Social Housing Can Work: An Interview with Hawaii Sen. Stanley Chang and California Assemblyman Alex Lee

Photo of Singapore Public Housing by Jnzl’s Photos

This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right

Thanks to Jacobin for publishing this week my interview with the inspiring Hawaii State Senator Stanley Chang and California Assemblyman Alex Lee. You can read the interview on Jacobin’s site here or below:

Hawaii State Senator Stanley Chang and California Assemblyman Alex Lee are determined to use the social housing lessons of Vienna and Singapore to address the housing crises in their home states. In the process, they aim to create models that can be followed across the U.S.

Chang is the chair of the Housing Committee of the Hawaii State Senate. He has sponsored legislation to create ALOHA (Affordable Locally-Owned Homes for All) Homes, dense, which are owner-occupied, transit-oriented developments. ALOHA Homes is based on the Singapore public housing system and thus designed to be open to residents of all incomes.

Lee is chair of the California Assembly’s Select Committee on Social Housing. He is the author of the Social Housing Act, which would establish the California Housing Authority to produce mixed-income social housing on state-owned land.

Chang and Lee have traveled with delegations to both Singapore and Vienna to study their housing systems, and co-authored a 2023 article in Shelterforce, How We Can Bring Vienna’s Housing Model to the U.S. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Among all the topics you could focus on in your legislative agenda, why have you made social housing a priority?

CHANG: The housing shortage has been the top issue in Hawaii for as long as I've been alive. It is no longer possible for young people to raise a family and buy a home in the way it was in generations past. When I joined the Senate in 2016, I wanted to learn from jurisdictions that had actually solved housing shortages and gone from housing shortage to housing abundance. That's when I traveled to Singapore for the first time and to Vienna for the first time. In the years since I've been working to try to empower the state of Hawaii with the same tools and the same policies that those successful jurisdictions have employed.

LEE: I am one of five renters in the entire state legislature, and the youngest member of the legislature. (Lee is 28 years old). If the status quo persists, even at my current lifestyle and compensation, I can't afford to buy a home or live comfortably in my own district. In San Jose right now, the average home price is like $1.65 million. So it makes sense to try and adopt what we can from the successful model that allows Vienna year after year to be named the most livable city in the world.

In your legislation and presentations, you have emphasized the universal nature of social housing. Why is universality important?

CHANG: For federal involvement in housing, the original sin started with the Housing Act of 1937. That is when private developers forced income restrictions for every unit to make sure that the middle class and the upper middle class would never be able to live in public housing. Eighty-seven years later, public housing is still restricted to the poor. The old saying in Washington is that a program for the poor is a poor program. And that is indeed what has happened. You don't have large scale buy-in from the public at large on public housing the way that you do for programs like Medicare and Social Security. They benefit everybody and therefore receive support from everybody.

LEE: While it may sometimes feel good to means-test programs to prove people are worthy, there's nothing more central to the socialist cause than saying everyone ought to have an affordable, stable home. In Vienna, the income threshold for social housing is high, and they only ever check eligibility when someone first receives social housing.

CHANG: Social housing is not rationed. Everybody who wants it gets it. I believe it is a corruption of leftism to require income restrictions on government benefits. We would never require income restrictions on public schools, public highways, public parks. That is why they are all successful programs. Just like Assemblymember Lee points out about Vienna, Singapore’s social housing has a high-income restriction, and it too only applies on day one. Once you are in the housing, you can stay as long as you want. The former president of Singapore lived in public housing until she was forced to move into the presidential palace for security reasons.

You both have called out the current U.S. approach trying to meet our affordable housing needs through governments funding for-profit developers and landlords. You have written that the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, the top financer of affordable housing development in the U.S., allows “legalized theft of government assets” by private developers. And you point out that HUD-funded programs like Housing Choice Vouchers pay private landlords.

LEE: The chief benefactors of public capital are private capitalists. They are the ones who try to delude policy makers and the public that housing is fueled by the private market. But by and large, when it comes to suburban sprawl or affordable housing ,so much of housing is supported by public financing. And it's not efficient public financing. We basically send money off to private entities and then we kiss it goodbye.

CHANG: The Section 8 program took money that once went into public-sector housing programs and gave it to private sector landlords. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit goes even further by giving free money to private developers to build housing while starving public developers. And the tax credit program only requires that private sector housing be temporarily affordable. As a result, all 50 states have these huge inventories of housing paid for by the taxpayers with affordability requirements that will expire in the future. Then those private owners are completely free to raise rents to market rate, to evict all the existing low-income tenants, and then to sell the buildings for a market price. That is a windfall profit. The obvious solution, which is to require that this housing be affordable in perpetuity, currently exists in only one state, Vermont. But I'm very proud that in Hawaii we just passed a bill to do that, too.

How do you go about convincing people that the better approach is for the government to directly take on affordable housing obligations?

CHANG: A big hill that we have to climb is that the neoliberals have won the argument in both parties that the government is always late, always over budget, can't do anything right. So that is why it is mind-blowing for people to see in Singapore that 80% of the population lives in public housing, where it is not stigmatized, it is well-maintained, and it is constantly upgraded. When you see a program that works so incredibly well, it completely changes your view of the housing problem. A lot of the other housing solutions that we talk about might be 5% or 10% solutions. But social housing in Singapore is a complete solution. It is a silver bullet. It is not one of many actions that need to be taken. It is the answer.

LEE: In the U.S., we experimented with the government providing housing as a human right back in the 1930’s, although it was very much sabotaged from the beginning. But already in Vienna by that time, and three decades later in Singapore, it was done right. It was not easy. When the Red Vienna period started, 25% of the people were homeless, people were starving and poor and defeated in the war. When Singapore began its program, it had just been decolonized.  Compare that to the U.S. now, the most powerful and wealthy country in the world. Our state of California is the wealthiest state in the union. If Vienna and Singapore could do it, we certainly can do it.

So where do you find optimism that social housing will finally start becoming a core solution here?

CHANG: First of all, I want to applaud Assemblymember Lee's efforts: The state of California is a very big place, and the whole country takes notice when California does something.  Here in Hawaii we have multiple Singapore-style projects set to go up soon. The next steps are to improve and reform the housing finance system, which is receiving huge taxpayer subsidies from the state of Hawaii, and to really scale up the social housing model.

LEE: I'm really proud of the fact that the last iteration of our Social Housing Act, which would have proved the concept, passed the (California) legislature with a two-thirds majority in both houses. The governor vetoed it, but the legislature now has said social housing is a solution that we have to try. ALOHA Homes is demonstrating that social housing works and Montgomery County, Maryland and Seattle are at various stages of doing the same. If we can demonstrate a statewide public sector social housing developing program at scale here in California, that really can show the way for it to be done federally.