The American left’s hot new affordability idea is publicly funded homes. Just don’t call it public housing.

The preferred term is “social housing,” a name intended to evoke the government-owned, castle-inspired apartment blocs in Vienna, not the government-owned Cabrini Green towers in Chicago, Brooklyn’s Marcy Projects or St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe, whose 1972 detonation was greeted with glee.

A modern counter-example is Seattle’s Elara, a 150-unit apartment complex built in 2018 and acquired this year by Seattle Social Housing Developer, a public authority created through a series ballot initiatives and funded via a 5% tax on employers who pay salaries for individual workers of more than $1 million a year. With the Elara now under public ownership, rents range from $665 for a low-income person leasing a studio to $3,767 for a two-bedroom apartment at market rates — without the cumbersome regulations that govern federally funded affordable housing.

We spoke with Tiffani McCoy, Seattle Social Housing Developer’s interim CEO and the campaign manager for the initiatives, about social housing and its place in one of the country’s most expensive cities. (The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and readability.) What is social housing?

Housing that is permanently affordable. It’s publicly owned in perpetuity. It’s free from market speculation and it is available to all incomes. How is that different from what Americans call public housing?

Something off the top is that public housing was income-restricted. I’d also say that it was set up to fail. When you have individuals that are of very low income within a building and if you do not continue operating and maintenance subsides, you’re never going to have the rents to cover the upkeep. You are basically baking in the degradation of a building for the population that lives inside of it.

Social housing is fundamentally different because we are not means testing and we want to make sure there’s robust funding streams to keep these assets in the public’s hands forever. That means it is not just for poor people? Not at all. We believe in universalism.

We think housing should be a public good just as we provide public schools, public infrastructure, public libraries. I can call the fire department and they’re going to come put the fire out at my house. They’re not gonna ask me how much money I make first. With one of our most basic human needs, the same standards should apply.

Not everyone agrees on that point. I’ve spoken to people around the country who see social housing as primarily or predominantly a tool to serve the lowest income.

There’s a whole national conversation around social housing and one of the biggest debate points is, are the buildings revenue-neutral? And are there hard ratios of the incomes you should serve? By “hard ratios” you mean how many renters are making certain incomes?

Right. We decided not to have hard ratios because for us having more social housing is better than having less. So if we have a building we’re constructing and we are only able to serve [people making 50% of the area median income] and above, that is a win to us. Our goal should be getting as much of the market as we can under public ownership so that we are driving down rents across the board.

But yes, the debate over who is the more deserving for public housing, social housing, was a very strong point in both campaigns. I would say that there are still people today who disagree that folks making over 80% [of area median income] should be living in the building. But we disagree with the idea of segregating poverty. A lot of those ratios are written into federal law.

If you’re operating with federal money, you don’t get to have a lot of creativity and flexibility. Anytime we were ever critiquing the affordable housing system we were very clear to say that these are restrictions by the federal government. In order to get this money, you have to do X, Y and Z. The beauty of our model is we don’t have those strings attached. We get to have supreme flexibility and we need to politically protect that ability.

Why would someone who can afford an apartment in the general market in Seattle choose to live in social housing?

They’re choosing to live in social housing because they want to have certainty that their rent is not going to rise to the legal limit every single year. They’re going to know that maintenance requests will be fulfilled. They’re going to live in high-quality housing.

We are going to be focusing 50% of our new construction portfolio on family-sized units: two-, three- and some four-bedroom units. The private market is not building predominantly twos and above. It’s not profitable enough for their shareholders. The affordable housing sector isn’t building them because they can’t get the financing in place. We have a massive gap for family-sized rental units that only the social housing developer will have.

Other than that, if folks want to have a say in the overall governance of the housing developer in which they live, that’s going to be in the social housing model in a significant way. They get to be part of this overall political project. Now, not as many people care about that part, but there will be some that do. Tell me about your first building.

The Elara is in Belltown, a part of the city that has not taken on its fair share of affordable housing. It’s right next door to Pike Place Market. It’s also a Class A building. We wanted to make sure we were also buying assets that didn’t have a lot of deferred maintenance. These are our buildings forever. We cannot sell them. Why did you decide to buy an existing building rather than start from the ground-up?

We know the political pressure. We know the need to deliver. So we knew always that an acquisition was going to be the first thing in our pipeline because new construction takes so long.

You hear talk about social housing in other places: Chicago, Los Angeles, suburban DC. How much of the push behind social housing in Seattle was driven by local factors and how much was part of a national trend?

It was local factors. We have so much investment going into the band-aids, the shelters. These are critical things that we need. But we are not at all stopping the pipeline into homelessness, nor are we building up the housing stock that we need so people do not become housing insecure.

We wanted to have a housing system that doesn’t trap people in poverty. You make more money over your lifetime, you shouldn’t lose your housing because of that. If you want to stay in social housing your whole life, you can — and you should be able to, just like you do in Vienna and Singapore. You would just pay more or less. Americans who promote social housing talk about those cities a lot.

Vienna and Singapore are the gold standard. No one would touch social housing in either of those countries. That would be political suicide. Have you been to Vienna? Twice. What impressed you there?

What really struck me about Vienna is how intentional they are about everything. They’re thinking about what the climate will look like in certain parcels of land in five, 10, 15 years and orienting the buildings and orienting the landscaping around droughts or how many degrees Celsius. I wish that wasn’t the case, but that is the reality that we’re living in. We should be future-proofing all of our housing stock.

I’ve heard some critiques about looking at Vienna and Singapore that social housing grew up out of unique social, historical and economic contexts in those places. So how translatable are they to today’s United States?

It’s such a good question because it’s not the 1910s — there’s not mass ethnic rioting.

But we do live in incredibly hard times with one of the thinnest safety nets in our entire country’s history. Politicians are not putting forward actual, scalable models for how to address multiple crises.

That was one of our main talking points during the first initiative: If elected officials were honest with us, there is no plan to meet our housing affordability needs at scale. That’s the beauty of having advocates, organizers, leading these charges. You need the folks that are willing to push what’s possible, to push outside the neoliberal paradigm, to imagine a future that could happen if everything comes together. And that’s the really beautiful thing about what we’ve created in Seattle. Now you cannot run for office and not be asked about how you feel about social housing. We’ve had a complete Overton window shift here.

Why should we view social housing as a solution to housing affordability problems in general?

I do not call it a solution to housing affordability. I purposely stay away from the word solution. I think politicians have said that way too many times and never have we delivered. So people lose faith in government. However, I think we can do a hell of a lot better than what we’re doing now.

People are desperate to look for a different way to address this crisis that could be really, really scalable — that isn’t just depending on what the federal government decides to allocate year to year. I don’t think we should be relying on the federal government at all.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need it. But I think we should be looking much more hyperlocally for meeting our needs.

It’s easy to say that when you just passed a millionaires’ tax that provides a local source of revenue that’s $100 million-plus in the first year. How would Detroit or Jackson, Mississippi, go about doing what you’re talking about?

We are very lucky and I never take that for granted. We also have the political will to be bold. I think that especially what we’ve seen in the last 10 years of presidential administrations, there’s existential threats that are at our doorsteps. Elected officials can either decide to keep hoping that there’s another president that changes things or they can start doing bolder policies at the local level.

Maybe people want it to be a property tax or sales tax increase. Or it’s debt financing through a bond. Or it’s a vacancy tax. I mean, there is not a lack of options. What we’re lacking is political will.