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Social Housing

How Social Housing Won In Seattle, Despite A Flood Of Big Tech Money

April 19, 2025 Roshan Abraham, Next City. , , ,
In the days before a recent ballot referendum in Seattle that would determine the future of social housing in the city, large tech companies spent big. Amazon and Microsoft, both of which are headquartered in the Seattle metropolitan area, each donated $100,000, and other opponents of a tax to fund social housing spent a combined $740,000 in the lead-up to the Feb. 11 vote. Despite this, the vote on a corporate tax to fund the city’s social housing authority won big, with 63% of voters supporting it. In 2023, voters had already resoundingly approved the social housing authority, agreeing that a new entity would be created to acquire and construct mixed-income housing and keep it permanently affordable and under the city’s ownership.

A New Plan To Fix Mexico’s Housing Crisis

April 13, 2025 Ximena González, Jacobin. , , ,
Lined by purple jacaranda trees and lush tepozanes, the walkable streets of Mexico City’s Condesa neighborhood connect a dense urban environment where contemporary apartment towers rise alongside squat multifamily buildings designed in a mix of architectural styles. Surrounded by bustling cafés, creameries, and art galleries, a public park draws passersby who pause to enjoy an impromptu jazz concert. North America’s largest metropolis is an urbanist’s dream — but also a cautionary tale of progressive ideas turned sour. In the early 2000s, the city’s government, under then mayor and future president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), embarked on an ambitious plan to curb urban sprawl by densifying the four central boroughs where employment centers concentrate: Cuauhtémoc, Miguel Hidalgo, Benito Juárez, and Venustiano Carranza.

Building Solidarity Around Survival: A Seattle Example

March 8, 2025 Patrick Mazza, Resilience. , , , , ,
We are in for a long hard time in the U.S. and the world as a whole. The divisions between people have grown too deep. The concentration of power in individuals and institutions that care little about the common good, pursuing their own interests at its expense, is too great. The buildup of problems either unaddressed or insufficiently addressed has mounted to an overwhelming extent. The ascendancy of Trump and Musk has intensified the situation, but the trends were going the wrong way for a long time before. It is enough to make people throw up their hands in despair, wondering what they can do, or retreating entirely into personal life.

Activists Win Excessive Compensation Tax To Fund Social Housing

February 23, 2025 John Burbank, Inequality.org. , , , , , ,
Seattle voters have just beaten the oligarchs, Amazon, Microsoft, the local Chamber of Commerce, the real estate industry, the coup makers and backers, the Muskites, and the Trumpiphiles. How? Through a ballot measure, the people in Seattle have just approved a tax on excessive executive compensation to fund affordable housing. The vote wasn’t even close. The proposal, Proposition 1A, won by a 26-point margin. The advocacy group House Our Neighbors led the ballot campaign. Their leaders and leafletters and canvassers prevailed over a conservative and obstructing city council, a mayor focused on toadying to Seattle-based Amazon, a half-million-dollar opposition campaign, and the overlords of the Trump/Musk dictatorship.

The Big Idea: Social Housing

February 20, 2025 J. Patrick Patterson, In These Times. , , ,
Affordable housing — which typically involves giving tax breaks to real estate developers — isn’t working so well. The open secret is that, all too often, it isn’t actually ​“affordable.” Nearly 40% of tenants using the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, for example — the largest federal program subsidizing affordable housing — are still rent-burdened, and the subsidy doesn’t require homes to be permanently ​“affordable,” leaving renters vulnerable to eviction. As Peter Dreier explains in The American Prospect: ​“The quest to provide what has come to be called ​‘affordable housing’ in America is hobbled by one fundamental reality.

Vote On ‘Social Housing’ Could Break Stranglehold Of Private Landlords

January 29, 2025 Rebecca Burns, In These Times. , , , , ,
On a once-vacant plot of public land in Seattle, a cluster of mid-rise buildings surrounds a tree-filled courtyard. Children play on swings while adults run laps and chat on shared stoops. Some neighbors live in dorm-style rooms with common kitchens, others in family-sized townhomes — but all benefit from access to parks and transit, affordable rents and a democratic say in how their buildings run. None of this exists yet, to be clear. But it’s the vision, laid out in proof-of-concept sketches and during door-to-door canvassing conversations, that Seattle housing activists are hoping to make tangible to voters.

There’s A Severe Housing Crisis In The US: The Work To Make Housing A Right

October 29, 2024 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , , , , , ,
A new report, Billionaire Blowback on Housing: How concentrated wealth disrupts housing markets and worsens the housing affordability crisis, explains how the United States has entered a state of hyper-gentrification in which the average person has to compete with a large corporation when it comes to buying or renting a home. There are currently 28 vacant homes for every homeless person. Clearing the FOG speaks with Chuck Collins, a co-author of the report, and Mehrdad Azemun of Peoples Action, about the housing crisis, the vision for a homes guarantee and how people are working to make housing a human right.

Social Housing Isn’t Just A Vienna Thing

August 2, 2024 Leo Miranda, Next City. , , , ,
When it comes to housing people for highly affordable and highly livable homes for the long term, Vienna, Austria has no equal. The average Viennese pays a quarter or less of their post-tax income on rent and utilities and half of the city lives in public or subsidized housing. These buildings aren’t shabby or poorly-maintained either. “It looks like the housing we can’t afford in New York,” says Samuel Stein, housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society. Vienna prioritizes housing supply, subsidizing the construction of 7,000 subsidized units a year while maintaining over 220,000 city-owned units. As Vienna grows its social housing stock, it suppresses housing costs overall.

Venezuela: Government Delivers 4.9 Million Homes

May 3, 2024 Andreina Chávez Alava, Venezuelanalysis. , , ,
The Venezuelan government marked the 13th anniversary of Venezuela’s Great Housing Mission (GMVV) by celebrating the 4.9 millionth home delivered to working-class families. On Tuesday, President Nicolás Maduro unveiled the new milestone by inaugurating the “Parque Hábitat El Ingenio” housing project, located in Guatire city, Miranda state. In a televised broadcast, Maduro handed the apartment keys to a young couple and their child alongside local authorities. One of the beneficiaries, young mother Marisabel Quiñonez, said she was studying electromedicine for free at the National Experimental University Francisco de Miranda.

Finally, A Path Toward ‘Modern Housing’ In 2024

March 15, 2024 Katelin Penner, Next City. , , , ,
In 1934, the architectural critic Catherine Bauer published one of the most important books ever written on housing. “Modern Housing,” based on years of research in Europe, recounts the sharp differences between the American and European approaches to the similar housing crises both regions experienced after World War I. Political movements for dignified housing forced many European nations, such as England, Germany and the Netherlands, to invest in what Bauer termed “modern housing”: non-speculative, affordable homes with adequate space, light, ventilation and community space.

Housing Coalition Asks Government To Socialize Corporate-Owned Housing

July 7, 2023 People's Dispatch. , , ,
On Wednesday, July 5, the housing rights coalition in Berlin urged the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)-Social Democratic Party (SPD) government to honor the mandate of the 2021 Berlin referendum and introduce legislation to socialize the properties of corporate realtors to solve the escalating housing crisis in the city. The previous SPD-Greens-Die Linke government in Berlin had established a commission of legal experts to assess the legality and feasibility of implementing the mandate of the referendum known as Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co. (DWE).

How A New Generation Of Activists Are Reinventing Housing

June 14, 2023 H. Jacob Carlson and Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Nonprofit Quarterly. , , ,
What is social housing? The simple answer is that it is a systemic approach to providing homes that treat housing not as a commodity, but as a human right. But to make it more than just a slogan, you need policies and institutions to make that right into a reality.       Not so long ago, social housing was rarely discussed in the United States. But today there are over a dozen social housing campaigns across the country: from municipal efforts in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Seattle, Kansas City, and San Francisco; to statewide campaigns in California, New York, and Rhode Island, to mention a few. Some are grassroots campaigns; others are led by elected officials.

The UK Is Mired In An Energy Crisis, But Not On Goldsmith Street

December 13, 2022 Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch. , , , ,
When the Goldsmith Street social housing development was completed in Norwich, UK, in 2019, it was the country’s largest residential complex built to energy efficient Passivhaus standards. At the time, it was dubbed a “modest masterpiece” and won the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Stirling Prize. Now, as the UK braces for the first full winter of a cost-of-living crisis and the energy crisis prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is winning its residents something even more important: savings on their heating bills. “We don’t have to put the heating on so it’s cheaper,” resident Jayed Abdas Samad told The Guardian. “We feel very lucky.” Passivhaus standards were first developed in Germany and are the go-to standards for new construction there.

Venezuela’s Great Housing Mission Achieves Major Milestone

April 11, 2022 People's Dispatch. , , ,
On April 7, the socialist government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro celebrated the delivery of a record 4 million homes to its citizens as part of a social housing program called the Great Housing Mission of Venezuela (GMVV). During a joint radio and television broadcast, President Maduro emphasized that the handing over of the 4 million homes was a “historic” event and a “world record.” “Nothing and no one is going to stop us,” he added.

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