[ Earlier this month, California passed a bill requiring the state
to produce a study and recommendations on expanding the state’s
social housing sector. Organizers hope it will be the first step in
providing de-commodified shelter on a large scale.]
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CALIFORNIA JUST PASSED THE FIRST STATE SOCIAL HOUSING LEGISLATION IN
THE US  
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Richard Marcantonio
October 18, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Earlier this month, California passed a bill requiring the state to
produce a study and recommendations on expanding the state’s social
housing sector. Organizers hope it will be the first step in providing
de-commodified shelter on a large scale. _

Hundreds of renters gathered at the state capitol in Sacramento,
California, on April 24, 2023, to voice their support for SB 555 and
stronger tenant protections., (Courtesy of Anya Svanoe)

 

On October 7, California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Senate
Bill 555
[[link removed]],
the Stable Affordable Housing Act of 2023. The legislation commits the
state of California to producing a study on the prospects for creating
“a robust sector of social housing that offers below-market rents
affordable to households of all income levels who are unable to afford
market rents and that is permanently shielded from the speculative
market.”

Introduced by Sen. Aisha Wahab, the bill emerged from five years of
discussions among tenant organizations, unions, and other members of
the Housing Now! [[link removed]] coalition.

SB 555 embeds a definition of social housing in state law and sets in
motion a public process “to identify tools to help achieve the
state’s goals for lower and moderate-income housing by creating
social housing through both new production and preservation of
existing units.” The resulting California Social Housing Study, to
be completed in 2026, will include recommendations to the state
legislature for creating social housing at the scale needed.

The legislation is the first of its kind at the state level. It
reflects a growing view that private, for-profit development is
failing to address the state’s worsening housing crisis — and
suggests an alternative, de-commodified vision of housing based on
democratic control and meeting human needs for shelter.

A Statewide Vision for Social Housing

As rents continue to soar across the state, evictions surge, and the
unhoused population swells, Californians have debated what the root of
the problem is. Many have focused on the failure of cities to permit
new housing construction and of the private market to build enough
housing.

But tenant advocates note that market-rate housing construction has
proceeded apace — between 2013 and 2022, California _overproduced_
[[link removed]] market-rate
housing by more than two hundred thousand homes, 43 percent more than
its official target; by contrast, housing production lagged the
state’s target for the lowest-income households by 50 percent. Even
more damning for the supply-side diagnosis, much of the high-rent
housing produced is lying vacant, held for its value not as shelter,
but as investment vehicles. A 2020 report
[[link removed]] found that Los
Angeles, for instance, had more than one vacant residential unit for
every unhoused person.

When policymakers attribute the shortage of affordable housing to a
lack of supply on the market, they are led to propose solutions that
prioritize building more market-rate housing. That view leads some
“YIMBY” (Yes in My Backyard) advocates to view social housing
[[link removed]] “mostly
as a countercyclical project, because we [understand] if another
recession like 2008 happens, rates of private home construction would
plummet.” But understanding that the problem is to a large extent
rooted in speculation points to a very different solution: creating a
sector of housing that is shielded from the market, to serve those
whose needs for shelter profit-driven investors and corporate
landlords will not meet even as the market supply of housing
increases.

With the passage of SB 555, the state of California has officially
embraced the view that speculation is a major source of the housing
crisis:

Given the extent to which housing has been commodified — diverted
from its role in meeting human needs into an investment vehicle —
the bill proposes a bold vision for ending the crisis: meeting the
state’s target of building 1.4 million units of below-market-rate
housing by 2030 through creating social housing that is “permanently
shielded from the speculative market.”

Since its birth in “Red Vienna
[[link removed]]”
in the wake of World War I, countries from Chile to Finland to
Singapore have developed a variety of models of and approaches to
social housing. SB 555 defines social housing not on the basis of any
specific policy model, but in terms of who owns it, who can live in
it, and the rights and protections its residents have.

Specifically, the bill defines social housing as housing that

* is “owned and managed by a public agency, a local authority, a
limited-equity housing cooperative, or a mission-driven nonprofit
entity solely for the benefit of residents and households unable to
afford market rent”
* accommodates a mix of households, from those with the lowest
incomes to “moderate-income households unable to afford market
rent”
* provides its residents with strong protections against eviction,
unaffordable rent increases, and other abuses
* is permanently protected from privatization
* provides residents with “the right to participate directly and
meaningfully in decision-making affecting the operation and
management” of their homes.

The bill tasks the state’s housing department with running a public
process culminating in a California Social Housing Study, including
recommendations to the legislature, to be completed by December 31,
2026. The study will examine “the range of models for creating
social housing that are currently in practice, or that public agencies
or mission-driven nonprofit entities plan to implement both inside and
outside California” with the aim of making recommendations to the
legislature on how to scale up social housing within the state.

“Our vision for social housing gained ready acceptance by members of
the legislature who are looking for real solutions to the growing
homelessness crisis,” said Andrés Ramos with Public Advocates
[[link removed]], one of the organizations that helped
draft the bill. “With social housing, keeping people affordably in
their homes is baked into the cake.”

Building the Movement for Social Housing

The organizations that led the push for SB 555 were Housing Now!,
Tenants Together, the Alliance of Californians for Community
Empowerment (ACCE), and Public Advocates Inc., but the coalition that
passed the bill was much larger. It included over eighty tenant
organizing groups, community land trusts, faith groups, housing and
climate policy organizations, and labor unions. The sole recorded
opposition came from the California Association of Realtors, along
with the City of Huntington Beach.

Importantly, the last few years have seen large segments of organized
labor come around to the idea of social housing. The cost of housing
in California has been an issue in strikes, including the
Oakland teachers
[[link removed]]‘
strike in 2019, this year’s Los Angeles school workers’
[[link removed]] strike,
the University of California academic workers
[[link removed]]‘
strike in 2022, and the Los Angeles hotel workers
[[link removed]]’
ongoing strike, among others. (One of the iconic images from the
United Auto Workers strike at University of California, Berkeley, was
a banner proclaiming “End Rent Burden.”) The California Federation
of Labor, AFL-CIO, supported SB 555, as did a number of statewide
labor councils and unions.

Many of these labor organizations and others came together this year
with ACCE, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), and AFSCME 3299 to
form California Common Good [[link removed]], a group
attempting to get unions organized around “common good” housing
demands. Organizers are focusing on the rising cost of rent. As one
union leader said at the group’s kick-off meeting in January,
“What we win at the bargaining table, our members give back to their
landlords.” With the push for social housing, unions hope to build
affordable homes that serve primarily to give working-class people
shelter rather than line the pockets of landlords and real estate
developers.

Tenant organizing is also at an all-time high in California. “More
and more local tenant organizing groups are connecting the long-term
fight for social housing to their immediate struggles for protection
against eviction and unaffordable rent hikes,” said Shanti Singh
of Tenants Together [[link removed]]. On April 24,
hundreds of tenants from all over the state converged on the state
capitol in Sacramento to demand “housing as a human right.”
Chanting “Tener un techo/Es un derecho” (having a roof is a right)
as they marched around the statehouse, they afterward made visits with
dozens of legislators to voice their support for SB 555 and several
other bills (including a bill to close loopholes in a 2019 tenant
protection law, which the governor also signed).

The coalition of supporters also included groups that have worked to
pass ballot measures to fund social housing at the local level. In
particular, the United to House LA
[[link removed]] coalition passed at the ballot a
transfer tax on high-end real estate sales. The measure will dedicate
22.5 percent of revenues to “alternative models of permanently
affordable housing,” using a definition
[[link removed]] very
similar to SB 555’s. San Francisco, Oakland, and other California
cities have also taken steps to promote social housing at the ballot.

SB 555 did not pass without some compromises. It originally set a
ten-year goal of 1.2 million new units of social housing and called
for a concrete social housing plan, rather than just a study. The
timeline for the study’s completion was also delayed by two years.

The Road Ahead

In the coming year, the state’s Department of Housing and Community
Development (HCD) will begin the public process to implement SB 555 by
creating the first-ever California Social Housing Study. Organizers
hope the state’s assessment of social housing will not only bolster
local social housing campaigns, but also feed into the national
movement for social housing. “California’s study — and the
organizing behind it — promises to boost the push for social housing
in states across the U.S., and ultimately at the federal level,”
said Andreina Kniss of the Alliance for Housing Justice
[[link removed]].

But the leadership of Housing Now!’s social housing campaign sees
strategic value in the passage of this legislation that goes beyond
the study and legislative recommendations themselves. By committing
itself to identifying “tools to help achieve the state’s goals for
lower and moderate-income housing by creating social housing through
both new production and preservation of existing units,” California
has officially started down a path they hope will eventually lead to
the provision of democratically controlled housing as a basic human
right.

This commitment has symbolic value, which organizers hope to use to
further popularize the idea of social housing. The public process also
offers the opportunity to organize tenants and workers across the
state, as the law requires HCD to “enlist in the development of the
study broad participation of residents unable to afford market
rents.”

A priority for organizers moving forward will be connecting the
statewide campaign for social housing to local campaigns, especially
those that heighten the visibility of housing speculation by targeting
the speculators themselves. In San Francisco, members of the Veritas
Tenants Association, with support from Housing Rights Committee, are
on a rent strike [[link removed]] against the
city’s largest private landlord. ACCE itself has organized tenants
in San Diego properties owned by Blackstone, which is also a target
[[link removed]] of
AFSCME 3299 and other unions who are demanding that the University of
California divest their pension funds from the private equity giant.

Organizers believe that bringing attention to these market players
will not only drive a wedge between them and corporate politicians,
but also heighten the popular demand to remove housing from the
control of real estate speculators.

“In the end, passage of the state bill is just a tool for building
the power it will take to challenge the dominance of real estate and
financial capital in our homes and communities,” said Amy Schur
of ACCE [[link removed]]. “The impetus for
transformative change will come from local organizing that unites
millions of residents and workers around this demand.”

_Richard Marcantonio is a managing attorney at Public Advocates, a
racial and economic justice advocacy organization based on San
Francisco, where his work focuses on social housing and public
transit. He is an occasional contributor to Labor Notes._

* affordable housing
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* California
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* State Legislation
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* Housing Activism; Social Housing; Tenants Rights;
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