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public housing
The Grassroots Fight For Affordable Housing
From Tacoma, Washington to Kansas City, Missouri, people power is key to creating communities where working people can live.
Jul 23, 2025
In the United States, the housing situation is abysmal and getting worse.
A few statewide and local statistics are emblematic of a broader national problem. For example, in Washington state, according to the New York Times, rental housing prices rose by 43% from 2001 to 2023 while, during the same time period, the income of state renters grew by only 26%. Meanwhile in New York City, The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the average price of a two-bedroom apartment was $5,560. The Journal headline of the article in which that statistic was cited nicely embodied a rising feeling among ordinary New York City residents: “New York’s Housing Crisis Is So Bad That a Socialist is Poised to Become Mayor,” referring of course to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who is the frontrunner to win the city’s mayoral election in November. Rates of homelessness, evictions, and foreclosures remain high around the country.
In the face of this ever growing crisis, mainstream politicians—Democrats and Republicans—have virtually nothing useful to say. They’ve doubled down on existing national, state, and local government subsidies for affordable housing—which do not even remotely begin to produce the supply of housing at levels needed—while insisting that the unregulated free market in housing (increasingly controlled by an ever smaller number of corporations) operate as much as possible.
Grassroots Resistance
Tacoma, Washington is a city of about 222,000, 35 miles southwest of Seattle. It is largely a working class town; the Tacoma News Tribune recently reported that 77% of the jobs within it “don’t pay enough for a single worker to be able to comfortably afford housing on their own.” In the whole of Pierce County (of which Tacoma is the county seat), 37% of renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing.
A group which has attempted to alleviate this situation, with modest but tangible success, is Tacoma For All (T4A), a group founded by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 367 and the Tacoma Democratic Socialists of America. T4A’s most noticeable achievement has been launching and successfully influencing the passage of Initiative 1 by Tacoma voters in November 2023, securing relatively strong eviction protections for the city’s renters and a cap on rent increases.
In order to assist in meeting the crisis of affordable housing, KC Tenants and T4A have both made a strong push for government-funded social housing within their particular locales.
However, the most impressive achievement of T4A has been its building of an organization, democratically run by its dues-paying members, devoted to educating ordinary people about their legal rights as tenants and to acting in solidarity to protect the rights of other tenants against the depredations of corporate landlords. The organization regularly sends teams of organizers to knock on doors of Tacoma apartment buildings, asking tenants about any issues they might be having with landlords, and offering the organization’s assistance and solidarity in addressing those issues. T4A has established Tacoma Tenant Legal Aid to help tenants pursue their rights. The organization has achieved real successes in helping Tacoma residents stay in their homes
Another successful grassroots organization is KC Tenants in Kansas City, Missouri. It is profiled in Jonathan Tarleton’s 2025 book Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons. While the group is anti-capitalist, KC Tenants foremost approach to tenants is not to preach socialism but to help them navigate bread-and-butter housing issues. The presentation of their critique of racial capitalism or lessons on the virtues of social housing comes later in the process of integrating tenants into their organization. As KC Tenants organizer Tara Raghuveer told Tarleton, the group’s initial approach is to simply ask tenants, “How the fuck are you?...We knock [on] doors asking people how they’re living now, which by itself is a very politicizing line of questioning because the people are not living good.”
For tenants suffering from serious psychological trauma and anger because of housing issues, the approach of KC Tenants organizers—the message that people are here to offer assistance to them without judgement and structures for solidarity with other people going through similar issues—can be exhilarating, even liberating. Similar feelings have also been felt by KC Tenants professional organizers. One of them is Magda Werkmeister, who at one point left Kansas City for back East to complete a college degree but eventually returned to continue working with KC Tenants. She told Tarleton that she returned to the group because “I was missing out on something that makes life more joyous, and I think that was just the sense of community… and these people that you are able to care about and [who] care about you.”
Social Housing
In order to assist in meeting the crisis of affordable housing, KC Tenants and T4A have both made a strong push for government-funded social housing within their particular locales. Other municipalities have followed suit: For example, Seattle voters approved funding for a city social housing developer in February, and in May the Chicago City Council passed a Green Social Housing Ordinance.
Social housing is a form of public housing: It is meant to assist persons of a wide range of income levels (not merely low income) and utilize government subsidies to ensure the rents it charges are substantially below market rate. The most successful example of social housing in the world is found in Vienna, Austria. The success of Vienna’s social housing seemingly played a role in Economist Intelligence naming it in 2024 as the world’s most livable city.
The Bottom Line: People Power
It seems likely that Zohran Mamdani—who has cited the Vienna model of housing as a major influence—will have immense difficulties in implementing social housing in New York City, as well as his other proposals like free childcare and free bus service. These programs will require tax increases on the city’s businesses and wealthy as well as increases in New York City’s debt limit; both require the approval of New York’s business-friendly Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and she is unlikely to accommodate Mamdani’s requests to any significant extent. Moreover, there is risk that city business leaders and the wealthy—fearful of the threat to their bottom line should Mamdani win election in November and try to implement his relatively mild democratic socialist program—will engage in capital flight, wrecking the city’s tax base.
Regardless of whether Mamdani is, somehow, able to resist the establishment pressure and implement major parts of his agenda—or whether that pressure forces him to sell out that agenda—it is obviously crucial that ordinary people and grassroots activists stick unflinchingly to core principles and relentlessly pressure politicians to follow them.
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Trump’s HUD Secretary and Our Reverse Robin Hood Housing System
A Trump-Turner housing agenda appears destined to continue the worst aspects of our nation’s approach to affordable housing: a relentless diversion to the already-wealthy of resources supposedly designated for the housing needs of the poor.
Jan 14, 2025
Donald Trump has nominated former Texas state representative Scott Turner as his secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the $70 billion federal agency that administers rental assistance and public housing programs, enforces fair housing laws, and provides community development grants to local communities.
Other Trump cabinet nominees, like potential Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have attracted attention for the ways they may shift the traditional priorities of the agencies they would lead. Turner has flown under the radar.
Perhaps that is because dramatic changes to HUD would need congressional approval, which was denied when Trump tried to slash the department during his first administration. Or maybe it is because, in many respects, Turner does not seem inclined to significantly alter U.S. housing policies.
As for likely HUD Secretary Turner, he is most associated with yet another housing giveaway to the rich.
That is not a good thing.
A Trump-Turner housing agenda appears destined to continue the worst aspects of our nation’s approach to affordable housing: a relentless diversion to the already-wealthy of resources supposedly designated for the housing needs of the poor.
This reverse Robin Hood approach to U.S. housing began in the 1970’s, when the Nixon administration and Congress began switching our affordable housing investment away from public housing to subsidizing for-profit landlords. Now, we fund wealthy landlords, often corporate landlords, via direct payments such as the Housing Choice Voucher program and Project-Based Section 8 program, in return for the for-profit landlords temporarily housing low-income tenants. 558F Low-Income Housing Tax Credits are designed to provide a tax shelter for wealthy investors.
This profit-soaked combination costs taxpayers six times more each year than public housing does. But public housing is far more efficient, for the simple reason that it bypasses private profits. Public housing is also hugely successful in providing high-quality, low-cost housing when there is adequate investment in maintenance and upkeep.
That is why other nations, who have far less homelessness, evictions, and housing-insecure people than we do, prioritize public housing. They divert little if any government support to for-profit landlords. And it is why U.S. for-profit landlords have been pushing for generations to block U.S. public housing from the funds it needs to ensure safety and keep up maintenance. The resulting deterioration of U.S. public housing undercuts competition for private landlords and creates a narrative justifying the delivery of housing dollars to the private sector.
A Subsidy for Gentrification
But those privatized programs are deeply flawed. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit often leads to rents higher than poor families can afford. The program known as LIHTC has been characterized by housing researchers as “a better-than-nothing gimmick that helps the poor by rewarding the rich.” Even that characterization is too generous for some legislators, who call LIHTC “legalized theft of government assets.”
Similarly, project-based Section 8 housing directs government dollars to for-profit landlords as payment for low-income tenants’ rent. But, like LIHTC, the program allows those landlords to convert their buildings to market-rate rentals after they use the government subsidies to pay off their debt on the properties. By contrast, public housing provides affordable housing in perpetuity.
There is even less lasting impact coming from the largest low-income housing program in the country, Housing Choice Vouchers. We provide a full $30 billion per year in voucher payments to landlords, often large corporate landlords, but those landlords can end their involvement at the end of each tenant’s lease, leaving the low-income renter without housing. It is another low-risk high-yield arrangement for the wealthy and raw deal for the poor: little wonder that the Project 2025 blueprint drafted by Trump supporters champions vouchers even as it slams other HUD programs.
As for likely HUD Secretary Turner, he is most associated with yet another housing giveaway to the rich. During Trump’s first administration, Turner served as executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, which focused on promoting opportunity zones, a program created by Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
The program rewards the wealthy’s investment in economically distressed areas—opportunity zones—with huge tax breaks. But investigations by ProPublica and Congress show that the definition of what areas count as opportunity zones is far too broad, and the guidelines for who benefits from the investments are far too loose. As a result, money invested in expensive hotels, high-rent apartment buildings, and even luxury condominiums as a superyacht marina escapes taxation. Politically connected billionaires lobby for the land where they develop to be designated an opportunity zone, then rake in the benefits.
The Brookings Institution says opportunity zones operate as a subsidy for gentrification. “The direct tax benefits of opportunity zones will flow overwhelmingly to wealthy investors,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says. “But the tax break might not do much to help low-income communities, and it could even harm some current residents of such communities.”
So, despite the relative quiet around Scott Turner’s nomination, we know some important things about him. We know that he champions opportunity zones as an addition to the already abundant tax benefits the U.S. showers on landlords and real estate investors. And we know that he is a fierce critic of anti-poverty programs, as he has made multiple public statements about government assistance being harmful and even disastrous.
But we also know that the likely next HUD secretary is concerned about that alleged harm only when assistance is provided to the poor. The wealthy can count on Trump and Turner to keep the pipeline of government housing money wide open and flowing their way.
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Congress Must Repeal Its Cap on Public Housing Now
The Faircloth Amendment and the consistent underfunding of public housing has caused the number of public housing units to decline 40% from 1.4 million in 1994 to 835,000 in 2022 while the need has steadily increased.
Dec 13, 2024
Randall Irvin has been waiting for public housing in Chicago for six years, and his situation is not that unusual. For example, there are over 100,000 families on San Antonio’s waitlist for public housing. In Chicago, there were more than 200,000 families on the waitlist in 2023. Public housing waiting lists are extremely long because there is an inadequate supply—and a 1998 amendment to federal housing law is a significant barrier to building new housing.
Table 1 lists the average number of months households waited before they were able to receive public housing in selected metropolitan areas according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It ranges from a low of 11 months in San Antonio to a high of 84 months (seven years) in Miami. These numbers hide the wide range of variation around the average. In the city of Chicago, families can wait for as few as six months or as long as 25 years depending on the specifics of their situation and their family size. Households that are still waiting for housing or that never receive housing are not included in the calculation of the averages, so these average wait times do not fully capture the difficulty of obtaining public housing.
The families remaining on public housing waitlists for housing for years are in desperate situations. They are people who are homeless, who are living in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, and who are struggling to afford their housing. In Washington, D.C., Rosalynn Talley, who waited 14 years for public housing, described her overcrowded housing situation as being “smashed up like sardines.” Her neighborhood was also unsafe, and there was mold in the house.
Congress is to blame for the low supply of public housing. In 1998, Congress passed the Faircloth Amendment which put a cap on the number of public housing units. The cap and the consistent underfunding of public housing has caused the number of public housing units to decline 40% from 1.4 million in 1994 to 835,000 in 2022 while the need for affordable housing has steadily increased.
Public housing is one of the most affordable forms of housing, but affordable housing policy has shifted to relying on the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). LIHTC goes to private developers and investors and creates “affordable” housing that is often more expensive to renters than public housing. The Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that “LIHTC [housing] does not necessarily protect a renter from [housing] cost burdens.” While the Faircloth Amendment has been a benefit to the for-profit real estate industry, it has hurt low-income renters.
Thankfully, there are some in Congress working to undo this bad law. The Homes Act, introduced by Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), if passed, would repeal the Faircloth Amendment and provide the funding needed to address the maintenance and repair backlog in public housing. Currently, the bill has 40 supporters in the House of Representatives and two supporters in the Senate. Repealing the Faircloth Amendment would open another channel to address the affordable housing crisis.
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