S T C E P S PRO
Why We Need Social Housing What Medicare for All is for health care, social housing is for shelter. By Ramenda Cyrus America sits on the cusp of a severe housing shortage. The systems that have propped up the American housing economy are failing, as they have been for a while. The 2008 financial crisis led to a depletion of residential investment, and a decade later—before the country could fully recover—the pandemic forced millions of workers to accommodate a workfrom-home schedule. Housing in America was already a battle between progressive organizers who see housing as a human right and greedy private investors who see housing as a good, but now rent and home prices have skyrocketed past what many can bear. Even upper-middle-class families are getting squeezed in many cities, while at the other end of the income ladder, a crisis of homelessness is festering. Traditional American solutions are generally focused on the private market and spurring competition. The government’s role is reactive to the whims of this sector. It’s relegated to a helpless position that can only perpetuate broken cycles. As a result, many have been sold the idea that people should either buy a home or live in an apartment owned by a private landlord, and that the government itself should then grudgingly run a few units for the poor. Yet there is another solution that addresses the crisis much more directly: social housing. Rather than American-style public housing, which is reserved for the lowest incomes, this housing would be open to everyone. Housing supply would be delivered to the people who need it most urgently—which is to say, all people. Ultimately, housing would become a right for all. To fight for this goal, the culture must disabuse itself of the notion that there are some people unworthy of government-owned housing—whether it’s marginalized groups like the poor or even the upper middle class. American society must renounce the presumption that there 10 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022
are people who cannot or should not live in proximity to each other. All people can cohabitate; what’s more, everyone must for a truly equitable future to be within grasp. Two big problems arise from relying nearly exclusively on private developers and landlords for housing. The first is that building happens in erratic surges depending on the business cycle, not the needs of the American people. Millions of homes were built during the housing bubble of the mid-2000s, but after the financial crisis, construction collapsed, and by 2009 new construction for privately owned homes was at its lowest point ever. As Business Insider reported,
the U.S. has not had a return to those prerecession highs since. Need for housing was not down during the post-recession years; on the contrary, the population continued to grow. Private builders, however, had no incentive to flood the market with new properties because it took the U.S. multiple years to fully recover economically. When full employment was finally approached, there were few affordable properties available, and so prices began to rise dramatically, eventually increasing 35 percent over the course of the decade. In 2020, the pandemic caused increased demand and also boosted building costs, causing another 20 percent price increase.
