Social Housing
Beginning the transition from housing for profit to housing as a human right.
In 2018, Public Advocates resurrected a century-old debate about our housing system in the U.S. In the 1920s and ‘30s, it was widely recognized that the for-profit housing system was incapable of meeting the housing needs of most working and poor families. Inspired by the post-World War I success in building millions of affordable, high-quality homes in socially-connected communities across Europe, social housing envisions a future in which housing is provided as a public utility to meet human needs, affordable to all, and removed from the vicissitudes of the speculative market. Today, as SB 555 (Wahab, 2023) opens a path to this vision in California and local experiments are on the rise around the state, social housing is gaining a wide audience nationally among the public and decision makers alike.