Across the country, housing advocates and policymakers are searching for solutions to the affordable housing crisis. Some are experimenting with different funding models. Others are rethinking zoning, transforming basements or backyard buildings into homes, or courting private investment. Here in Philly, Mayor Cherelle Parker’s $2 billion H.O.M.E. Initiative has the ambitious goal of saving or building 30,000 homes through public-private funding, regulatory reforms and neighborhood investments.
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There is one potential solution H.O.M.E. lacks, however, that has gained a whole lot of buzz in the past few years: “social housing,” which regions as diverse as Seattle, Washington and Montgomery County, Maryland are attempting to create. The idea: House low- to mid-income citizens in government-owned, modern, amenity-rich rental properties among higher-income residents — and promise that their affordable, publicly subsidized rents will remain permanently affordable. Equally important social housing is what it says: social, with a nod to building community and opportunity for residents along the socioeconomic spectrum.
If this sounds a lot like public housing, that’s because it is, but with a nod toward property as a community good, not as a speculative asset for real estate investors. Vincent Reina, the founder of the Housing Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, explains it this way: “Social housing implies essentially treating housing as an important public good for social welfare.” Emily Dowdell, the president of Housing Policy at the Reinvestment Fund, describes social housing as public housing with a community focus, a rebrand, if you will. “It’s as simple as Starbucks calling a large size ‘grande.’”
Could such a setup work in Philadelphia? Reina and other housing experts say it could, provided there’s ample political and community will, not too much push back from the real estate sector, and the essential structural supports to make it a reality.
Social housing in Vienna
The most famous example of social housing is in Vienna, Austria, which developed its model a century ago. Today, approximately 50 percent of the city’s 1.9 million residents live in housing that is owned by the city itself (200,000 units) or built and managed by mission-driven organizations (another 200,000 units). This is not an inexpensive municipal good: Vienna invests hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars annually to maintain the current stock and build new housing. And it’s not perfect: In 2020, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) pointed out that even this model has priced out some of Vienna’s lowest income residents. But still, it’s by far the largest such model — and has long been held up as the gold standard of municipal housing, or, as The New York Times put it in 2023, “renters’ utopia.”
In part that’s because, as The Times reported, an average Viennese couple pays 4 percent of their pre-tax income on rent — compared to the U.S. average of 30 percent, a fact that renders American renters “cost burdened.” (Four percent is about what Americans spent in 2023 on dining out.) Vienna’s housing is also insulated from the market (not subject to supply and demand swings), allows renters to stay in their homes regardless of whether their incomes increase (the government doesn’t ask), and offers enough services and amenities to make it “a village within the city.” Importantly, the Vienna model focuses not on providing individual housing vouchers (as we have long done in the U.S.) but on simply constructing more homes.
In other words, Vienna’s social housing is a far cry from just about anything we have closer to home. Nonetheless, a few U.S. cities and regions have attempted to make it happen, with mixed results.
If ever there is a moment to think outside the box in Philly, Parker’s H.O.M.E. initiative has provided that opportunity.
Social housing in the United States
Most cities and states who’ve bought into the idea are in their exploratory social housing era. Atlanta, Georgia created an agency to develop city-owned land for mixed-income housing. In Rhode Island, voters approved legislation calling for $80 million to be invested in potential social housing projects. Massachusetts’ state legislature funded a pilot program.
Then there’s Seattle, Washington, where a political battle nearly derailed a new social housing initiative. While Philadelphians may complain about the rental prices here, Seattle is facing an even more brutal housing market, with prices dramatically increasing, availability dramatically decreasing, and need skyrocketing. Between 2023 and 2024, homelessness there rose 59 percent.
A few years ago, a coalition of homelessness-focused Seattle organizations called House Our Neighbors (HON) lobbied for a ballot measure to create a City-funded social housing developer. In 2023, Seattle voters approved the measure, and, in 2025, approved a tax on large corporations to generate $53 million annually to fund Seattle Social Housing. But, after much-reported delay and turmoil within the public developer agency, and after vociferous opposition from the region’s real estate lobby and its supporters (who believed they would lose out from the low-priced competition), the plan continues to struggle to find purchase.
The lesson here, according to Jeff Paul, HON’s co-executive director: “It’s not enough to just be popular. There are political forces at play that you need to overcome.”
In New York City, housing justice advocates have long argued the model could help address the grinding affordability crisis. They point to their state’s Mitchell-Lama Housing Program, which limits profits to keep rental prices affordable, as a similar, successful model to show it could work in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Oksana Mironova, a housing policy analyst at Community Service Society of New York, has been researching and advocating for social housing along with her colleagues since 2019. Mironova sees a bit of New York in Seattle.
“There’s always a political fight that comes back to the real estate lobby,” she says, adding that discourse around the idea has shifted in recent years, but that funding is the biggest challenge. But she says Philadelphia shouldn’t be discouraged from pursuing the idea. “It would probably look different just because the local conditions really should shape the way that each social housing experiment works. But it feels like a worthwhile goal for a city like Philly to try.”
A so-far successful experiment in social housing
Perhaps Philly could take a page out of Montgomery County, Maryland’s social housing book. That initiative’s first mixed-income social housing apartment complex opened in Rockville, an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., in 2023.
Although a private apartment developer built and operates The Laureate, the complex’s controlling, 70 percent owner and $100 million funder is the public Housing Opportunities Commission (HOC) of Montgomery County. The Laureate offers 30 percent below-market rate and 70 percent market rate housing. That translates to about 90 out of 268 units that cost approximately $1,700 to $1,900 — as opposed to $3,000 on up — for a one-bedroom.
To qualify, prospective tenants must show proof of income. The cutoff is in the mid-$60,000 range. But once you’re in, no matter your income, you have access to swanky amenities such as a yoga and fitness studio, heated outdoor pool, clubroom and pet washing room. In a separate article, The New York Times positioned The Laureate as the next step in a string of inclusionary zoning successes in the county, and noted high satisfaction among residents of the lower-priced units.
Reviewers on Apartments.com seem to agree: 65 of them rated the facility 4.8 out of 5 stars. What’s more, the county is developing more, larger mixed-income luxury-style complexes in the same vein.
But Montgomery County, MD is no Philadelphia County, PA. The former has one of the highest household income levels in the nation, between $132,000 and $141,000, according to the most recent U.S. Census. Philadelphia’s is closer to $62,000. Jenny Schuentz, a housing policy analyst at The Brookings Institute told NPR in 2024 that Montgomery County’s wealth, combined with premium staffing, are a perfect recipe for social housing success. “These are all really unusual characteristics for most local governments across the U.S.,” she says.
If this sounds a lot like public housing, that’s because it is, but with a nod toward property as a community good, not as a speculative asset for real estate investors.
A need for deep affordability in Philadelphia
Still, if ever there is a moment to think outside the box in Philly, Parker’s H.O.M.E. initiative has provided that opportunity. (The Mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment about whether the Mayor would support social housing as part of her H.O.M.E. Initiative.)
In 2024, City Councilmembers Jamie Gauthier and Kendra Brooks joined progressive politicians from around the country on a tour of social housing in Berlin and Vienna. Gauthier, head of Council’s Committee on Housing, Neighborhood Development and the Homeless, came away impressed. “It stood out to me that in Vienna, not only are they kind of saying they want affordable housing, they’re lining up their policy, their resources, their land use towards that goal,” she says. “It felt like their communities were very well planned.”
One way Vienna has achieved its social housing success is through building on city-owned land — of which Philly has plenty. “They were very intentional about saying that that’s what their publicly-owned land is going to go towards,” says Gauthier. “I know that’s a goal here in Philly, or that’s how we set out with the Land Bank, but I don’t think in practice it’s actually played out the way that we intended.”
According to a Land Bank spokesperson, the City of Philadelphia currently owns 5,371 undeveloped properties. In last year’s budget hearings, Land Bank Executive Director Angel Rodriguez stated that since the program’s creation in 2013, only 1,017 of 8,000 properties had been sold and developed. (A Land Bank representative did not answer questions about any more recently sold or developed properties.) That means the City is holding on to parcels all over town that could be developed into social housing through a public-private venture.
“Most of the dangers and the harms that we’ve seen in the housing market — from redlining to gentrification, displacement, people dealing with slum lords — are a product of housing being treated more as a commodity than like a crucial basic need that everyone deserves access to,” she says. “If we operate with some creativity, we can absolutely carry out social housing on the parcels that we have now.”
At the same time, of course, the City has to contend with the biggest obstacle to housing opportunities: Low wages keep Philadelphians from being able to afford even lower rents than in comparable cities. But that shouldn’t stop us from thinking big. Notes Dowdell: “There’s no one solution to meeting people’s housing needs. Housing policy needs to encompass a pretty wide toolkit. Social housing is an important part of that.”
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