Public Housing For All

Racism and classism diminished SF’s public housing. The SF Community Housing Act is a Nov 2020 ballot measure to re-fund public housing and expand it equitably to everyone.

You can’t understand the Bay Area housing crisis without knowing its history. And one of the most under-reported parts of this history is the War on Public Housing.

Not enough people talk about it. Hardly anyone in the media mentions it. Yet America’s racism and classism helped defund, privatize, and dismantle public housing — leaving us in the grasps of a profit-driven private real-estate market.

How did this happen, and what can we do to fix it?

From the beginning, New Deal public housing was segregated to placate white households. For a period of time, there was a substantial white and middle-income population in public housing.

But as “white flight” to the suburbs unfolded thanks to redlining, and white tenants became homeowners, the remaining public housing tenants — many of them black, low-income, and without basic rights — were powerless compared to landowners and real-estate interests.

This set the stage for politicians to defund, demolish, and privatize federal public housing — while still getting reelected. Nixon froze funds for public housing and celebrated the demolition of the predominantly black Pruitt-Igoe project. Reagan slashed tens of billions of dollars in funding for new public housing development under the guise of “balancing the budget.” Clinton halted the construction of new public housing in the 90s. Obama passed the Rental Assistance Demonstration program in 2012 to privatize public housing, instead of funding over $25 billion in backlogged repairs. And Trump is working to gut HUD completely.

There are now only 1000 units of federal public housing in San Francisco, and the SF Housing Authority has been defunded to the point of collapse. Against this backdrop, 70 percent of SF renters making less than $75,000 are rent-burdened, and you may be out of affordable options yourself.

We must stop depending on the profit-driven real-estate market, and instead invest in a long-term, dependable City housing infrastructure to guarantee affordable housing for all.

Our grassroots ballot initiative will raise hundreds of millions of dollars each year by taxing multimillion-dollar corporations.

We also believe in empowering tenants. Community Councils of tenants, elected by tenants, are given the power to organize like a union does at work. These tenant associations can call for a rent strike to hold the City accountable and can compel meetings with their district’s Supervisor over any grievances. Unionized City workers with the Mayor’s Office of Housing maintain the housing on a day-to-day basis, and public input is incorporated throughout the measure.

In Vienna, one of the most affordable cities in the world, three in five residents live in social housing of some form, and 25% of the housing stock is fully publicly-owned and publicly-managed. Taxes fund the continued acquisition and construction of social housing, and tenants with higher incomes subsidize operating costs for tenants with lower incomes — just as the healthy subsidize the sick in their universal healthcare system.

A broad-based political constituency — like what we have with Social Security and what we can have with Medicare for All — keeps the overwhelmingly popular program going.

Anyone who lives or works in San Francisco can qualify, which would start to reverse some of the worst economic and racial impacts of gentrification and displacement.

We can give the public sector leverage over the private real-estate industry — which currently controls housing decisions and is a massive lobbyist — while creating good-paying union jobs.

We can deliver economic justice for all workers and offset income disparities by taxing corporate wealth.

We’ve developed this initiative over two years with housing activists, policy experts, and community groups. But we need your thoughts and feedback too, because these homes are for you. We will only win this fight if we can put up a thoughtful, forceful, and united front against the wealthy interests who control our tax system and real-estate landscape.

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