Housing Justice Commission: Statement on Organizing for Social Housing
Social housing is when people live where we want, with whom we want, and how we want — to the extent that we can imagine using all available resources through a democratic process.
To build towards a future of social housing, as socialists, we need to have an accompanying organizing strategy. Our analysis starts from an understanding that tenants1 are currently not organized to produce the leverage needed to combat the intensified tenancy crisis resulting from rampant housing speculation.
The immediate aim of a socialist movement in housing should be to build powerful organizations of tenants, so any activity around social housing should focus on this task. The main way to organize tenants who would fight for social housing is to build militant, autonomous tenant unions with a dense enough network of coordinated tenant unions in conjunction with an organized working class more generally. As the tenant movement fights against rising rents, evictions, and harassment brought on by landlords, the tenant movement also fights for the end of rent, the end of eviction, and the social recognition of the human right to dignified housing. We should conceive of social housing as a horizon, incompatible with housing’s existence on the market, to permanently address the demands of organized tenants.
Principles of Social Housing
The socialist perspective on social housing should aim to abolish the exclusivity, extraction, and monopolization in housing and all of society. We believe for social housing to be a transformative vision of housing, which aims to abolish the present state of things, it must contain the following four principles:
Redistribution from Landowners: Social housing must first be a redistribution of land from landowners to the landless. This means that social housing cannot simply make housing available and affordable, though it must be both of these things. Social housing must expropriate property from capitalists and deliver it to the working class, through which it may be sustained and rejuvenated. Capitalism requires the private ownership of land, upon which the very possibility of surplus value extraction is based. A definition of social housing must challenge this fundamental relation of the capitalist mode of production.
Democratic Control: Social housing must authorize those who directly depend on the provision of the housing in question to decide the fate of their community. Social housing does not offer an equal seat at the table to developers, investors, or city councilors. Social housing prioritizes and makes real the collective will of tenants. Democratic control of housing is a key difference in the distinction between public housing and social housing.
Sustainable and High Quality: Under capitalism housing prioritizes profits over people and planet – buildings are made cheaply with high external costs to the environment; neighborhoods are cycled through disinvestment, dispossession, and gentrification; and cities are selectively improved with public dollars to overwhelmingly benefit the already wealthy at the expense of the poor. Social housing breaks this pattern by adhering to design, architecture, and social planning that serves everyone, which also means protecting and reviving our ecosystems and when possible prioritizing renovation and renewal over new construction.
Universal Access: Housing must be available for everyone, free of segregation by income or race. Housing also must be accessible for people of very different needs. That requires us to improve housing standards to accommodate all disabilities and needs through flexibility, creativity, and advance planning.
How Do We Build Towards Social Housing?
In the fight towards these principles, social housing won’t be established by the tenant unionist movement overnight. Likely, an increasingly stronger movement will reach these goals incrementally. We see the goals of the tenant unionist movement in advancing towards social housing as the following:
- Short Term: State-provided, free, publicly owned and managed homes and apartments available to anyone, with the “right to not own” and democratic control by residents rather than NGOs or existing government entities are key features.
- Medium Term: Land reform and redistribution based on the sustainable use of land and natural resources in the general interest of the public, rather than the narrow interests of private landowners and capitalists. Housing becomes part of a general redistribution and public management of land and resources, that society democratically controls.
- Long-Term: The end of commodified housing, and the production of unalienated housing, the places where people live supports their full flourishing as individuals and blossoming communities.
What Next?
With this document, we hope to provide DSA chapters with guiding principles of social housing and a proposed overarching strategy for how to get there. The specifics are an open conversation.
It can sound daunting to build towards a base of organized tenants to demand social housing, but we have to root ourselves in our organizing and grow confident over time. Formative steps can start immediately: we can all adopt a practice of talking to our neighbors, ask them if they have issues with their tenancy, and involve our comrades to build the structures to address and politicize their struggles. Within every grievance of tenancy can exist a desire for housing free from the consequences of capitalism. Let’s point to the horizon and take up the challenging work of building the organization to get there.
- Our definition of tenant borrows from LA Tenants Union, which defines a tenant as more than a renter. A tenant is anyone who doesn’t control their own housing. https://communemag.com/101-notes-on-the-la-tenants-union/ ↩︎