8
How We Fix This—Public and Social Housing
At first glance, our clients Margaret and Tina do not seem to have much in common.
Margaret, who lives on a $1,100 per month disability check, is being evicted from her apartment. The $850 monthly rent finally became more than she could scrape together. Once her court-ordered eviction happens, Margaret has no idea where she will sleep.
Tina has affordable rent. She too only has a disability check income, one that is even lower than Margaret’s. But Tina has a public housing apartment that caps her rent at 30 percent of her income.
Yet Tina’s living environment is abysmal. It is so bad that we were forced to file a lawsuit against the local public housing agency on Tina’s behalf and on behalf of other residents of her building. The elevators are often broken, leaving persons with disabilities stranded on high floors. The building has a mice infestation, and bedbugs are rampant. The stairwells are littered with human feces and urine and drug paraphernalia, presumably from the nonresidents who come into the building during the hours when there is no security present.
Tina’s apartment has been broken into twice. A few months ago, she witnessed a shooting as she walked down the hallway to the laundry room. The shooter, a nonresident, turned and saw that Tina had watched the whole thing. There was a long, terrifying pause before the shooter’s companion took his arm and said, “Leave her alone.”
Margaret is on a long waiting list for public housing. Tina has public housing, but the conditions are deplorable. So they do have something in common after all, something they share with millions of Americans: they need public housing to be much better, and for there to be much more of it.
“When people drive past public housing or see it on the news, they too often just see the stigma of crime-ridden projects in bad condition,” says Ramona Ferreyra. “But behind those walls they drive past are people with life stories and accomplishments that were able to happen thanks to public housing.”1
In my interview with her, Ferreyra shared two of those stories.2 Her grandmother has lived in their Bronx public housing apartment for thirty years. The affordable rent allowed her to retire at sixty-five from a lifetime working as a seamstress, and then enjoy living in a community that included a senior center with recreation and regular programs. As for Ferreyra, the low housing cost and the security of longtime tenancy helped her finish both college and graduate school, while many of her fellow students and friends faced eviction from their private-market homes when money got tight.
So Ferreyra and fellow tenants formed Save Section 9, named after the 1937 Housing Act provision that created US public housing.3 They promote the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, which would direct $234 billion to fund desperately needed repairs and retrofits in existing public housing and establish new resident councils to boost democratic management of these communities.4 Save Section 9 also organizes against efforts to privatize New York City public housing and lifts up the many artists and other successful people who have roots in public housing. “Public housing allowed my family and many others to pursue what people call the American Dream,” Ferreyra says.
Yet condemnation of US public housing has been both enduring and bipartisan. Richard Nixon called public housing “depressing” and “crime-ridden.”5 Conservative think tanks label the homes “noxious environments.”6 Republican US representative Richard Baker from Louisiana said after Hurricane Katrina, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”7 Recall from chapter 2 that President Jimmy Carter’s HUD secretary, Patricia Harris, in 1976 called public housing units “monstrosities.” “We should make it clear that we are abandoning the whole notion of public housing,” Harris said.8
Yet US public housing is still the home to nearly two million people, many of them members of groups that have struggled in the for-profit housing market.9 Public housing is particularly important for Black and brown families still impacted by generations of housing racism: 43 percent of heads of housing in public housing are Black, and 26 percent are Latinx. More than a third of public housing households are headed by someone age sixty-two or older, and over half of public housing households rely on disability or retirement checks.10
Contrary to a common impression, public housing is not limited to large urban structures. A good deal of public housing is operated by small local housing authorities. And most public housing is now located in single-family homes, duplexes, or low-rise buildings without many units.11 In many cities, like Austin, Texas; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Portland, Oregon; Pittsburgh; the Bronx; and St. Paul, Minnesota, there are examples of public housing that are attractive, thriving communities.12 Jackson Gandour, author of a comprehensive 2022 Human Rights Watch report on public housing, agrees with Ferreyra that public housing has been victimized by an overbroad stigma.13 “The impression is that public housing is a total failure, and that misses a lot of the picture,” Gandour told me in an interview.14
The most compelling part of the public housing picture is its affordability, which shines through during a time of rapidly rising rents and widespread evictions.15 Public housing rents are capped at 30 percent of the tenants’ income, meaning that the average public housing tenant pays $392 a month in rent, compared to an average of over $2,000 per month for market-rate rentals.16
Public housing tenants also enjoy a far more secure tenure than most renters, as they are entitled by law to protections from arbitrary evictions and rent increases.17 Our lawsuit on behalf of Tina and her neighbors is bolstered by federal law that requires their lease to include a promise by the public housing agency to provide good conditions, a promise that we never see in private rental leases.
So it is no wonder that millions of people apply for subsidized housing.18 For example, in 2021, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, opened applications for twenty-nine affordable apartments. Over nine thousand people applied.19 Nationally, the public housing demand is so great that applications are often not even accepted: waiting lists are only opened up every few years. When these waiting lists do open up, people have been physically trampled in the rush to put in applications.20 As Michael Stegman, the top housing policy adviser in the Obama administration, has said, “Public housing is unpopular with everybody except those who live in it and those who are waiting to get in.”21
The Sabotage of Public Housing
Yet Tina and other US public housing residents too often face real challenges. Residents of the Bronx building where Ferreyra and her grandmother live could once count on fast-responding management. But now the elevator goes out regularly, a significant hardship for residents living with disabilities, especially on higher floors. Also like Tina’s building, Ferreyra’s building has leaks and infestation problems, too.
In fact, far too many public housing apartments and buildings are in bad shape. The National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials estimated in 2020 that there was a whopping $70 billion in repairs and replacement needed for US public housing.22 Gandour of Human Rights Watch says we should not be surprised: “If you don’t provide for needed maintenance, eventually any home will start falling apart.”
The blame for this maintenance crisis lies squarely at the feet of public housing’s biggest critics. Since public housing’s creation with the Housing Act of 1937, the private real estate lobby undermined it by ensuring public housing was segregated by race and income, built with inferior materials, and blocked from funding for necessary maintenance.23 “America’s public housing was designed to fail, to be unappealing to anyone who could afford to rent,” Francesca Mari writes in the New York Times.24 It was this ongoing legacy that motivated Human Rights Watch to add US public housing to its advocacy agenda that is better known for exposing political repression and war crimes. “Purposefully driving people’s homes into disrepair is an obvious human rights problem,” Gandour says.
As we saw in chapter 2, our massive divestment from public housing began in the early 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan and Congress cut annual funding from $83 billion all the way down to $18 billion.25 Then the 1998 Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act, as part of its fulfillment of President Bill Clinton’s promised “end welfare as we know it” cuts to federal antipoverty programs, enabled public housing agencies to use capital funding to tear down developments without replacing the demolished units.
The same legislation also featured the odious Faircloth Amendment, which capped the number of public housing units. Cash-strapped agencies’ inability to maintain existing units has ensured that the no-growth goal of the Faircloth Amendment has been easily achieved: there are more than 400,000 fewer public housing units today than there were in 1996.26 In our Indianapolis community alone, hundreds of desperately needed public housing homes and apartments are left vacant because of poor conditions.
This massive loss of housing was no accident. HUD’s HOPE VI program funded the demolition of public housing, significantly reducing the number of affordable homes available.27 Under HOPE VI, Atlanta lost a stunning 86 percent of its public housing; Chicago lost 62 percent. HOPE VI has now expired, but neglect and decay still cause the loss of more than ten thousand public housing units each year.28
While HOPE VI has been abandoned, the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program is now in place. RAD furthers the narrative of failed public housing, privatizing much of it by converting the housing from Section 9 public housing to Section 8, with private ownership.29 The conversion to private ownership is not supposed to reduce available affordable units the way HOPE VI did, but RAD has led to spikes in evictions and widespread lack of accommodation for residents with disabilities.30
As we saw in chapter 4, at the same time our government starves public housing of needed funds, it spends lavishly on subsidized housing for wealthy homeowners and corporate landlords. Depending on the calculations, the US government spends anywhere from two to thirteen times more on wealthier homeowners than on renters in need.31 Subsidies like the mortgage interest and property taxes deduction, which in the US typically benefit only the wealthiest homeowners, do not exist in comparable nations like the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.32
Nor do other nations match the US’s array of generous tax expenditures for landlords we discussed in chapter 4, including deductions for depreciation and access to tax-avoidance schemes such as like-kind exchanges and pass-through exemptions. For example, New York provided a tax break for real estate developers of new multifamily construction—including luxury apartments—that cost $1.7 billion in fiscal year 2021, more than the city or federal government spent on the area’s public housing and subsidized housing development.33
Redirecting toward public housing some of the tax expenditures that now reward wealthy homeowners and corporations would dramatically reorient our economy toward greater equity. We could provide subsidized housing to every eligible US renter—an entitlement that is already the law in the UK and Australia. The government money now spent on wealthy homeowners in one year alone could instead fund in full the tens of billions in accumulated capital costs for public housing across the nation.
Public Housing Is Great, Actually
How do we know that investments in public housing can bear fruit? Because, in addition to the benefits public housing has historically provided US families like Ferreyra’s, multiple other countries offer shining examples of success. As we will see in more detail in chapter 9, Austria, Finland, and Singapore are among the many nations with vibrant public housing programs.34 Germany flips the policy script from the homeowner-centric US approach, providing renters with subsidies and rights including rent control and strong protections against arbitrary evictions. Germany is now a renter-majority nation where the average tenancy lasts eleven years.35
Here in the US, the efforts of the real estate lobby have limited public housing to low-income people. But a wide range of income groups benefit from public housing in these other nations, increasing the programs’ base of political support.
As we discussed in chapter 2, the US is also a global outlier in the extent that we divert our affordable housing dollars to for-profit entities. Since the 1970s, the US has switched our affordable housing investment away from public housing to instead subsidizing for-profit landlords via direct payments and tax breaks, in return for their housing low-income tenants.36 The Section 8 voucher program (also known as housing choice vouchers), the Project-Based Section 8 program, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, and the Emergency Rental Assistance program all directly fund private landlords, often large, for-profit corporations.37 In fact, this profit-soaked combination of vouchers, project-based subsidies, and tax credit housing accounts for six times more housing units than public housing does. If our goal is to provide truly affordable, enduring housing, that ratio should be reversed.
Common sense tells us that public housing is far more cost-effective than these privatized versions, since it saves taxpayers the cost of paying for the profits of developers and landlords. Further, public housing can be developed and enhanced even in market downturns, a time when for-profit housing construction stalls. And public housing endures longer than other types of subsidized housing like LIHTC and project-based Section 8 developments, which can be converted to market-rate rentals after their subsidized housing commitments expire.
Back in 1949, the American Housing Act set out the goal of ensuring a “decent home in a suitable living environment for every American family,” echoing the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed by the US the year before. There is no better way to fulfill that goal than public housing.
So it is heartening to see that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Bernie Sanders, and other members of Congress are sponsoring the Green New Deal for Public Housing. This legislation would not only devote the necessary funds to renovate public housing but also repeal the Faircloth Amendment.38 It is also exciting to see state and local governments across the country embracing a new commitment to public housing.39 “For me this is primarily about the state stepping up to solve a housing problem that is affecting huge numbers of people,” Meghan Kallman, a Rhode Island state senator who sponsors legislation to create a state-level agency to build and operate public housing, told Vox.40
“It’s not rocket science,” Jackson Gandour says. “Fundamentally, public housing in the US needs money to achieve its potential. It can be done. Other governments are doing it well every day, and even the US experience shows it is well within our capacity.”
Ramona Ferreyra can attest to that. As she moved her way through graduate school and into her professional career, Ferreyra sometimes encountered bosses or peers who marveled at her upbringing in the Bronx. “People used to say to me, ‘Look at all you did despite living in public housing!’” she says. “And I have to correct them: No, I accomplished what I did because of public housing.”
The Market Will Not Save Us
When my students and I represent struggling tenants like Margaret as they face eviction and homelessness, we get a clear view of our communities’ most urgent housing need: secure housing that is affordable for all. Just as clearly, we can see that private, for-profit housing cannot meet that need.
We should not be surprised by this, Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes in Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. “Satisfying basic human needs, like the provision of shelter, medical treatment, water or even education run counter to business’s objective of maximizing return on investment or simply making money,” she says. “One of the most pressing questions has been how to secure the provision of safe, sound, affordable and decent housing for everyone. The obstacles to that goal have always been business’s bottom line.”41
Samuel Stein, housing policy expert and author of the highly regarded book Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, agrees. “Building expensive housing is just far more profitable than building affordable housing. As long as our system depends on for-profit actors to build, own, manage, and maintain our homes, good quality affordable housing will always be out of reach,” Stein says. “We need nonmarket actors to produce social housing.”42
We should keep these admonitions in mind when prominent voices claim that the answer to our housing crisis is simple: we just need to build more market-rate housing. For example, in early 2023, in an editorial titled “The U.S. Can Solve Its Housing Crisis, It Just Needs to Start Building,” Bloomberg news editors wrote, “For all its complexities, America’s nationwide housing crisis boils down to a problem of supply and demand: The country needs a lot more homes than it has.”43
Sometimes labeled the YIMBY (yes in my backyard) perspective, the argument here is that more construction dollars accompanied by “upzoning”—allowing denser development by way of multiunit buildings—will fix our housing ills. “Filtering,” a kind of trickle-down concept for housing, envisions that building even luxury housing will ultimately result in more of the remaining housing stock becoming more affordable.
There is some evidence that zoning changes that allow for more housing to be built can have a modest overall impact in lowering prices.44 But the evidence also shows that high-end housing, often the focus of private developers, can gentrify the communities where it is built. That means the new housing is raising—not lowering—the price of the housing all around it.45 When the public invests in transit and other services to support the new housing, private developers and wealthier landowners disproportionately benefit from those investments.46
The “build more” elementary supply-and-demand analysis has another flaw. It does not account for the millions of property owners opting for financial reasons to keep units vacant rather than renting them for lower prices. As we learned in chapter 4, empty condominiums in cities are sometimes known as “safe deposit boxes in the sky.” (Sometimes those safe deposit boxes hold ill-gotten gains: the purchase of US residential housing is one of the world’s most favored forms of money laundering.)47 In some US cities, there are more vacant units than there are homeless persons.48 Nor does the YIMBY approach factor in the effect of wealthy people owning second and third homes. Those extra buildings do not add to the number of people being housed.49
Even more fundamentally, the just-build-more solution fails to account for the fact that even the least expensive market-rate housing is still too pricey for our client Margaret and millions of others like her. As two of our most respected US housing scholars, Alex Schwartz and Kirk McClure, have written,
As experts on housing policy, we agree that increasing the supply of homes is necessary in areas with rapidly rising housing costs. But this won’t, by itself, make a significant dent in the country’s affordability problems—especially for those with the most severe needs. In part that’s because in much of the country, there is actually no shortage of rental housing. The problem is that millions of people lack the income to afford what’s on the market… . In other words, even if landlords set rents at the bare minimum needed to cover costs—with no profit—housing would remain unaffordable to most very-low-income households—unless they also receive rental subsidies.50
Urban development scholar Max Holleran also has Margaret and our other very low-income clients on his mind. “Building market-rate housing is not going to solve the major problems because many people cannot afford the market rate,” Holleran insists. “We need to stop thinking that the market can provide for everyone—it’s just not going to happen anytime soon.”51
A Call for Social Housing
In my view, public housing is the most direct and scalable answer to our clients’ affordable housing crisis. But it is not the only one. Public housing is one of several proven approaches that can be grouped under the broader umbrella of “social housing.”
Social housing is owned by the government, or by nonprofit organizations that respond to democratic control by residents.52 Social housing is decommodified—protected from the profiteering of the private market. It is affordable for the life of the building or unit—no expiration date.53
In this way, social housing is like public education, fire and emergency services, infrastructure like roads, sewers, and water, our justice system, and other public goods. It acts on the principle that access to a safe, secure home is too important to be dependent on whether a family has enough money to ensure a profit to a private landlord.54 Simply put, social housing sees housing as a human right, not a commodity or wealth-building tool.
Too often, the US subsidizes only the final stage of housing—the actual renter occupancy—after relying on the for-profit market to finance the earlier stages. The Section 8 / housing choice voucher program and project-based housing subsidies are examples of this flawed approach.55 Social housing can go further upstream, and we have active, successful examples showing us how.56 For instance, governments at all levels already use land banks and other mechanisms to acquire land from the for-profit market, sometimes by taking over distressed properties or seizing tax-delinquent ones.57 We should dedicate that land’s use for affordable housing, not simply resell it to for-profit developers as land banks too often do.58
Another way to decommodify our current housing stock is through the Tenant and Community Opportunity to Purchase Acts. TOPA and COPA provide first rights of purchase—and sometimes government funding to support that purchase—to entities that will convert the property into permanently affordable social housing.59 Even more impactful versions of this legislation impose a right of first refusal for tenants or the community, meaning the landowners must accept the bid if it matches the best offer.60 Public financing can then support the construction or rehabilitation of the property, along with the necessary maintenance.61 There is obvious financial benefit to be gained when government housing dollars are solely dedicated to affordable housing, not diverted in substantial amounts to the rich via tax credits or surpluses for the benefit of for-profit landlords or developers.
As we see in court, tenants in privately rented housing are often powerless. Their landlords’ attorneys have drafted the terms of their take-it-or-leave-it leases, then those landlords are often unresponsive to maintenance needs. Social housing can hand control back to the renters by embracing a democratic approach to operation of the housing. That can be accomplished through cooperative resident ownership or with nonprofit or government owners constrained by a rent board, along with direct accountability to tenants.62 Those tenants would preferably be organized into a tenant union with legal rights akin to workplace collective-bargaining units.63
Again, there are many successful models we can emulate, both in the US and internationally. When residents are the owners, the landlord-tenant conflicts over rent and maintenance tend to fade away, and all involved are dedicated to the prosperity of the housing.64 The value of this structure was proven during the housing crisis of 2007–2009, when social housing entities saw far fewer foreclosures and delinquencies compared to private market housing.65
Social housing has a positive effect on the overall housing market as well, driving costs down by forcing for-profit housing to reduce its prices to compete with social housing.66 Social housing at large scale in other nations amplifies the price-dampening effect, an impact that is not felt in the US because only 4 percent of our housing is subsidized. And by removing the profit percentages, social housing provides cost savings for the government in construction, management, and maintenance costs.67
Of course, the people doing that construction, management, and maintenance work will be members of the community. So the public, nonprofit nature of the enterprise can ensure that these are well-paying jobs with good benefits and security rather than positions that are as temporary and low-paid as a for-profit entity can get away with.68 People’s Action’s Homes Guarantee program calls for a school-to-union pipeline created by union-designed apprenticeships in social housing projects.69 Those social housing jobs can endure through economic downturns, avoiding the workforce shrinkage the for-profit construction industry inevitably suffers through during those periods.70
As we discussed in chapter 3, social housing is a logical and appropriate reparation for the generations of well-documented racist US housing practices.71 Social housing investments should be disproportionately targeted, especially initially, to benefit the Black and brown communities whose resources have been extracted under the racist US housing approach we have followed for multiple generations.72
More broadly, housing’s core role in family health and stability means that the improvements generated by social housing will have dramatically positive effects throughout our communities. Research shows that children who live in subsidized housing are healthier and have better educational outcomes than comparable children living in for-profit rental housing.73 Low-income households with money left over after paying rent will spend that money in their communities.74
None of these benefits can be realized by making small tweaks to the current system. We can see in eviction court each week that private for-profit developers and landlords, even when heavily subsidized, are unable to create and provide affordable housing for the millions of Americans in need. By contrast, there is abundant evidence that public land acquisition, financing, construction, and operation will make massive improvements in housing affordability.75 We will review some of those examples here.
Social Housing Momentum Is Growing
The US is far behind other wealthy nations in providing social housing. But the foundation for a massive increase in US social housing is already in place. Hundreds of US communities have land banks and/or housing trust funds.76 Some, like Minneapolis and Indianapolis, are following the European example of directing public real estate and public funding to social housing.77 North Dakota has had a public bank for over a century, Philadelphia has a city-owned public bank, and California now allows public banking statewide. Advocates are calling for nationwide support for public banking.78
In Minnesota, New York, and California, corporate-owned properties have been converted to community ownership. San Francisco is raising public dollars for affordable housing by assessing taxes on high-end real estate.79 Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA) legislation has passed or is pending in multiple states and communities including Washington, DC, and Portland, Oregon. Baltimore community advocacy successfully forced the creation of a housing trust fund, and San Francisco requires landlords to recognize and meet with tenant associations or face a mandated rent reduction.80
Increasingly, state and city governments have realized that the private housing market will not meet the needs of their communities.81 States like Rhode Island, Hawaii, and Colorado are investing in building social housing, as are communities like Montgomery County, Maryland.82 “What I like about what we’re doing is all we have effectively done is commandeer the private American real estate model,” Zachary Marks, the chief real estate officer for Montgomery County’s housing authority, told Vox in 2022. “We’re replacing the investor dudes from Wall Street, the big money from Dallas… . Both because we don’t have to meet the private sector return requirements, and because it’s much easier to set policy on things that you own, all of that [revenue] just gets poured back into overall housing production and operation.”83
One social housing approach that is attracting widespread support is community land trusts, known as CLTs.84 In a community land trust, the nonprofit trust retains ownership of the land while the resident purchases the house on it.85 The purchase cost is lowered because of the discount for not buying the land, and is often supported with subsidies.86 In exchange for the reduced price and the subsidy, the resident agrees to limit their resale price to make sure the home is permanently affordable.87
CLTs have a legacy that traces back to Black-owned projects like the New Communities that grew out of the southern US civil rights movement.88 There are now over 225 CLTs in the US, with cities like Indianapolis supporting them by acquiring land and buildings from private ownership and transferring title to CLTs to develop and manage.89 Government funding and land grants have played an important role in the success of CLTs, including the US’s largest program, the Champlain (Vermont) Land Trust.90
Yet even all this activity only scratches the surface of the potential for transforming our housing systems.91 Governments at all levels hold the power to raise revenue for social housing by taxing high-end housing and housing speculation, to tightly regulate for-profit housing activity, and to exercise eminent domain, especially on vacant or distressed corporate properties.92 These governments can prioritize and fund adaptive reuse, turning existing vacant or for-profit buildings into affordable housing.93 The federal government can repeal the 2017 legislation that gifted capital gains tax breaks to wealthy developers through so-called opportunity zones, a program that we saw in chapter 4 too often fuels gentrification.94
That’s not all. Governments can significantly increase the resources and power of public land banks, institute the first rights of purchase to tenants and the community via TOPA and COPA legislation, and then subsidize those organizations’ development and maintenance efforts via public housing finance agencies. Housing researchers Gianpaolo Baiocchi and H. Jacob Carlson have proposed a Social Housing Development Authority to coordinate the acquisition of real estate and its transfer to social housing.95 “It would intervene in the troubled parts of the housing market and, rather than let those units go to corporate speculators and house-flippers, finance their transfer to tenant cooperatives, land trusts, and non-profits,” they write. “This would crowd out speculators and expand the share of housing shielded from the private market.”96
At the federal level, perhaps the most ambitious and straightforward current US social housing proposal is Representative Ilhan Omar’s Homes for All Act. The legislation would devote $1 trillion to building twelve million new, permanently affordable public and social housing units, among other social housing investments. Like the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, the Homes for All legislation would repeal the Faircloth Amendment.97 So would the Homes Act, a proposal that Senator Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced in September of 2024. The Homes Act aims to create a federal development authority to finance and build homes where rent is capped at 25 percent of a household’s income. The Homes Act program would create 1.25 million new social housing units from an investment of $30 billion per year, the equivalent of the annual cost of the mortgage interest deduction provided to homeowners.98
Another proposal, led by the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, is the “HoUSed” campaign to expand rental assistance to every eligible household and create a national housing stabilization fund to provide emergency help.99
As our clients like Margaret can painfully attest, all these proposals are much needed. The view from eviction court—not to mention a homeless shelter or a subsidized housing waiting line—shows that the US’s dominant approach to housing is irretrievably broken. It is time to finally reject the failed model of relying on the private, for-profit market to ensure housing for all. It is time to embrace and fully fund public housing and other robust social housing options.