Social Housing Part I: The Social Housing Funding Plan is Out
A quick description, and how you can help.
Initiative 137
The folks over at House our Neighbors unveiled their much-anticipated funding initiative for social housing, drawing inspiration from successful mixed-income public housing developers like those in Montgomery, Maryland, and abroad.
Seattle voters overwhelmingly supported the creation of the agency last year, recognizing the urgent need for innovative solutions to our city's housing crisis. This funding initiative presents an opportunity to rally together and provide the start-up capital the agency needs to create the housing voters asked for.
What is “Social Housing?”
For those unfamiliar with the concept, “social housing” is a great way to build the middle-income homes that our city desperately needs. While market-rate housing, and affordable housing aimed at folks with lower incomes are indeed vital, social housing bridges the gap for the middle income families who are often overlooked. In doing so, it provides a lifeline, offering stability and security in the face of skyrocketing rents.
This publicly-controlled developer comes with some extra perks. Unlike private developers subsidized to create affordable housing, the social housing developer will have access to bonding authority and can use rents to make the bond payments. That reduces the cost to the public. Because the housing is also mixed income, the more expensive rents help subsidize the rest as well.
A note on the unique nature of this mixed income housing, which represents a significant departure from public housing models Americans funded in the 1960s and 70s: we know that poverty, in particular geographically concentrated poverty, is a root cause of much of the social disorder and violence we see on our streets. That’s why many housing “projects” of decades past, which concentrated people with lower incomes in neighborhoods without many public or private services, became magnets for bad actors seeking to prey on those vulnerable people.
Social housing solves that problem by building an income mix directly into communities. In doing so, it avoids concentrating poverty and lays the foundation for safer streets. The research also suggests this improves social cohesion and upward mobility as well.
Showing Me the Money
The price tag for kick-starting the social housing developer is modest - $50M per year, much less than the housing levy. (The housing levy was focused on those with much lower incomes, and thus requires a lot more public subsidy. I strongly supported it as well.)
This levy would be one of the vanishingly few things Seattle funds with progressive taxes.
Instead of increasing taxes on people who already spend half or more of their money on rent, the funding comes from only the most astronomical incomes.
If it passes, the city will charge employers a nickel for every dollar of income an employee makes that exceeds $1,000,000 in a year. The first million bucks an employee makes will be tax- free. Like the employer part of Social Security, the tax is paid by the employer, not the employee.
It’s Not Gonna be Easy. Please Help.
Please consider chipping in with a donation and some volunteering, and please share this with your Seattle friends.
The big businesses that control our local Chamber of Commerce are of course trying to prevent this, making all manner of silly claims about it.
I’ll discuss some of these issues, and what they tell us about the real reason for the opposition, in Part II.