Yes, We Can—And This Ain’t It

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

Many thanks to Jacobin for once again publishing an article by me about our housing crisis, this time responding to ill-informed bloggers who claim that Vienna’s historic social housing success story can’t be replicated in the U.S.

You can read the entire article on Jacobin’s site here. In summary, the article builds on my visit to Vienna and accompanying research, which I posted about in this newsletter a few weeks ago, to respond to pundits who try to dismiss the Vienna housing example:

(Vienna) is an inspiring model for what governments can accomplish when they elevate human needs over the lust for private profits. Which makes Vienna a very dangerous precedent for U.S. private housing capital and its apologists. They have responded in predictable fashion

The pundit Matthew Yglesias attempts to marginalize the Vienna housing success story as an historical anomaly, impossible to replicate without a post-war economic crisis. “Pretty idiosyncratic and not necessarily applicable elsewhere,” he tweeted in May. In his full dismissal of Vienna as a model, behind a paywall here, Yglesias writes, “Private capital is absolutely willing to finance the construction of apartment buildings in expensive jurisdictions . . . Publicly financed construction is a solution to a problem we don’t have.”

The libertarian magazine Reason jumped all over this verdict by Yglesisas in an article titled “Don’t Buy the Social Housing Hype.” “Private providers are willing to build and rent out housing units at affordable rates to the same class of people that are served by social housing,” writes Reason’s Christian Britschgi. “Vienna's social housing is at best duplicating what the private market is doing.”

Of course, these arguments are breathtakingly disconnected from the current realities in both Vienna and the U.S. Vienna continues to develop and maintain social housing that is the home to a majority of its population. As I wrote:

Yglesias misses the fact that this (Vienna) success is less attributable to economic conditions of the 1920’s than to the current policies of the Social Democratic-led Viennese government. Social Democrats’ commitment to protecting tenant rights of tenure and affordability is coupled with progressive taxation and investment in social housing. That stands in stark contrast to the U.S.’s practice of typically allowing landlords to terminate leases without cause, all while subsidizing wealthy landlords and homeowners and underfunding subsidized housing so dramatically that three of every four eligible households cannot obtain the federal subsidies they qualify for.

Regarding the wildly irresponsible claim that the private for-profit housing industry can solve our affordable housing crisis, I wrote in part:

As for the U.S., it is beyond disingenuous for Yglesias and Britschgi to claim that the private housing market can match Vienna’s success, given the abundant, painful evidence to the contrary. There are well over 600,000 unhoused people in our nation every night, and research shows that most endure homelessness simply because they are unable to afford housing. Census data show that twelve and a half million U.S. households are behind on their rent or mortgages, and thus at perpetual risk of joining those who are already on the streets. In our eviction court clinic, my students and I regularly see clients who have landed there after months and sometimes years of paying 70% and more of their income on market-rate rent—and we live in one of the least expensive urban housing markets in the country.

I hope you consider reading the full article at Jacobin.