jeremy Corbyn as their party leader.10 Corbyn, a trade unionist who was elected after the resignation of party leader Ed Miliband, beat three Blairite prime ministers who broadly embraced the approach of New Labour, showing that there was, in fact, broad popular support for socialist leadership in the United Kingdom. And for the first time since the post-war period, the Labour Party actually led on housing. Corbyn used his leadership role to call for a government reinvestment in council housing, proposing a £75 billion plan to build 100,000 new council homes each year. This plan, which had real potential to address Britain’s severe housing shortage and national affordability crisis, was also popular with voters, as Corbyn’s housing plans garnered more support than any other prime minister candidate in 2019. For a brief moment, it seemed as if the British could win public homes, funded by government borrowing and taxes on the rich, as a universal public good. But Corbyn’s Labour Party lost the 2019 Parliamentary elections, so he stepped down from his leadership position, despite the fact that Labour membership had grown sharply under his radical, clear vision for a socialist state.

Lonsdale House, part of a council estate in Notting Hill, London

In the wake of Labour’s 2019 defeat, Keir Starmer emerged as the consensus leadership candidate for the party’s centrist wing. Seeking to usher the Labour Party back to the center, Starmer was quick to decry Corbynism, while standing for little else (with the exception of transphobia and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, of course). But a disastrous couple of years for the Conservative Party, including the whirlwind Premiership of Liz Truss, had changed the political landscape in the United Kingdom, and Starmer’s Labour Party became well-positioned to take over Parliament in the 2024 general elections. Even though voters acknowledged that Starmer was a dull leader with uninspiring policy proposals, the UK was simply done with Conservative rule, so Labour won a commanding parliamentary majority.

While voters weren’t excited about Starmer, and many LGBTQ+ and pro-Palestinian voters justifiably opted for the Green Party due to Starmer’s offensive comments, Labour still ended up with a 174 seat majority in Parliament, the party’s largest bloc since Blair took office in 1997. Yet Starmer’s plans to address the country’s increasingly dire housing crisis are dull, market-centric, and feed into the same financialized, speculative dynamics that the Tories spent decades fostering in the British housing market.

Starmer’s landmark housing proposal is his commitment to reintroduce local building targets and build 1.5 million new homes over the next five years. Unsurprisingly, however, Labour’s plan is not particularly focused on affordability, choosing to instead prioritize “economic growth”. Starmer argues his administration will meet housing targets by cutting back the state’s planning process, which, though certainly flawed, has long served as a form of government regulation against sprawl and developer overreach. While it is likely that the planning process needs some reforms to meet Britain’s dire housing needs, scholars like Gareth Fearn have argued that building more homes alone will not be enough to meet the housing needs of the United Kingdom, especially due to the nation’s shrinking council housing stock. Ultimately, Starmer’s housing calculations are based on the risky assumption that simply infusing more (privately-built) housing supply into the market will lower housing costs. And while the new supply Starmer’s Labour Party is advocating for will likely alleviate the nation’s severe housing shortage, it’s hard to imagine that private developers will build unless huge profits are available to them.

Writers like Grace Blakeley have pointed out the fallacies in Starmer’s argument, arguing that developer land-banking, a process where speculators purchase large swaths of land, win planning approval for development on their parcels, and subsequently delay development until profits can be maximized, also restricts the nation’s housing production. Blakeley has pointed out that the UK’s largest developers have increased their landholdings by 67% over the last decade, but this substantial increase in developer-owned land has not been paired with a similar rise in housebuilding. If private, profit-driven developers won’t build new homes until their potential revenues are maximized, it seems foolish to rely on these same developers to pick up their tools and usher in a new era of housing production. Furthermore, it seems silly to assume that these same private developers, who are tasked with providing larger and larger returns to their investors, will tolerate any reductions in housing costs — instead, these speculators will continue to leave their properties fallow until they can rake in cash.11

Yet Starmer, who has argued that Labour must stand with “the builders, not the blockers (of housing plans)”, has offered few solutions to the growing issue of developer land-banking, only offering weak commitments to hinder the practice. Without a concrete plan to stop developers from price-gouging working-class people out of the housing market through land-banking, the Labour Party is essentially endorsing mass speculation of the nation’s undeveloped land. Under Starmer’s government, greedy landlords and developers will still have nearly unchecked power to raise housing costs, destabilize families, and displace Britons. More housing may be produced, but working-class Britons will still be left behind.

Starmer’s commitments to protecting tenants are similarly weak; despite remaining committed to ending no-fault evictions, the Labour Party had initially more sweeping reforms to the private rental sector, including the creation of a national landlord registry and a legally binding Decent Homes Standard. However, these proposals were been dropped from Labour’s platform in an attempt to appease landlords. Earlier commitments to affordable housing production were also dropped from Labour’s manifesto — the party initially pledged to make 40% of housing units in planned “New Towns” affordable, but this pledge was also silently removed from the party’s manifesto.

Instead, Starmer has committed to continuing Thatcher’s “property-owning democracy” — under his tutelage, Labour, the party that built 800,000 social homes during the post-war period, is branding itself as the “party of homeownership”.12 The Labour Party has frustratingly refused to reconsider Thatcher’s harmful “Right to Buy” policy, with Starmer calling the sale of council homes “…a legitimate route for working-class aspiration.” But Starmer’s homeownership agenda goes beyond the sale of council homes — his “Freedom to Buy” proposal, which allows people to access a government-backed mortgage with low deposits, seeks to get young Britons (who can afford a mortgage of any sort) on the property ladder seems to have replaced Labour’s commitment to providing decent housing to all of its residents through the tools of the state.

Labour is also offering few solutions for local councils, many of which are hurtling towards bankruptcy after being asked to provide more and more services with smaller and smaller budgets. While these bodies do crucial work, both operating council estates and helping to place the growing number of homeless families in increasingly expensive temporary accommodation, they do not seem to be a priority for the new government. Indeed, Rachel Reeves, Labour’s new Chancellor, has repeatedly indicated that the party will not increase social spending, and will instead look towards the private sector to solve crises like infrastructure and housing. For local councils, which are now spending a record £1.7 billion on temporary housing, Reeves’ commitment to continued austerity reads like a death sentence — councils have reported they may need to sell off more of their public housing stock to remain afloat.

Trellick Tower, a famous council estate in North Kensington, London

For a party that has seized a historic majority in Parliament, Labour’s housing reforms are paltry, and replicate the same neoliberal logic that created the housing crisis the nation faces today. Years of austerity, cuts to housing budgets, and growing council housing waiting lists have left British housing in a precarious position, one that can only be addressed with aggressive, radical action, that gives the state a central role in the production of new housing.

There is a clear path forward for Starmer to change course — Jeremy Corbyn’s £75 billion plan to build 100,000 new council homes each year while also supporting social housing associations is ambitious yet radical enough to meet United Kingdom’s political moment. The 2019 Labour housing plan centered the private market’s fundamental inability to provide decent housing for all Britons, and subsequently gives the state an active, central role in developing housing for all of its citizens. Furthermore, it calls for the end of Right to Buy, protecting council housing from privatization and speculation. Corbyn’s plan also emphasized the importance of working towards universalist state-developed housing system, where councils could compete directly with the private market, helping to eventually crowd out private landlords and developers. And Labour’s 2019 plan was politically popular — a 2019 survey of British voters found that Britons believe building more council housing will help to address the housing crisis.

The United Kingdom needs a leader who is willing to build public infrastructure for its citizenry. It needs a return to the postwar era, when the Labour Party, committed to providing housing as a basic public good, built 800,000 council homes in under a decade. This type of aggressive public spending and construction program, which would fully fund local councils and help them build public housing, would meaningfully ameliorate the United Kingdom’s housing crisis while also making housing a public good. Keir Starmer’s market-driven housing policies will only continue the United Kingdom’s path towards housing speculation, financialization, and displacement. And with a 174 vote majority, voters sure should expect better.

If you know me well, you know how much I love Catherine Bauer, the New Deal-era urban planner, houser, and labor organizer whose 1934 manifesto, Modern Housing, called convincingly for the end of speculative practices in the American real estate market 90 years ago.

In the nine decades since Modern Housing’s publication, and particularly in the six decades since Bauer’s untimely death in 1964, real estate speculation, rent-gouging, and overall financialization of the housing market have accelerated at a breakneck speed. As the federal government withdrew its investments in creating and preserving affordable homes, housing in America gradually transformed into an investment, or an asset, rather than a place where people lived. While this process has benefitted some — the white people who bought homes using federally-backed mortgages, slumlords, and for-profit developers — tenants and the working class have been left behind to struggle to find a decent place to live. In recent years, the costs of housing have skyrocketed more than ever. And as I’ve written in Next City, many in housing and planning circles have turned to Bauer’s work for ideas on how to resolve this crisis— policy proposals like the Social Housing Development Authority in New York State closely mirror many of her suggestions.

I believe that Bauer’s time, and perhaps more accurately, public and social housing’s time, has come — and I’m thrilled to be starting a biweekly newsletter writing about the path towards public and social housing from New York to Nairobi inspired by her work in Modern Housing. The first several essays will focus primarily on New York and the United Kingdom, including an essay that will be released on Substack later this week on how housing is driving the “cost of living crisis” in the U.S. and the U.K. Later essays this summer will focus on social housing projects I visited this April in London and Edinburgh, as well as developments I’ll be touring next week in Berlin and Amsterdam.

If you have suggestions, questions, or anything you’d like to learn more about, please reach out! I’m excited for this project and more than open to suggestions.

-Katelin

As housing costs continue to skyrocket, the working class residents of cities like New York are struggling to make ends meet. Since the end of the pandemic-era eviction moratorium, the city’s eviction rate has been sharply rising, violently forcing many working class and poor families out of their homes. Countless other New Yorkers have lost their homes simply because their landlord did not allow them to renew their lease, leaving thousands of people scrambling to find housing they could afford. Of course, these housing challenges do not impact all New Yorkers equally – Black and Latine tenants are substantially more likely to be threatened with an eviction than white families. Furthermore, AAPI, Black, and Latine tenants face a substantially higher rent burden than white tenants, with AAPI tenants being the most rent-burdened community in the city. 

Politicians across the city have spoken about the need for affordable housing here in New York, but “affordable housing” is not a particularly strong or meaningful term in a city shaped by real estate and finance capital. Many of these same politicians at the federal, state, and city level have spent the last several decades neglecting the city’s largest source of truly affordable housing, NYCHA, allowing the city’s public housing authority to acquire over $40,000,000,000 in capital needs. Many NYCHA tenants have been impacted by lead poisoning, prolonged gas outages, vermin infestations, and heat outages due to near universal neglect of public housing by government officials at all levels. And instead of investing in public housing, the city has chosen to privatize many units, converting housing complexes to Section 8 buildings and handing them over to private management through a program called RAD-PACT. As of January 2023, over 30,000 NYCHA apartments had been converted to Section 8 developments through the program, which has been shown to increase eviction rates. 

(Bushwick Houses, Photo by Mike Steel)

Most new “affordable housing” in this city is financed by the private sector or non-profits, who raise the money for these new buildings through a byzantine system of private capital, tax credits, public subsidies, and property tax cuts. Federal programs such as the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) infuse “affordable” housing programs with private capital, as developers sell these tax credits to wealthy investors in exchange for investments in their “affordable” housing projects. In addition to ensuring our housing markets remain reliant on private capital, tax credit programs like LIHTC do not create deeply or permanently affordable housing – “affordable” units created through this program are not designed to serve New Yorkers making under 50% of area median income (AMI), and are only required to remain affordable for a maximum of 30 years. Programs providing developers with a property tax break in exchange for “affordable” housing units, including the 421-A tax break, have similarly failed to create any truly affordable housing, with developers finding a number of loopholes to avoid rent regulations and other measures designed to keep units “affordable”. 

As a result, to qualify for many of the new “affordable housing” units New York City is creating, one has to have an income of nearly six figures. At Sunrose Towers, an “affordable” development in Hamilton Heights currently on the city’s housing lottery website, applicants must earn more than $80,000 a year to qualify for a studio apartment. Similarly, at the Brooklyn Tower, an ugly, monstrous skyscraper rising up in Downtown Brooklyn, applicants for “affordable” one bedroom units must earn a whopping $96,000 a year to qualify for a spot in this new building. In a city where 8 out of 10 rent-burdened tenants make under $60,000 a year, it is beyond clear that the “affordable” housing New York is producing isn’t doing very much to address the true housing crisis we face – one where capitalism, developers, landlords, the real estate industry, and systemic racism are all powerful forces keeping people from obtaining safe, deeply affordable, accessible housing. 

Last week, I visited Barcelona, the largest city in Catalonia and the second largest city in Spain, where my younger sister Emily has been studying abroad for the past four months. My parents, my sister and I did all of the major tourist hits – we were captured by the beauty of the massive, rainbow stained glass windows of the Sagrada Familia, a church that has been under construction for what seems like an eon. We ate tapas, took a cable car to the top of Montjuïc, drank sangria, and strolled through Park Güell, one of Antoni Gaudί’s signature works. I babbled to my family about superblocks, Barcelona’s innovative street design model, intended to decrease car use and air pollution, while increasing access to public space. 

Yet the thing I found most striking about Barcelona was its rapidly growing social and public housing stock. Much like New York, Barcelona is facing a housing crisis of massive proportions; eviction rates have risen dramatically over the past several years, private speculators have made substantial, harmful investments in the local housing stock, and rental costs have skyrocketed. But unlike New York, which has primarily used private and public-private sector solutions in an attempt to solve the housing crisis, Barcelona has actually taken substantial steps towards making housing a social good. 

In 2016, Barcelona released a ten-year Right to Housing plan that identified four main housing goals the city needed to address. The first goal the city identified was preventing and addressing the housing emergency and residential exclusion, including homelessness. To ensure the housing crisis did not worsen in the city, the government proposed strengthening public grants to help people maintain their homes, implementing eviction mediation programs, strengthening publicly run Housing Offices, and crafting proactive policies to address the housing needs of the aging. While in Barcelona, I saw this last proposal in action, as I visited a social housing development for the aging in Santa Caterina, located right next to one of the city’s 39 markets.  

(Photo by Katelin Penner, April 2023)

This bright, airy building, which was completed in 2005, is equipped with services on site to help the individuals living in its 59 social housing units continue to live independently. Located on Plaça Joan Capri, a bustling public square in the city’s center, the building gives aging residents of Barcelona easy access to both the Santa Caterina Market and public, open space. It is accessible, well integrated to the street grid, and beautiful, everything social housing can and should be. 

Barcelona has also proposed a number of other policies to protect individuals who are at risk of losing their homes, including mediation services, subsidies, and grants for those struggling to pay their rent or mortgages. The city has also crafted plans to quickly rehouse those who do face eviction, through its new Proximity Provisional Accommodation Program (APROP). This program seeks to minimize the impacts of gentrification on local communities by building new housing units intended to rehouse individuals who have experienced the violence of eviction. The APROP program is also focused on keeping people in their communities, intending to rehouse people in the neighborhoods they have historically lived in. This innovative program has the potential to greatly reduce the harm and trauma of eviction, though the ultimate goal should be to abolish evictions altogether. While in Barcelona, I had the opportunity to visit the city’s first APROP development, in Ciutat Vella. The building is modern, sustainable, and pleasant, and it plays an important social role in housing some of the city’s most vulnerable residents.

(First Picture by Adria Goula, second picture by Katelin Penner)

Barcelona is also actively building public housing, something New York City has not done for several decades, due in part to the Faircloth Amendment. The 2016 Right to Housing plan called on the city to build 8,000 new public housing units, a goal the city is actively progressing towards, as the city has constructed 4,000 new public housing units with more under construction since 2015. The city’s choice to actively strengthen its social housing stock helps to insulate Barcelona residents from market pressures, protecting those in public housing from speculatory rent hikes, evictions, and displacement. The city is also seeking to improve energy efficiency in its existing public housing stock, increasing the health of public dwelling space and promoting sustainability in home construction.

(New Public Housing in Barcelona, photo by Katelin Penner)

Barcelona is also using another tactic we could learn from in the United States — seizing vacant apartments for social housing. Since 2016, a law in the city has allowed the municipality to temporarily seize apartments that have been vacant for more than two years for use as social housing, while also charging landlords hefty fines for warehousing apartments. In 2019, this law was strengthened, and Barcelona now has the ability to permanently acquire these vacant buildings and apartments for use as social housing by purchasing them at 50% of their market rate. In New York City, where it’s estimated that over 88,000 rent regulated apartments sit vacant due to warehousing by profit-hungry landlords, the idea that vacant apartments could be seized has been tossed around, but it has often been discredited, as some argue it is not in line with the takings clause of the Constitution. However, eminent domain has frequently been used to condemn and demolish the property of Black Americans, including in the somewhat recent Atlantic Yards project in Downtown Brooklyn. If building a private basketball stadium with land obtained through eminent domain is seen as a “public good”, seizing vacant, warehoused apartments is absolutely a public good. New York City should follow Barcelona’s lead in aggressively acquiring vacant apartments and buildings to convert them into social housing.

Barcelona has also begun to invest in cooperative housing, a housing model that was once used extensively in our city with substantial success. However, New York City has largely stopped building limited equity co-ops, where the resale value of the unit is limited to ensure housing remains permanently affordable, a barrier to our city’s potential for social housing production. In Barcelona, however, co-ops are building steam, as La Borda, possibly the city’s best known social housing development, is cooperatively owned. La Borda uses a non-speculative housing model to ensure it remains isolated from the pressures of the private market, ensuring the costs of living in the building are low enough for “humble people”. It was developed on the site of a former factory in the Sants neighborhood, using renewable materials and solar panels to ensure it does not contribute to the climate crisis. The design of La Borda seeks to promote community and togetherness, many of the principles on which cooperative living is based on, and the space feels warm and welcoming. Ultimately, La Borda is airy, natural, and beautiful — everything social housing should be in New York City.

(La Borda. First Photo: Lacol; Second Photo: Lluc Miralles)

Ultimately, the fundamental difference between the housing futures of New York City and Barcelona is that the municipal government of Barcelona has actively begun planning against capital. The city’s drastic actions to scale up its public and social housing stock will protect residents from potential gentrification, housing market fluctuations, displacement, and evictions in the future. On the other hand, New York City’s government is generally planning for capital, creating “affordable” housing developments that still enrich the real estate industry and prominent investors. To change course, New York City’s political leaders just need the political will to resist the power of real estate donors, and prioritize the urgent housing needs of everyday people.

Thank you to Eduardo González de Molina and Javier Burón Cuadrado for insights and advice on social housing in Barcelona.

Source: https://ny.curbed.com/2017/4/12/15276978/mta-l-train-morgan-avenue-restoration

And, of course, at the same time, rents skyrocketed. Landlords were able to increase rents by an average of 68% between 2000 and 2014 in Bushwick, directly to the east of the Morgan L, as the African American and Latine population dipped. And this rent increase has led to severe racialized displacement, especially among the area’s long-term Latine population. Between 2000 and 2013, the Latine population in North Brooklyn decreased by 18 percent despite the fact that the city’s Latine population increased by 10 percent over the same time period. The incredible violence of gentrification and displacement, especially in working class communities of color, is important to acknowledge. What is also too often missing in those accounts are the ways in which the people most affected have typically lost the services they have come to rely on, such as local food stores or hair salons they’ve been frequenting for decades, while seemingly overnight, they can barely afford the raised rent in the apartment they’ve lived in for years.

Recently, Curbed published an article written by Clio Chang about two tech workers from San Francisco that started a new project known as  “The Neighborhood,” to bring more creative-class, relatively affluent people to this gentrifying corner of East Williamsburg. The two co-founders, husband and wife duo Priya and Andrew Rose, seek to create a community of ambitious, creative people that will “combine the serendipity of a college campus, the co-creation of Burning Man, the agency of Silicon Valley, the vigor of a Midwestern high school track coach, and the culture of New York City.” Residents of “The Neighborhood” are all over Substack, writing pieces on the joys of co-living or their progress towards getting 100 friends to move to the community. When I read the piece in Curbed, I was instantly struck by the brutal honesty the Roses showed in talking about how they selected East Williamsburg. The two cofounders call the Morgan Avenue L stop “the frontier of culture in New York City”, which Clio Chang, the author of the Curbed piece, correctly identifies as a “creative way to describe gentrification”. This project, especially in a neighborhood where so many working class people of color are struggling to make rent, find an affordable apartment, or keep their shops open, is violent, and an accelerator for gentrification, without a doubt. Currently, 23 people live in  “The Neighborhood,” a number its cofounders seem proud of building towards in such a short period of time. Something about the community is very immediately off-putting, maybe even cultish.

Yet, when I began to parse through cofounder Priya Rose’s Substack, where she outlines the process through which an actual neighborhood was selected for “The Neighborhood”, I quickly became fascinated with the contradictory ideologies of the project. Initially, Rose seemed to be angling for a location further west in Williamsburg, specifically the area between the Bedford Avenue L and McCarren Park, but once a friend gave her a tour, she quickly changed her tune. In a Substack article called “Williamsburg: A Charming Mall”, Rose talks about a walk she took through Williamsburg on a sunny weekend morning, where she seemingly braved the crowds at Smorgasburg to get food and sit by the water. She talks with friends who highlight the good food, the walkability, and the convenient proximity to Manhattan that brought them to Williamsburg, but she doesn’t seem convinced, claiming that she alternates “between feeling charmed by Williamsburg and disgusted by it.” Something about the core of Williamsburg seems plastic, artificial, and not authentic to her – she even notes that the neighborhood has sold out, and that it reminds her of “girls in yoga clothes exclaiming "oh my GOD! it's so cute!!” at dogs”. But, undoubtably, and contradictorily, she is also attracted to the neighborhood and its many amenities, as she acknowledges daydreaming about walks along the shiny new waterfront parkways and daily workouts at a fancy rock climbing gym.

To the Roses, the western side of Williamsburg is no longer “the frontier of culture in New York City”. But to many people, it used to be. In the 1980s, hundreds of artists who had once called Lower Manhattan home began to look for a new neighborhood to live and make art in. Since the subway lines on the East Side of Manhattan, the L and the J/M/Z, passed through Williamsburg, the neighborhood quickly became an obvious alternative, as it, too, had a substantial amount of abandoned factory space that could be converted into lofts or performance spaces. By 1990, around two thousand artists had moved into converted lofts in Williamsburg, and another several thousand were moving into the neighborhood’s low rise housing stock. As Sharon Zukin notes, many of the early Williamsburg transplants were attracted to the neighborhood for its post-industrial “grittiness”, a word that became a largely positive signifier for authenticity in the early 1990s, after being largely used to describe unpleasant urban environments for decades.  New Williamsburg residents experienced authentic, “gritty” urban life by creating cultural spaces in abandoned warehouses and moving into illegal lofts.

As Sharon Zukin has argued in her book, Naked City, after LedisFlam, the community’s first art gallery, opened in 1987, other galleries and DIY and experimental performance spaces sprung in abandoned factories across the neighborhood. As artists and creatives continued to take the L train over the East River, Williamsburg began to function like an industrial “arts district”, much like SoHo in the 1970s, and the East Village in the 1980s. And much like SoHo and the East Village in the decades before, the new residents of Williamsburg began to change the neighborhood. As Zukin notes, the consumer tastes of these newer, comparatively wealthier residents led to the establishment of new types of businesses in the area, like a Middle Eastern restaurant and a coffee shop by the Bedford Avenue L. And, at the same time, Williamsburg was attracting serious attention from the media as a new, “hot” neighborhood, as several major outlets in New York and beyond began to report on art shows and performances in the community. This media attention helped to accelerate gentrification in Williamsburg, a process that had been started by the rapid influx of the so-called creative-class into the community.

As David Harvey correctly notes in his article, “The Urbanization of Capital,” the economic structure of capitalism offers postindustrial cities like New York two options to revitalize their economies. They can try to become more competitive within the spatial division of labor by producing an extremely business friendly climate to draw private investment and a more efficient workforce, or they can become more competitive in the realm of consumption by marketing themselves as sites of culture, entertainment, and innovation. As Williamsburg became a media darling, with glowing headlines like “Williamsburg: Quirky but Reasonable”, and “East Williamsburg, Brooklyn: A Gritty Industrial Vibe”, the neighborhood became a key site in New York’s battle to compete within the spatial division of labor and the realm of consumption.

During the late 20^th century, New York City became very concerned with competing in the spatial division of labor, as the municipal government sought to economically revitalize the city by growing the finance, insurance, and real estate industries (known as the FIRE industries). As a result of these policies, NYC gained nearly 100,000 jobs in the FIRE sectors between 1970 and 1990 while losing most of its industrial jobs at around the same time. With the expansion of the city’s professional class, the real estate industry continued to boom. Real estate values rose drastically across the city, with sales prices in Brooklyn skyrocketing by 180% between 1980 and 1989.  Real estate and finance professionals came together to form development corporations and to lobby for the revitalization of and investment in downtown business districts or “hot” neighborhoods like Williamsburg, courting city investment for these projects. The real estate industry wanted more than piecemeal zoning variances in Williamsburg and Greenpoint; they also won a massive neighborhood rezoning also supported by Michael Bloomberg that funneled real estate (and public) capital into transforming the East River Waterfront from a hotbed of industry to a hotbed of capitalism, unaffordability, luxury condos and gourmet grocery stores.

But, as Harvey notes, the city’s investment in the Williamsburg real estate sector, like public-private partnerships and development deals, amount “...to a subsidy for affluent consumers, corporations, and powerful command functions to stay in town at the expense of local collective consumption for the working-class and poor.” As a result, the wealthy and powerful began to transform Williamsburg. Wealthy real estate developers bought out many of the more alternative, less mainstream spaces used for art and performances, such as warehouses, and turned them into condos, despite the fact that these industrial spaces attracted many people to the neighborhood in the first place. Landlords were able to drastically raise rents, displacing people from their homes while making massive profits. Financiers made major profits in loaning money to developers involved in new construction projects across the neighborhood. The profits generated through the Williamsburg rezoning weren’t allocated to everyday Brooklynites – they were made by real estate executives, landlords, and finance CEOs.

Ironically, however, the city’s decision to rezone Williamsburg drastically changed the neighborhood’s role within the realm of consumption, as many music, art, and performance venues that initially attracted people to the neighborhood, had to shut down due to high costs. But, at the same time, new coffee shops, gourmet restaurants, wine bars, and other, more upscale amenities were being introduced to the neighborhood, as more affluent New Yorkers began to move across the East River throughout the 2000s. This transition away from the arts and towards small, “quirky” businesses is well explained by Zukin, who argues that consumer tastes do have a substantial role in shaping neighborhood change across the five boroughs. And, as Zukin notes, many people, major news outlets like the New York Times, and academics see “authenticity” in the places that they like to shop at, eat at, live in, or visit. As more and more powerful, wealthy, white folks move to places like Williamsburg, their tastes, and what they see to be authentic, have come to restructure the area surrounding the Bedford Avenue L station.

As Zukin notes, residents of Williamsburg who see authenticity in “artfully painted graffiti on a shop window, sawdust on the floor of a music bar, or an address in a gritty but not too thoroughly crime-ridden part of town” initially had power to control the commercial scene of the neighborhood, taking this power away from the longer term Latine residents who had called the neighborhood home for decades. This process was violent – Latine residents lost their homes, were priced out of their neighborhoods, and had their businesses displaced by white hipster entrepreneurs. Yet this first round of displacement was given little attention by many of Williamsburg’s new white residents, who were maybe even excited to see a coffee store replace a Latine owned hardware store down the block. Nobody called Williamsburg “plastic”, “sold out”, or “an open air mall” (all things Ms. Rose calls the neighborhood in her Substack piece) when Latine folks who had called Williamsburg home had to leave the area due to skyrocketing rents and greedy landlords. However, as arts spaces have begun to close, and the area’s industrial character began to go away, we did start to comment on the changes we saw in Williamsburg. Some people even pushed further east into Williamsburg and Bushwick, searching for a place that had the same industrial grit as Williamsburg initially did. By the early 2000s, young, largely white people searching for authenticity had pushed all the way to the Morgan L, moving into the McKibbin Lofts, an illegally converted loft space that featured many of the elements of “authentic” co-living that the Neighborhood seeks to re-create.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKibbin_Street_Lofts

As Sharon Zukin notes, in today’s capitalist society, we are primarily interacting with cities as consumers, and that our experience as consumers plays a substantial role in shaping whether we see spaces as “authentic” or not. And, in reality, authenticity functions as a form of capital in a city like New York. So maybe Priya and Andrew Rose truly see Bogart Street as the “the frontier of culture in New York City”, and maybe some of us do too. But this perpetuation of a largely white, elite aesthetic of authenticity has only accelerated and intensified processes of violent gentrification and displacement. And maybe we all just need to reconsider what we think of as an “authentic” urban environment, especially before we create an extremely cringey gentrification co-op.

Yet what happened in Williamsburg wasn’t an accident – rezonings have repeatedly been used by the city government to raise property values and attract capital. As a result, New York City works in coalition with major real estate developers to transform neighborhoods for profit, allowing developers to make millions off of real estate deals, while incentivizing landlords to hike rents. This phenomenon, which scholar Sam Stein calls the real estate state, ensures that speculative real estate capital has immense control over our lives, making it hard to fight for the livable neighborhoods we all deserve. Under our current system of zoning and rezoning, developers will only invest in neighborhoods where they know they will make profits, leading to a problematic link between capital investment in vital resources and real estate speculation in neighborhoods across our city. The concessions community groups have won from developers are often weak – programs like Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, which require developers benefiting from a rezoning to set aside a certain percentage of units as affordable, do not address the needs of the poorest New Yorkers, often creating “unaffordable affordable housing units” that aren’t accessible to the majority of neighborhood residents. 

The real estate state ensures that everyday people are excluded from making decisions about zoning – the City Planning Commission, the body with the first binding vote in New York’s land use process, has historically consisted primarily of those involved with real estate, finance, and capital. Leah Goodridge, the most visionary, left-wing member of the body, has consistently drawn attention to the central role the City Planning Commission has played in greenlighting projects funded and boosted by the real estate state with little discussion about equity or affordability, let alone the harmful role that capital plays in shaping our cities. Furthermore, our current system of zoning puts housing organizers in a challenging position – it forces us to fight individual rezonings that have the potential to displace our neighbors from their homes instead of creating new systems that allow all New Yorkers to survive and thrive.

Clearly, there are a myriad of issues with this system – its disjointedness, focus on creating profit for the real estate industry, its lack of truly democratic participation, and its sole focus on zoning as the solution to the challenges our city faces. But there is a solution, comprehensive planning, which progressive planners have been pushing for years, that is finally gaining some real momentum in Brooklyn. Comprehensive planning allows planners to present an integrated vision for the future of a city by ensuring that equity, fair distribution of resources, climate justice, and other community identified needs are being addressed. It actively reflects that housing is connected to healthcare, climate resilience is connected to education, and jobs are connected to transit – it sees all of the resources that make a city livable as symbiotic with one another. Furthermore, comprehensive planning presents a vision for a city as a whole – it presses that both resources and housing development need to be shared equitably across all neighborhoods of a city, instead of being heavily concentrated in certain regions. 

Most importantly, at least for socialist planners like myself, a strong, enforceable comprehensive plan has the potential to pave the road to a citywide strategy to plan New York around people instead of real estate and finance capital. As a global capital of both real estate and finance, New York’s history and infrastructure have been shaped by the desires of the wealthy and powerful, not the people. A comprehensive plan could change that by accommodating for expansive investments in infrastructure in many working class communities that have been left behind by the city, such as transit improvements or new public schools. A comprehensive plan could push for stringent tenant protections, housing for the homeless, community health clinics, and affordable fresh food accessible to all of our neighbors.  Furthermore, the development of a citywide comprehensive plan will be vital to equitably distributing social housing development in New York City, something that is only becoming more important as calls for deepening investments in community land trusts, limited equity co-ops, and other forms of permanently affordable, decommodified, democratically controlled housing continues to grow. Lastly, comprehensive planning could help to place planning power back in the hands of communities, especially when community members are empowered to identify their own needs and centered throughout the planning process. We can plan for a city for the working class, not capital, especially when we look at New York City holistically, and not just neighborhood by neighborhood, or resource by resource. We can plan to meet all of our neighbors’ needs.

Despite all of this, New York City doesn’t have a comprehensive plan – it remains the only major American city that entirely lacks one. And many of the institutions in the city’s planning ecosystem, including the City Planning Commission, are supposed to be enforcing a comprehensive plan that doesn’t exist. But finally, in 2022, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso has put forth a pathway to the generation of a comprehensive plan for the borough, a step in the right direction. Reynoso, a long time critic of neighborhood rezonings and the role they have played in exclusively upzoning Black and brown neighborhoods, has committed to creating a comprehensive plan committed to the integration of healthcare and housing. His comprehensive plan, which is currently undergoing a public engagement process, is being influenced by a wide range of community organizations, input Reynoso hopes to use to craft a plan that will shape his decision making on ULURP projects in the future. In talking about his vision for a comprehensive plan in Brooklyn, Reynoso has emphasized that all neighborhoods have to play a role in providing affordable housing, not just communities like East New York or Downtown Brooklyn, which have been hotspots of development over the past 10 years. Reynoso’s integration of healthcare into his comprehensive plan also shows his understanding of the symbiotic relationships between the different resources people need in a city – housing and healthcare are deeply connected resources that the city must plan for in concert with one another.  

Reynoso’s comprehensive plan is a massive step in the right direction for New York. As longtime planner and progressive leader Tom Angotti has argued for decades, a community centered comprehensive plan has legitimate potential to move the needle away from capital and towards everyday people. But the mechanics of Reynoso’s plan remain unclear – how will the borough president, generally an advocate of building more housing, lessen the grip that the real estate state has on Brooklyn, perhaps the borough that has faced the most substantial amount of gentrification in the past few decades. Furthermore, Reynoso has not yet indicated that his comprehensive plan will actively encourage and accommodate the construction of social housing, or developments that are independent from the commodification pressures of the private market and are governed by residents, not a landlord. As calls for the establishment of a social housing authority at the state level become louder, actively planning for a citywide (or at least boroughwide) social housing development strategy in concert with transit, educational, healthcare, and environmental considerations, is vital to ensuring New York begins to liberate itself from the bind of speculative real estate capital. It remains to be seen if this comprehensive planning initiative will fully embrace the self-identified needs of community members, especially individuals living in places like Bushwick, East New York, and Brownsville, that have faced violent divestment at the hands of the city over the past century. A successful comprehensive plan will center the people left at the margins by discriminatory zoning policies and the seemingly limitless power of real estate capital – and we need to see Reynoso’s full plan to accomplish this.

We know zoning has been a poor substitute for a comprehensive plan – it has centered real estate capital, not people. And Antonio Reynoso’s comprehensive plan undeniably pushes our city, and more specifically, Brooklyn, in a stronger direction. However, it remains to be seen if Reynoso’s comprehensive planning initiative will do enough to push New York away from the grips of capital. A comprehensive plan that more explicitly rejects the increasingly dominant role capital plays will do more to make New York a palace for the people, not the wealthy.