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social 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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A Year After Grants Pass, Criminalizing Homelessness Still Doesn’t Work
Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime if our country commits to ensuring that every person has a safe, affordable, dignified, and permanent place to call home.
Jun 09, 2025
In the largest eviction of a homeless encampment in recent history, around 100 unhoused people were recently forced to vacate Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest—or else face a $5,000 fine and up to one year in jail.
The forest was the last hope for the encampment’s residents, many of whom were living in broken down RVs and cars. Shelters in nearby Bend—where the average home price is nearly $800,000—are at capacity, and rent is increasingly unaffordable.
“There’s nowhere for us to go,” Chris Dake, an encampment resident who worked as a cashier and injured his knee, told The New York Times.
Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country.
This sentiment was echoed by unhoused people in Grants Pass, 200 miles south, where a similar fight unfolded. A year ago this June, in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court’s billionaire-backed justices ruled that local governments can criminalize people for sleeping outside, even if there’s no available shelter.
Nearly one year later, homelessness—and its criminalization—has only worsened.
Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country. The federal minimum wage has remained stagnant at $7.25 since 2009, and rent is now unaffordable for half of all tenants.
As a result, there are now over 770,000 people without housing nationwide—a record high. Many more are just one emergency away from joining them.
The Supreme Court’s abhorrent decision opened the door for cities to harass people for the “crime” of not having a place to live. Fines and arrests, in turn, make it more difficult to get out of poverty and into stable housing.
Since Grants Pass, around 150 cities have passed or strengthened “anti-camping” laws that fine, ticket, or jail people for living outdoors—including over two dozen cities and counties in California alone. A Florida law mandates that counties and municipalities ban sleeping or camping on public property. Due to a related crackdown, almost half of arrests in Miami Beach last year were of unhoused people.
Emboldened by Grants Pass, localities have ramped up the forced clearing of encampments—a practice known as “sweeps.”
While officials justify them for safety and sanitation reasons, sweeps harm people by severing their ties to case workers, medical care, and other vital services. In many cases, basic survival items are confiscated by authorities. Alongside being deadly, research confirms that sweeps are also costly and unproductive.
Punitive fines, arrests, and sweeps don’t address the root of the problem: the lack of permanent, affordable, and adequate housing.
President Donald Trump is only doubling down on failed housing policies. He ordered over 30 encampments in D.C. to be cleared based on a March executive order. And his budget request for 2026 would slash federal rental assistance for over 10 million Americans by a devastating 43% (all to fund tax breaks for billionaires and corporations.)
For too long, our government policies have allowed a basic necessity for survival to become commodified and controlled by corporations and billionaire investors. We must challenge this if we ever want to resolve homelessness.
Housing is a fundamental human right under international law that the U.S. must recognize. Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime if our country commits to ensuring that every person has a safe, affordable, dignified, and permanent place to call home.
As housing experts have long noted, governments should invest in proven and humane solutions like Housing First, which provides permanent housing without preconditions, coupled with supportive services.
Despite the obstacles, communities continue to fight back—including in Grants Pass, where disability rights advocates are challenging the city’s public camping restrictions. Others are forming tenant and homeless unions in their cities, organizing rent strikes, and pushing for publicly funded housing (or “social housing”) that’s permanently affordable and protected from the private market.
The Grants Pass decision may have opened the door to new cruelties, but local governments still have a choice to do what’s right. Now, more than ever, we must demand real housing solutions.
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'Inspiring': Seattle Voters Say Yes to Corporate Tax Hike to Fund Social Housing
"This victory is just the latest sign that Americans are fed up with overpaid CEOs—and want to use tax policies to crack down on the problem," one advocate said.
Feb 12, 2025
Seattle housing advocates look to have defeated Amazon, Microsoft, and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce this week with the likely passage of a ballot initiative to fund social housing through an "excess compensation" tax on city businesses paying salaries of over $1 million.
According to early returns for a special election Tuesday, 68.32% of voters backed funding for social housing and 57.55% chose to fund it specifically with the proposed tax. Advocates estimate that the 5% marginal tax on $1-million-plus salaries could raise around $53 million per year for affordable housing, funding 2,000 units in 10 years.
"This victory is just the latest sign that Americans are fed up with overpaid CEOs—and want to use tax policies to crack down on the problem," Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org co-editor and global economy project director at the Institute for Policy Studies, told Common Dreams.
For Seattle housing advocates, the victory was a long time coming. While much of the country struggles with an affordable housing crisis, Seattle's housing costs are around 50% higher than the national average, playing a large role in making it the most expensive U.S. city outside of California, according to a 2024 analysis. Twenty-three percent of Seattle renters spend over half their income on housing, and Washington state has the third-highest homeless population in the U.S., trailing only California and New York. More than half of the state's homeless population—or over 16,000 people—spend their time in Seattle's King County.
There is also a very real sense in the city that Big Tech businesses in particular are directly to blame for the high costs, as rents in the Seattle metro area rose by 17% from 2011 to 2015, as Amazon and other tech giants developed the formerly industrial South Lake Union area into an office park. One local columnist even labeled the phenomenon the "Amazon effect."
House Our Neighbors, a group of housing activists that first came together in 2021 to defeat stricter sweeps of homeless encampments, has been working on a solution for years, according to In These Times. The solution they came up with was a model of social housing pioneered in places like Vienna and Singapore that is "removed from the profit motive, available to all, permanently affordable, and held as a public good in perpetuity."
"Last night's results left no doubt that Seattle voters want our city to act quickly to create permanently affordable social housing for people living on a range of incomes—and we believe that our wealthiest corporations should help pay for it."
First, they succeeded in passing a voter referendum in 2023 creating a new affordable housing agency, the Seattle Social Housing Developer.
To fund the agency, the coalition then gathered more than enough signatures to put the excess compensation tax, first dubbed Initiative 137, on the ballot for the high-turnout November 2024 presidential election. However, the Seattle City Council voted to delay the vote until a lower-turnout February special election. Then, following lobbying from the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and other business interests, the council introduced a competing measure that would fund the social housing agency using an existing JumpStart payroll expense tax that was already earmarked for existing affordable housing and Green New Deal programs.
"The City Council would rather take money from low-income programs than from millionaires and billionaires," House Our Neighbors policy and advocacy director Tiffani McCoy told local publicationThe Stranger at the time.
The competing measures were put on the ballot as Proposition 1A (for the excess compensation tax) and 1B (for the council alternative.) The latter option was promoted heavily by Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell. Since January 1, its campaign received more than twice as much money as the 1A campaign, with tech giants Amazon and Microsoft each contributing $100,000, as local outlet Real Change reported.
"The Proposition 1A campaign had huge odds placed in front of it," Washington State Rep. Shaun Scott (D-43), whose district includes parts of Seattle, told Common Dreams. "It was a… low-turnout February special election in which some of the wealthiest corporations in human history spent gobs of money to defeat it. Many of the political proxies of those corporations… also opposed 1A."
"And yet," he continued, "it won. It won because of working people. It won because it's good for working people."
While many ballots are still to be counted, 1A is currently leading 1B by a 15-point margin, according to The Urbanist.
"Despite a half-million dollars in corporate spending and the unscrupulous tactics of our City Council and mayor, last night Seattle voters delivered an unambiguous message: Now is the time for Seattle to take bold, innovative action to meet our housing and homelessness crises," McCoy said in a statement.
"Last night's results left no doubt that Seattle voters want our city to act quickly to create permanently affordable social housing for people living on a range of incomes—and we believe that our wealthiest corporations should help pay for it," McCoy continued. "This is now the second time that Seattle has told its elected leaders, loud and clear, that we want social housing!"
Shemona Moreno, the executive director of 350 Seattle—which helped with the get-out-the-vote effort—told Common Dreams: "Last night Seattle showed that not only do we want social housing but that we reject the austerity policies of this City Council, mayor, and their corporate backers. A huge thank you to the hundreds of volunteers that made this happen and to House Our Neighbors' leadership. Seattlites deserve safe, affordable places to call home. Social housing is good for our planet and for our communities."
The victory could make a big difference for housing in Seattle itself, though social housing advocates believe the fight is not over.
"Despite this clear mandate, we fully expect a legal challenge from the corporate interests who sought to defeat this measure," McCoy said. "Because let's be clear, their opposition was never about any of the issues they raised—it was about making sure the wealthiest among us don't pay a dollar more in taxes to solve the housing crisis. With two citywide council seats and a mayoral election coming up, we hope our city's elected leaders will listen to their constituents and embrace the work to come."
Beyond the city limits, however, state and national advocates also say it has the potential to inspire change across the country.
"I wouldn't be surprised if we see this spread to 'red' communities as well as officials see such taxes used effectively to raise revenue for social programs—revenue that will be even more needed in the face of federal cutbacks."
Scott has introduced a state bill to increase spending on low-income housing and support for the homeless by closing a corporate tax loophole that favors large banks.
"The city of Seattle has shown us the way," Scott said, adding that he wants Washington state to be able to support Seattle and other cities that may follow its model. The win for Proposition1A may increase support for his bill from other legislators.
"I think it's a clear signal to state lawmakers that this is something that we can win on that's popular," he said.
And the signal doesn't have to stop at the borders of Washington state.
"Seattle can play a very important role for leading the way for what it looks like to address housing unaffordability through progressive revenue," Scott said.
Further south, California Assemblymember Alex Lee (D-24) recently introduced A.B. 11, The Social Housing Act.
"It's inspiring to see the grassroots support for social housing in Seattle," Lee told Common Dreams. "Voters see the value in embracing social housing as a public good, and Proposition 1A is a major step toward bringing this successful housing model to the city. As we've seen in Vienna and Singapore, social housing can actualize housing as a human right. That's why I will continue to push for social housing in California, so that housing can be attainable for everyone."
Anderson agreed the Seattle win could have national implications, especially when it comes to holding corporations who overpay executives to account. She noted that Seattle's excess compensation tax follows measures in San Francisco and Portland, Oregon to penalize companies with large gaps between CEO and worker pay.
And while these efforts may have begun on the progressive West Coast, there is a voting bloc for similar polices to succeed in other parts of the country.
"I wouldn't be surprised if we see this spread to 'red' communities as well as officials see such taxes used effectively to raise revenue for social programs—revenue that will be even more needed in the face of federal cutbacks," Anderson told Common Dreams. "And polling shows that taxing companies that overpay their executives is very popular—across the political spectrum. One 2024 survey, for instance, asked voters their views on a tax hike on corporations that pay their CEO at least 50 times more than they pay their median employee. Large majorities in every political group supported the idea (89% of Democrats, 77% of Independents, and 71% of Republicans)."
On the national level, there are three bills set to be reintroduced this session that seek to address excessive compensation: the Curtailing Executive Overcompensation (CEO) Act, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, and the CEO Accountability and Responsibility Act.
"Once these policies start spreading at the state and local levels, they will give a boost to similar bills that have been introduced at the federal level," Anderson said.
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