From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Maybe More of Us Should Live in Public Housing
Date January 6, 2021 1:05 AM
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[Economically diverse housing complexes, owned by the community,
could answer the need for affordable units in Boston and other
cities.] [[link removed]]

MAYBE MORE OF US SHOULD LIVE IN PUBLIC HOUSING  
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Miles Howard
March 13, 2020
Boston Globe
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_ Economically diverse housing complexes, owned by the community,
could answer the need for affordable units in Boston and other cities.
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Vienna's Karl Seitz-Hof is an example of the city's abundant "social
housing," which is owned by the city or collectives of residents.,
BWAG

 

It’s a spritzing winter morning in Vienna and I’m standing,
Hobbit-like, before a tower of greenery: baby spruce, gnarled vines,
bushes that will bear flowers in a few months. They’re all exploding
from balconies on one of the curved 27-story high rises that make up
the Wohnpark Alterlaa — a massive housing complex built by a
city-owned nonprofit and occupied by low-income and middle-class
Vienna residents alike. Walnut trees, gardens, swimming pools, fitness
centers, kindergarten classrooms, and even an in-house shopping mall
and subway station are among the perks that Alterlaa residents enjoy,
on top of their permanently affordable, rent-stabilized apartments.

This is one of the ways Vienna does public housing. Ever since the
early 20th century, when housing shortages, grotesque living
conditions, and rampant disease outbreaks brought Vienna to the brink
of chaos, the city has embraced housing projects that can seem
downright utopian if you’re a renter or aspiring homeowner in a city
like Boston. Today, more than 60 percent of Vienna residents live in
housing units owned and managed by the city government or nonprofits.
They don’t call this public housing, however. Instead, the
affordable housing stock here is referred to as “social housing.”

No matter whether you call it public housing or social housing, the
term might bring to mind the dreary tower blocks one encounters behind
the former Iron Curtain or, for that matter, many American cities. In
Vienna, social housing is an allusion to its former Social Democratic
government, which catalyzed the construction of thousands of
permanently affordable flats during the late 1910s. But there’s
another layer to the name that has contemporary relevance. Social
housing refers to social ownership — an arrangement in which housing
is owned either by taxpayers or a collective of residents.

Better yet, social housing is built to encourage integration between
social classes. The mixed-income nature of Vienna’s social housing
means that you’re just as likely to live next to a subway-car driver
or a lawyer. You could hang out with them in your building’s
centralized courtyard and catch up over a few bottles of beer, or you
might bump into them at the built-in library. You’re each paying a
quarter of your income in rent.

Most people travel to Austria’s capital to gawk at the beautiful
buildings, wander the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace, and imagine the
crowds who once lined up for Mozart’s concerts. But I’ve come here
to learn how a century ago, Vienna solved a problem that now besets
Boston.

Like every major US city, Boston has capitulated to the idea that
housing should be left to the market. Our strategy of persuading
developers to add a fixed number of affordable units to market-rate
projects has failed. The Boston Foundation’s 2019 housing report
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card paints a grim picture of the reality for low- and middle-income
renters. Rents have been skyrocketing so severely that even
historically affordable neighborhoods are feeling the squeeze. The
median monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Dorchester or
Roxbury is now $2,000. With the population of Greater Boston expected
to grow by nearly 20 percent from 2010 to 2025, at least 320,000 units
of housing would be required. But thus far, less than 200,000 units of
housing are projected. Clearly, bolder ideas are needed — like
rethinking the very nature of public housing, including what it looks
like and who lives in it.

PEOPLE IN VIENNA, especially expats who have moved here, are happy and
willing to show curious visitors around social housing. Eugene Quinn
is one of them. He and I are strolling past a swing set in the grassy
square of the Karl Seitz-Hof, a sand-colored complex in Vienna’s
working-class Floridsdorf district that wraps around a circular garden
with lots of sunlight. Families are at play nearby. Quinn is a
U.K.-born urbanist and DJ who fell in love with a journalist from
Vienna and moved here to start a family. Now he gives cheeky tours of
Vienna’s most garish vanity architecture, but he also leads more
admiring expeditions into Vienna’s social housing. A week before my
visit, he guided a group who had traveled from China to learn about
Vienna’s affordable housing system. So I sought him out for a long
walk.

The Karl Seitz-Hof is a good example of classic social housing. It
used to be a stronghold for social democrats during the “Red
Vienna” era when they ran the city more than 100 years ago, and
while the interiors have been modernized, much of that
turn-of-the-century architecture is preserved. But social housing
comes in many forms. In the slightly more affluent Leopoldstadt
neighborhood, we find the Wohnprojekt Wien: a co-housing project
partially funded by city subsidies, but owned by the diverse
association of Vienna residents who co-founded the place.

The city’s subsidies allow the Wohnprojekt to remain permanently
affordable for people living here. As of January last year, apartment
rents were stabilized at 10 euros per square meter, which would be
equivalent to about $1,250 for a 1,200-square-foot apartment.
Aesthetically, the community brings to mind Somerville’s Assembly
Square, with finished wood-and-steel apartment buildings and little
parklets, one of which is occupied by a family taking a plump white
rabbit for a walk. In this and similar social housing complexes in
Vienna, Quinn explains, each of the residents contributes some time to
community upkeep. They also organize group dinners and car-sharing
programs.

Massachusetts doesn’t make housing like this. We have the
Massachusetts Housing Partnership, which is a partnership between the
public and private sectors to help finance the development and
purchase of affordable housing. But our strategy of persuading private
developers to build more affordable units hasn’t mitigated the
housing crisis. Worse, much of that private development is happening
on publicly owned land that the city has sold off. And even if we
still had that land and wanted to build publicly owned housing on it,
another hurdle would loom. The budget of the federal Housing and Urban
Development is much lower
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on an inflation-adjusted level, than it was when it funded much of the
public housing in the United States. This means cities like Boston
would essentially have to go it alone in finding ways to fund
permanently affordable, socially owned housing comparable to
Vienna’s.

“The attitude I think we need to develop, as a city, is that we have
limited resources to create affordable housing,” says Chuck Collins,
a program director at the Institute for Policy Studies think tank.
We’ve met up for coffee in Jamaica Plain a couple days after my
return from Vienna. Collins has been an advocate for taxing luxury
development projects
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and using the proceeds to fund new affordable housing.

This wouldn’t have to be like most other “affordable housing”
today. In our current arrangement, much new affordable housing is
owned by the private sector. Without rent controls in place, there’s
no guarantee of permanent affordability. Socially owned housing could
have that guarantee.

Collins is quick to point out that our state has micro examples of
socially owned housing, and some of it is mixed-income housing. A
couple of blocks from my apartment in JP, there’s the Farnsworth
House, a nonprofit where seniors live in rent-subsidized apartments.
Then, just over the neighborhood line, the Dudley Neighbors land trust
manages over 200 units of housing for Roxbury residents. Like the
co-housing I visited in Vienna, it’s permanently affordable and
socially owned. In theory, an expansion of land trusts in the Boston
area could set the stage for an expansion of such units.

Other examples exist within driving distance. New Hampshire and
Vermont fund affordable housing “almost entirely through a social
ownership structure,” Collins says. For example, Vermont has a
housing conservation board that taxes real estate transfers and puts
the revenue into a trust fund for nonprofit groups that are creating
permanently affordable social housing.

That idea is on the legislative table here in Massachusetts. Boston,
Somerville, and Nantucket are just a few of the communities whose
elected officials have proposed
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placing transfer fees on certain real estate deals, and using the
proceeds to support affordable housing development. But what’s
missing here and in Vermont is an expansion and re-imagining of
permanently affordable housing that’s built by developers but owned
by the city — by all of us. It would take furious organizing to
funnel those transfer fees toward municipal housing with rent
stabilization and mixed-income residency. We haven’t seen that yet.
And so, I can’t help but wonder if the big roadblock between our
status quo and something like Vienna’s social housing system isn’t
the lobbying power of developers, but the affliction of normalized
class segregation.

One of the reasons why public housing in America has often failed to
flourish is because we’ve treated those units as a last resort for
those with nowhere else to go. This model has concentrated poverty,
further marginalizing the poor from the middle class. And, according
to state Rep. Nika Elugardo, it reduces public housing to a top-down
act of begrudging philanthropy, which is not the same thing as social
ownership. “Our conception of public housing was sort of born out of
a federal program for housing, and that includes a certain unhealthy
dependency on national political dynamics for not only our housing
funding, but our idea of what public housing even is,” says
Elugardo, who ran for office on a housing equity platform. “We’re
just chasing that funding. That’s a charity model of public housing.
We need to shift to a local investor mindset, where the taxpayer is
the investor.”

One of Elugardo’s forthcoming bills will focus on use of public land
assets. “There’s at least $1.2 billion in surplus state-owned land
that’s sufficient for affordable housing,” she says.

It’s not hard to find the kinds of places where this could happen,
like the old red brick Nawn Factory building in Roxbury. Last fall,
the city put out a call for bids to redevelop the site for both
commercial and residential use. As I size up the old building,
listening to the hum of traffic on Melnea Cass, I can’t help noting
that back in 1880 — the year when the factory building was erected
— Vienna was in the throes of the housing catastrophe that put the
city on a radically different and effective path. We could take that
path too. Next to the Nawn Factory, there’s a vacant lot called
“Parcel 8.” Socially owned housing could fit there. People could
live there.

THAT’S ANOTHER NEAT thing about Vienna. People there are still
re-envisioning what their housing can be like, even as other cities
struggle to catch up and experiment with social ownership that Vienna
embraced decades ago. On my last full day in the city, I get a glimpse
of this by tramming over to the leafy Ottakring district and meeting
up with Ula Schneider, founder of an art collective. Her studio office
is located in the Sandleiten Hof, another city-owned housing complex.
After a quick cup of tea, we go for a stroll on cobblestone paths
connecting the parklets of the complex, which is built on a hillside
that affords a view of downtown Vienna.

There’s more than just housing units here. Schneider and I visit a
public square with shops and a nonprofit headquarters and an art
school classroom where students are tinkering away at sculptures. Just
outside of the complex walls, we pause at a green where Schneider and
her colleagues have staged an annual arts festival, with the help of
Sandleiten residents. “We’re always trying to imagine new ways to
use vacant spaces for the benefit of the community,” Schneider tells
me.

As Schneider and I stroll back to her studio, there’s a slight
awkwardness to our conversation: an almost irreverent quality. I
wonder if it feels odd for Schneider to take an American journalist on
a tour of something that’s so normal for her and most Vienna
residents. Vienna social housing is a unique achievement, globally
speaking. Markus Leitgeb, an official of the Vienna city government
who’s something of a press liaison, tells me he’s received more
media inquiries over the last couple years, as cities elsewhere
grapple with housing nightmares of their own. “One hundred years
ago, Vienna had a problem that required a new approach to creating
permanently affordable housing,“ Leitgeb says. “And today, most
cities are now living that same problem.”

I’ll admit, having returned home to the anxiety that comes from
renting in Boston, I’ve often found myself daydreaming about going
back to Vienna. But why flee there when we could just take one of its
best ideas?

_Miles Howard is a journalist based in Boston. Published March 13,
2020 Boston Globe. _

 

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