How European-Style Public Housing Could Help Solve The Affordability Crisis

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How European-Style Public Housing Could Help Solve The Affordability Crisis


February 25, 2020

By Ally Schweitzer

Read More: https://www.npr.org/local/305/2020/0...ability-crisis

"Public housing" isn't such a loaded term in Vienna, Austria. In the European capital, public housing is attractive and well-maintained. It's located near schools, transit and cultural amenities. It's home to singles, families and senior citizens — and most important, it's mixed-income, with affluent Viennese sharing walls with working-class residents.

- But social housing is still a radical concept in the U.S., where government-funded housing is — unfairly or not — associated with crumbling apartment towers marred by crime and poverty. First constructed as segregated housing for low-income Americans during the New Deal era, many public housing projects were reserved for poor African Americans systematically shut out of the housing market. As conditions worsened in public housing, the federal government pulled out, leaving local authorities with enormous maintenance backlogs and residents in unsafe conditions. --- Some progressive officials and activists say public housing doesn't need to be this way. Borrowing best practices from cities like Vienna, Austria, they say, could improve millions of lives, chip away at America's legacy of racial segregation and give the country an economic boost.

- The main difference between social housing and public housing is who's allowed to live in it. Since the end of World War II, public housing in D.C. and the rest of the country has been reserved for poor residents, typically black Americans barred from economic opportunity. Owned and operated by governments, disproportionately located in high-poverty areas and exclusively available to the neediest occupants, public housing has never had a working financial model, says Peter Gowan, a senior policy associate with the left-leaning Democracy Collaborative. "Public housing in the United States was designed to fail," Gowan says. "It was designed to be segregated, it was designed to be low-quality. Where a few public housing authorities tried to do it very well, it was disinvested from later on."

- Today, social housing in Vienna is available to people of all incomes. It's often built on government-owned land that's sold to a private company, which then owns and operates the housing units under public oversight. And crucially, social housing is placed in desirable areas and required to meet architectural and livability standards that make it appealing to people across the income spectrum. --- Those higher-income tenants pay market rents, subsidizing the cheaper rents reserved for low-income occupants. In Vienna, typically half of a building's units are reserved for low-income people. Rent costs don't fluctuate wildly year-over-year, in part because the government builds thousands of new social housing units each year, ensuring that supply keeps up with demand. Today, social housing accounts for an estimated 40% of the housing stock in Vienna.

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In D.C.'s Ward 1, Garfield Terrace is one public housing building in serious disrepair, according to the city's housing authority.






Churchill Gardens is a social housing community in London. Progressives in the D.C. area are calling for similar housing to be built here.