There’s A Growing Push To Develop Social Housing In D.C. What Is It?

Image via DCist.

From DCist:

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

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

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

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