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BUILDING ON THE BEST OF NEW YORK’S SOCIAL HOUSING POLICY  
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Jonathan Tarleton
March 26, 2024
Jacobin
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_ The New York state legislature is calling for the revival of
Mitchell-Lama, a program that built over 160,000 affordable housing
units in the mid-20th century. It’s a welcome proposal — but we
need bigger ambitions for social housing policy today. _

Masaryk Towers, a 1,105-unit Mitchell-Lama cooperative,

 

This year’s budget season in New York State, running through and
likely past the coming April 1 deadline, is taking on a familiar
contour to years’ past: a devastating housing crisis rages, certain
promising legislative proposals are put forward to address it, and
prospects for their passage appear murky. Some if not all are likely
to be shot down by the governor and real-estate money.

Among the refrains coming out of the legislature this year is the
annual call for a “Mitchell-Lama 2.0,” a revival of the revered
state and city program that funded the creation of an impressive
number of middle-income rentals and co-ops across New York from the
1950s up until the fiscal crisis of the late ’70s. This is good
news: Mitchell-Lama is one of the most successful social housing
programs in US history, and its still-robust ranks of apartments in
New York City and beyond are vital xxxxxxs against the ongoing
decimation of affordable homes for regular people.

Mitchell-Lama originally set out to fill a gap in the state’s
housing supply. Households faced a dearth of homes postwar, and many
working- and middle-class people were too well-off to qualify for
public housing or too cash-strapped to afford market-rate homes. To
address this, the program offered developers low-interest-rate
mortgages covering up to 95 percent of project costs, ongoing property
tax breaks to reduce operating costs, and occasionally a ready-made
site prepared with federal urban renewal funds — in exchange for
what was supposed to be permanently affordable housing and a cap on
developers’ profits.

This program funded the creation of 420 projects with over 165,000
apartments across the state, 140,000 of those in New York City. About
half of those city homes took the form of a limited-equity co-op:
apartment complexes owned collectively by their residents and kept out
of the speculative real-estate market by strict formulae that limited
resale value and sought to maintain the homes’ affordability for
future generations.

Today, the state senate has proposed $250 million for the creation of
a New York Housing Opportunity Corporation to finance a similar mix
of new affordable rentals and co-ops on state-owned land. Meanwhile,
the state assembly has earmarked $500 million for Foundations for
Futures, a plan to finance Mitchell-Lama-like limited-equity co-ops.

Learning From Mitchell-Lama

Details of these proposals are, for now, sparse. But as we know,
that’s where the devil resides. It is not enough to simply evoke
Mitchell-Lama; these proposals must learn from it. The most crucial
lesson is to ensure that housing built under these proposals is kept
affordable to low- and middle-income people in perpetuity.

 

Sen. Brian Kavanagh, who as chair of the state senate’s housing
committee is one of the plan’s main backers, went on record to
affirm that this was the intention — but it was also the intention
with the original Mitchell-Lama. A controversial change to the law in
1959, designed to spur the construction of more rental units, ended up
introducing the possibility of “privatization” for buildings in
the program that has since led to a massive loss of affordable rental
units and an existential threat to co-ops, as some residents look to
cash in on their publicly subsidized home for whatever a
Zillow-scrolling buyer will pay.

Commitments like Kavanagh’s can be bargained away in the budget
process, and laws can change. The promise of true social housing needs
not only to be built into the law, a financial term sheet, or a
property’s deed, but woven into the fabric of governance — at the
state and city levels and within the housing communities themselves.

As a housing practitioner and researcher, I’ve spent the last ten
years following privatization fights within Mitchell-Lama co-ops.
I’ve observed that keeping such decommodified housing — that which
is valued as a home and not as an asset to be flipped for the most
cash — out of the market is as much a social challenge as a
financial one. The state and city have recently made admirable strides
in making privatization more difficult and making more funding
available for physical maintenance at Mitchell-Lamas, the latter in
exchange for remaining in the program for another fifteen to thirty
years. This takes privatization off the table temporarily and ensures
that Mitchell-Lama’s income, rent, and sales restrictions keep these
homes accessible to working-class New Yorkers for the time being.

These efforts, however, cannot fully extinguish the lure of profit
that threatens such affordable housing: the fact that someone who may
have bought into a co-op for as little as $3,000 in the 1970s could,
if their co-op were privatized, sell their share for over $1 million
today. Countering this requires a different kind of support. We need
political education to instill a culture of cooperative living, social
housing, and stewardship of public goods among the resident-owners of
co-ops.

 

To preserve the co-ops, we also need broader social programs to
support residents in realizing the great benefits of a safe, stable,
affordable home so that they buy in to its long-term preservation —
among them high-quality, affordable eldercare that can keep older
co-operators in their homes, while protecting those homes from the
impulse to pilfer a public good to pay for a basic social need. And we
need a political movement at the city and state levels that is
fiercely committed to the principles of decommodified housing and
willing to fight the inevitable pushes for privatization. Without
these, the prevailing winds of commodification are strong enough to
seep into even the best-built structures.

Social Housing Policy for the Twenty-First Century

Mitchell-Lama 2.0 and other programs to boost housing supply cannot
alone solve our larger housing crises. We need to preserve the
affordable housing we already have, existing Mitchell-Lamas among
them, as they face threats from investors, residents, and even the
housing agencies charged with protecting them. We need to pass “good
cause
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legislation to ensure tenants aren’t arbitrarily evicted from their
homes. And we need stronger rent laws to end legalized price gouging.
We need, in short, to return homes to their true purpose as places for
living, not assets for profit.

The proposal to bring back Mitchell-Lama is welcome. But the state
would do well to take further inspiration from the scale and
principles of more ambitious social–housing initiatives recently
proposed and supported by its progressive lawmakers: for instance,
socialist state assemblymember Emily Gallagher’s bill to create a
Social Housing Development Authority
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deeper pockets and a broader remit than just funding housing on
state-owned land. Lawmakers can also look to the Community Land Act
package put before the New York City Council last year, which would,
among other things, give tenants and certain community groups a leg up
in purchasing their buildings, or those in their neighborhood, when
they go up for sale.

The realization of these ideas is possible in the not-to-distant
future. In the near term, the state must focus on breaking its cycle
of inaction on providing affordable, high-quality housing for
working-class New Yorkers. Mitchell Lama 2.0, if the lessons of 1.0
are properly heeded, is a start — or, rather, a continuation of the
best of New York housing policy. A return to this tradition of
wide-scale social housing couldn’t be more critical.

_Jonathan Tarleton is a writer and urban planner. His book Homes for
Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons will
be published in early 2025 by Beacon Press._

_Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a
web audience of over 3,000,000 a month._

* Housing
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* cooperative housing
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* Mitchell-Lama housing
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* New York
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