by Calls to build 10 million units of permanently affordable green public housing should be at the center of the climate justice movement.
By Tom Barnard
Visualize this: tens of millions of Americans living in housing communities that not only provide quality affordable housing for all, but are combined with such amenities as a medical clinic, a community kitchen, free childcare, a library, parks and gyms and even employment opportunities. Frequent and free public transit means most residents rely on public car-share services only for the rare occasions they need a private vehicle. And all of this fed by renewable energy sources, built with union labor and a minimum of fossil-fuel made components.
That may be hard to imagine in a time of massive housing insecurity for both renters and homeowners, exacerbated by a looming eviction crisis coming out of the pandemic. But across the country, there is a growing fight for massive investment in green social housing, an idea that promises to unite campaigns for both climate justice and housing rights.
An organization called Data for Progress that Bernie used for his 2019 election platform has research showing that “a ten-year mobilization of up to $172 billion would retrofit over 1 million public housing units, vastly improving the living conditions of nearly 2 million residents, and creating over 240,000 jobs per year across the US. These green retrofits would cut 5.6 million tons of annual carbon emissions — the equivalent of taking 1.2 million cars off the road. Retrofits and jobs would benefit communities on the frontlines of climate change, poverty and pollution and the country as a whole.”
There are also historical precedents. In an inspiring video, Zohran Mamdani, a DSA New York State assemblyman, describes how Austrian socialists in the 1920s and ‘30s pioneered an approach that offered better, cheaper, and safer homes for everyone, known as “Red Vienna.”
In 1919, in the wake of the carnage of WWI, the Social Democratic Party swept the municipal elections in the capital of Austria, Vienna. Conditions for working people were harsh, and the housing stock was in a rundown state. The new government completely redeveloped the housing stock, building 60,000 units of public housing between 1919 and 1934, financed through taxing the rich. But these were a far cry from what we in the US are used to in public housing. Many developments combined housing with health facilities, a post office, education and other facilities. This model still exists in Vienna today, where 62 percent of housing is public social housing, and the average rent is $400 to $600 in US dollars.
The Failure of the Private Housing Market
The US housing market is constructed on a private commodity model; the construction and real estate industry build housing based not on need, but on the highest possible return on investment. An entire network of capitalists, banks, construction firms, developers, rental housing owners, and real estate investment firms collude to produce the most expensive housing possible. The result is a constantly escalating price structure for both renters and people looking to buy a house. It’s also highly racist, with real estate firms and governmental “red-zoning” that kept people of color out of white neighborhoods and forced them to pick from the worst housing options available.
In the meantime, the role of the federal government in providing housing subsidies for low-income people, especially people of color, is simply atrocious. Even in the post-WWII era through the 60’s, the most serious period of intervention in market-rate housing, the public housing built often amounted to warehousing poor people in giant tenements, in contrast to the mixed-income public housing of Red Vienna. It also often destroyed stable neighborhoods where people of color had lived. This was then made worse by the decades of neglect that followed. In the ensuing years, subsidies like Section 8 have been cut to the bone, and the current HUD model of “mixed income” housing often gentrifies working-class people out of their neighborhoods and they’re forced to relocate to suburbs or smaller cities.
Profit-Driven Housing = Rising Environmental Costs
This pattern of gentrification not only destroys traditional communities, but also raises carbon emissions and greenhouse gasses, as people are forced to commute long distances for work and other necessities like health care. Most of these communities are far from urban systems like subways and light rail, and have poor bus service.
In addition, the housing stock is older, less energy efficient, less well maintained — especially in rental units where the point is to keep upkeep costs to a minimum. In places like these, children grow up exposed to toxic substances like asbestos, bad internal air flow, and rotting infrastructure. This is one of the reasons why childhood asthma is so closely related to income and housing conditions. When these units finally deteriorate beyond repair, real estate companies just tear them down and build completely new developments at far higher prices.
Among more established “Big Green” organizations, whose policy priorities are often just palliatives for upper-middle income folks they use as their donor base, you will hear various green solutions — individual solar panels on everyone’s roof, buying electric cars, increasing urban trolleys, and other elite solutions. Among larger units of higher end apartments, you will see various environmental LEED construction levels flung about, seemingly to reassure upper income renters and condo owners that their housing is “environmentally conscious.”
Although there is nothing wrong with any of these things themselves, they are not at the scale needed to meaningfully address the climate crisis. And they are not a solution for working-class people dispersed from neighborhoods they grew up in. Simply put, we need a new model of housing. Here is where the promise of a Green New Deal comes into play.
Proposed GND Legislation
The goals of the current GND resolution, re-introduced in Congress in April 2021, calls for “…upgrading all existing buildings in the US and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification…”
Even stronger is the Green New Deal for Public Housing, a proposal introduced in 2019 by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, which calls for the federal government to spend $180 billion repairing and retrofitting every public housing unit in the US. Restoring the 200,000 public-housing units that have been lost would require billions in federal spending.
And in 2020, the House of Representatives passed the Moving Forward Act, a $1.5 trillion plan to upgrade the national infrastructure and combat climate change by reducing demand for fossil fuels. The bill included an amendment by Rep, Ocasio-Cortez, that would have repealed the Faircloth Amendment, a 1990s-era rule that created legal obstacles to expanding existing public housing.
Of course, all of those things would help deal with the rocketing increases in greenhouse gas and carbon emissions. They would increase the housing stock and provide improvements in people’s living and working conditions. Yet even some of those “solutions” can exacerbate housing inequity. The Transit Oriented Development in South Seattle for instance led to new housing being built that working people could no longer afford anywhere along the light rail corridor, part of the traditional home to people of color. Thus many of them were dispersed to suburbs and cities far away from any light rail line.
A Socialist Green New Deal + Social Housing
What we need is to decouple urban planning and housing development from the private market if we hope to solve either the affordability or the climate crisis. Real solutions require a massive build-out of quality public housing for working people, financed by taxes on the rich, as was done in Vienna. We need to construct a housing model that integrates services like health care, education, and work opportunities into a walkable space, and that includes parks, community gardens, and tree cover, especially for our children to enjoy and learn from. This will not only lower carbon emissions and greenhouse gasses, but help to create a vibrant community. These units should be built with the latest green technology, and become part of the society-wide drive to decarbonizing the economy by electrifying everything. Finally, we need a massive expansion of subsidies to working and middle-class homeowners to cover the costs of retrofitting all US homes to lower their carbon footprints.
So how do we get there? The legislation laid out above is an excellent start, but leaving the real estate industry in charge of most of the existing housing stock means there will be a constant threat of having the partial reforms we fight for gradually eroded, as real estate industry lobbyists collude with local and federal governments to roll back hard earned victories. This is the history of the US government in public housing, where they built bad public housing to begin with, refused to maintain and subsidize it, then tore it down, only to replace it with private/public market rate housing, which further locked in racist zoning practices. In the long run, no housing reforms are safe without a wholesale socialist transformation of society.
We need to bring ordinary people into the current housing struggle so we can build a movement that demands public control over the big landlords and financial institutions that dominate the housing industry. (See Reform & Revolution issue #5 for how this struggle has moved forward in Berlin.) We need to fight against the attempts to evict tenants and homeowners as the pandemic lifts. We need to build a tenants rights movement that will resist the double-digit rental increases the mainstream media has already noted. And we need to combine mass environmental struggles with the rising housing struggles. Combining the environmental justice movements with movements around housing and homelessness will do much to strengthen both movements, and solidify their inevitable anti-capitalist nature.
Alongside combining the movements, the key issue is around what program? The existing movements for housing and climate should link immediate demands with a unified national campaign for mass social housing. DSA can play an important role in bringing these fights together at the local level around a coherent national, statewide platform and goals. In this way, the power of the Green New Deal can provide a coherent broad vision to overcome the piecemeal struggles into a common intersectional struggle for our collective future.
