Social Housing Could Be A Repair For San Francisco’s Housing Affordability Disaster

SAN FRANCISCO – Democrats across the country say there is a solution that can help resolve the housing affordability crisis, which is what is known as social housing.

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From the state capital’s dome to the San Francisco City Hall, 2021 has sparked all sorts of conversations about the concept of social housing, but there is one problem: most people don’t really know what it is.

“How do I explain this as simply as possible?” State Assembly member Alex Lee thought out loud before landing: “Social housing is a publicly serviced housing estate.”

“Basically, social housing is human-controlled housing,” said Dean Preston, a supervisor for San Francisco.

Both Preston and Lee recently passed laws promoting social housing. Both also point to the success of social housing in Vienna, where 62 percent of the population live in this type of housing, and in Singapore, where that figure is 82 percent.

“It’s something in Europe and Asia that they have had for a very long time. We can derive successful models from it,” said Lee.

It can take many forms, but at its core, social housing means removing a property from the speculative real estate market so that it either belongs to the building’s tenants as a collective or to the government.

Supervisor Preston says San Francisco voters made social housing a reality by passing Proposition I in November.

“What we have taken upon ourselves in San Francisco is that people are not fighting for the same pot of money to actually grow that pot, generate new income and dedicate it to social housing,” said Preston.

Prop I doubles the transfer tax on commercial and residential real estate valued at over $ 10 million, so the fee for transferring ownership of a property to a new buyer goes into a residential stability fund.

This year, that money will be split between the COVID-19 rent relief and a social housing fund. By 2023, 100 percent of the funds will go into social housing. San Francisco’s controller estimates this could generate $ 196 million annually.

To live in social housing in San Francisco, renters would have to earn less than $ 71,700 a year, on average, or less than 80% of AMI.

“I’m 100 percent for social housing,” said Kristen Panti, an educator who lives in the San Francisco Mission District.

Panti is a unicorn in that she has lived in her building since 1989, taught on the street and just had her first second-generation student.

“I’ve been in my job since ’91, my first year I had a child whose son was in my class 2 years ago,” said Panti.

When her landlady decided to sell her building a few years ago, she thought she would be evicted.

“I was a wreck,” said Panti.

Instead, the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), a nonprofit organization, stepped in and bought them with the help of the city’s small site program. If the city owns the building instead of a not-for-profit, this would be an example of public housing.

“For teachers, something has to be done for all workers who are low-income people,” said Panti.

Many people have a bad relationship with what was formerly called “The Projects,” a form of public housing in the United States. Public housing failed because it was largely defused and extremely separate.

“Many homes were designed for the storage of color communities and the storage of the poor, and they were doomed to sabotage,” Lee said.

Preston and Lee say that public housing is not doomed, it just needs to have a variety of incomes and enough money to make it work.

“Fund it to start with, right? I mean, part of the reason people have a negative relationship with public housing is that it has been underfunded for generations, ”said Preston Said.

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