What local leaders are learning from Vienna’s social housing

August 17, 2024

Welcome to the eighth issue of Report Forward by journalist Alissa Walker. Photos by David Levitus.

*A courtyard in a Vienna social housing project*

THE BIG REPORT

Last May, Scarlett De León left her breastfeeding infant for the first time and boarded a plane from LAX to Vienna with a cohort of fellow housing leaders from Los Angeles. As Campaign Director for the ACT-LA coalition, she was well-versed in the social housing developments where 60 percent of Vienna renters live. But as she toured these properties with her colleagues and coalition partners, De León was unprepared for how emotional it would be to see them in person. “One of the last developments was so beautiful. All these kids running around. I was literally in tears,” she remembers. “I thought, we can have this in LA.”

Social housing is a “public option” for housing — it’s permanently affordable, under community control, generally mixed-income, and outside the speculative real estate market. Led by coalitions like ACT-LA , the social housing movement in LA County is also focused on ensuring that social housing is resident-run, rather than managed by large corporate or government bureaucracies, and that it offers pathways to ownership. In Vienna, about 40 percent of the housing stock falls under the broad definition. And over the last two years, dozens of LA elected officials, nonprofit leaders, and housing policy experts have traveled to Vienna to tour some of the most famous examples. These delegations, organized by the Global Policy Leadership Academy, have sparked high-level conversations around social housing models right in LA at the time that funding is available to actually turn ideas into action. A new report, “Social Housing in Vienna: Reflections from Los Angeles Housing Leaders” gathers their reactions into a comprehensive website that’s part toolkit, part policy framework, making a persuasive case for how the concept could change the conversation around LA’s housing crisis.

*The Gleis 21 co-op social housing building in the* Sonnwendviertel district, which is part of a master-planned development on the site of a former railyard in the center of Vienna

The refreshingly jargon-free report is written for ground-floor entry into the concept, with basic terms and plenty of examples of social housing models. (For an introduction, start here: “I’m new to social housing and I want to learn more.”) Meeting people where they are in an attempt to find some shared ground was exactly the point, says Ari Pounaki, Community of Practice Manager at GPLA and a co-author of the report. “In the U.S., we have a lot of consensus around the problem, but not a lot of consensus around the solutions,” he says. “In Vienna, we heard such a strong consensus amongst residents, people who own businesses, people who work for the government: this is what the system is, and this is what we need to do to make it successful.” As more electeds made the trip to Vienna, the concept began to really take hold in the local housing discourse. While one LA group was in Vienna, Pounaki notes, a popular New York Times story about a previous trip was published while the group was literally on a tour of one of the same buildings featured in the story. Even Rick Caruso praised Vienna’s approach in a recent interview.

*In Vienna, only 18 percent of residents are rent burdened — meaning they spend more than 40 percent of post-tax income on rent — compared to 58 percent of LA city residents*

The timing for the report is critical. For the first year ever, the City of LA has a new funding source, drawing from the United to House LA transfer tax on real estate sales over $5 million. Up to $100 million each year in ULA money can be used for social housing strategies. And in addition to the city’s House LA Fund, there’s an important complementary effort at the county level: Measure A on the November ballot that could help fund social housing solutions through LACAHSA, the county’s newly formed housing authority. “Now with ULA, and hopefully, with the success of LACAHSA,” says Pounaki, “we can replicate one of these foundational elements of the Vienna program by having his ongoing funding source for capital, for refurbishment, for all the different kinds of tenant protections.”

As noted by the delegation, affordable housing in LA, like many other U.S. cities, has traditionally been built around a very narrow vision: publicly subsidizing housing, often using tax credits, to support low-income households or formerly homeless individuals. With social housing, says Pounaki, the scope becomes much broader: how can a city best house and support anyone, from seniors to single mothers to people experiencing financial crises to people who have mental health disorders? “The lesson from Vienna is that it’s not just one thing,” he says. “Our existence is within a spectrum, so this is really taking a more comprehensive worldview: how do we design a system to address the whole person at every stage of life?”

It’s important to note that these models already exist in LA in a limited way, through community land trusts, co-ops, and other tenant-ownership models, as well as in the city’s own supportive housing. A recent paper by Dani Knoll explores how the LA Eco Village, an intentional community in Rampart Village, supports residents’ mental and emotional well-being. But overall, the type of housing available to LA renters is overwhelmingly one potentially harmful type. According to a 2021 SAJE report, 67 percent of all rental property in LA is owned by large landlords that own five or more properties, and 75 percent of LA renters live in buildings owned by investment companies or corporate landlords. This traps renters in extractive situations where landlords are not incentivized to repair or update properties. And it also yields more control to wealthy people and corporations that profit from housing, and then derive even more political power from that wealth which is used to dehumanize renters and take away their rights.

LA’s current affordable housing approach also segregates the city. ”If you look at where most low-income housing and properties are built, it continues to be in high-poverty, high-minority neighborhoods,” Pounaki says. “And when you look at where the majority of Section 8 households live, it's again disproportionately concentrated in low-income and high-minority neighborhoods.” Not to romanticize Austria’s approach to racial and economic integration too much, Pounaki notes; the country continues to reckon with its own complicity in Nazi fascism and mass killing of its Jewish population. “But what we saw in Austria was this social mixing that doesn’t exist here.”

*Members of Southern California GPLA trip talk in a Vienna social housing courtyard*

*Angelenos listening in a courtyard of one of Vienna's oldest social housing projects*

That conversation — where exactly to put new places for people to live — is forefront at the moment as the city’s Housing Element is currently determining where LA should build hundreds of thousands of new homes per state requirements, mostly for low-income families. Right now the city is recommending that single-family-zoned neighborhoods — a majority of the city’s developable land — be exempted from any multi-family development. Former LA City Councilmember Mike Bonin recently described these decisions as “LA’s new redlining,” reinforcing the racial and economic divides that already exist in LA. “Across Los Angeles, officials are exempting the wealthiest areas from policies promoting affordable housing,” he writes. “On the Westside, it’s even more disturbing. City officials have defiantly refused to protect existing affordable housing, are blocking homeless housing, and are even closing interim housing sites.”

Right now the biggest challenge is finding public land that’s either made available by the city or acquired through land banks. Buying buildings — something the city is doing now more frequently — can also be one strategy, but many affordability covenants put in place through these deals eventually expire, and the goal is to keep properties off the private market permanently. This allows residents to manage their living situations directly, and even pass their units down to their children, says De León. “Affordable housing development is extremely important, and it's definitely part of the solution,” she says. “What we’re envisioning is a different model: where people have agency, and the home is really truly yours.”

*The communal kitchen of the Gleis 21 social housing co-op building, which is part of a common area that occupies the entire top floor*

As De León notes, the ACT-LA social housing coalition has been organizing around three key issues — land, people, homes — in its goal to decommodify at least 20 percent of the housing stock in LA. While acquisition of land is obviously most critical, ULA also funds about $7 to 8 million per year in capacity-building in the form of programs, training, and a resource hub to pull in community-based organizations and nonprofits. This creates the social infrastructure, if you will, training potential housing residents on a set of best practices for how to manage properties, oversee maintenance, or deploy programs like childcare and gardens. “In Vienna, the way the agencies supported folks living in these units really made the success of social housing possible,” says De León. “We don't want watered-down outreach, we want strong partnerships.”

To create the homes themselves, the social housing movement will need quite a bit of help from city government. “The reality is that the only thing that can make this possible is a better financing mechanism for housing, and especially affordable housing,” says Councilmember Nithya Raman, who visited the same social housing developments as the delegations during a family vacation in Vienna. “Especially with interest rates and the current costs of construction, unless there’s real collaboration between policymakers and financial institutions and developers who know this process back and front, there’s no way that we can make social housing happen.” Raman was part of a recent convening of philanthropy groups, developers, and housing practitioners discussing how to begin to streamline that process. (ULA money, for example, has previously been used to fill in funding gaps for under-construction LA affordable housing projects.) She was also the co-author of a motion, passed out of the housing and homelessness committee last week, that requires the city and banks to report back on developing creative new financing solutions for collective ownership.

And that, says De León, is the real promise of social housing: self-determination. Being able to live in the neighborhood you want to live in, stay in your home for as long as you’d like, and have the right type of apartment to suit your needs at that moment — it’s all completely unthinkable for more Angelenos currently. “I think of my generation, young people who are starting families right now,” says De León. “There's a lot of pressure. Do I move out of the city to own a house and space with my family and have this type of agency? Or do I stay in the city where I have roots and connections to the people I love? Social housing is providing this vision of the future of what housing should look like in Los Angeles.”

Read “Social Housing in Vienna: Reflections from Los Angeles Housing Leaders.” And for further reading, check out these other recent reports. "Building Our Future: Grassroots Reflections on Social Housing” by the national Alliance for Housing Justice features updates on social housing campaigns in cities and states nationwide. At the federal level, the Climate + Community Project is recommending the establishment of a Green Social Housing Development Authority to build and preserve millions of homes.

*The park running through the middle of the* Sonnwendviertel district, a former railyard in Vienna's center. Imagine if we did this on the 215-acre site of the soon-to-be closed Santa Monica Airport?

PROGRESS REPORT

“Overwhelmingly positive outcomes” were reported last month for the 3,200 households that received $1000 monthly cash payments for one year under the city of LA’s first-ever guaranteed income (GI) program. According to analysis by researchers at UCLA and University of Pennsylvania, participants in BIG:LEAP (Basic Income Guaranteed: Los Angeles Economic Assistance Pilot) reported less food insecurity, an increased ability to cover emergency costs, and fewer incidents of domestic violence — with some using the guaranteed income to exit living situations with violent partners. BIG:LEAP participants were also more likely than a control group to find and maintain full-time or part-time employment. At a press conference, Ashley Davis, a 37-year-old single mom, reported buying more fresh food and taking time off from work to spend with her 8 year old: “Essentially, a lot of the stress that I had been dealing with, it was being alleviated by that extra income.”

“In Los Angeles, a city of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, the opportunities for upward economic mobility can seem out of reach,” the researchers write. “BIG:LEAP, the largest GI program at its time of launch, represented a bold and significant investment to provide economic security and a solid foundation for mobility to a diverse group of caregivers with children.”

City leaders praised the outcome and pledged to find ways to expand the program, which cost $40 million, some of it reallocated from LAPD funds in 2020. “The BIG:LEAP program offers significant change for some and life-altering benefits for others,” said Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who will become council president next month. “The data underscores its effectiveness and success in improving health and wellbeing, and stability for all who participated.” The need remains obvious; over 50,000 households had applied during the launch. Meanwhile, LA County’s guaranteed income program, Breathe, will expand to include 2,000 people aged 18 to 21 in the foster care system.

LOCAL REPORT

74% of LA County voters would vote to expand the Board of Supervisors, according to a survey shared as part of a July motion supported by Supervisors Lindsey Horvath, Janice Hahn, and Hilda Solis. If voters pass a November ballot measure the county would increase the number of supervisors from five to nine, add an incredibly powerful mayor-like county executive, and create an ethics commission. Here’s more on how that might work and the pros and cons.https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-08-17/column-the-only-thing-as-broken-as-l-a-s-thousands-of-ruptured-sidewalks-is-city-halls-response

One-half of homeless residents reported being on the streets for more than three years in an ongoing RAND study that tracks homeless residents in Skid Row, Venice, and Hollywood encampments. The study concluded city-sponsored sweeps did little to reduce overall homelessness numbers, but Hollywood encampment residents were less likely to return to the streets due to “more frequent engagements with service providers.”

Nearly 40 percent of all arrests and citations in the city are of unhoused people, even though they make up 1 percent of the city’s population, according to the Human Rights Watch report “You Have to Move!” The 337-page report on the criminalization of LA’s homeless population includes excellent maps and data visualizations.

66 luxury homes sold in the city of LA last quarter, 46.7 percent more than the first quarter of 2024 and 15.8 percent more year over year. “The strong quarter hints that the city’s luxury market has fully digested a mansion tax that stifled activity after it went into effect in April 2023.” Related: Listen to KIWA Executive Director Alexandra Suh and United to House LA Director Joe Donlin discuss why ULA worked.

There are more than 3,400 requests for sidewalk accessibility repairs like curb cuts pending at LA’s Bureau of Engineering, despite a $1.4 billion settlement of a class-action lawsuit in 2016. That number doesn’t include a backlog of tens of thousands more requests to fix broken sidewalks made by people without mobility disabilities. Some city employees have wondered if using data from sidewalk delivery robots could help LA make repairs faster.

STATE REPORT

PENSION PROBLEMS: Public pensions are fueling displacement in the state, asserts a Private Equity Stakeholder Project report. Retirement plans for employees of LADWP, the California Teachers Union, and University of California are being invested in the high-risk funds of the private equity firm Blackstone, which buys buildings, raises rents, and spends millions to oppose rent control campaigns. Here’s an idea: why not invest pension funds in social housing?

CLIMATE CUTS: NextGen Policy has an overview of the state’s climate investment plan, where the original 5-year, $54 billion Commitment has been cut to $45 billion: “Dim projections for state revenues in future years mean that there is little hope that new general fund infusions can revive the Commitment and restore cuts in the near or medium term without bond-based borrowing or creating new revenue sources.”

NOT-COOL SCHOOLS: At California public schools, a median 6.4 percent of the areas used by students are covered in tree canopy, according to a Green Schoolyards America study. Approximately 2.6 million students attend schools with less than 5 percent tree canopy in student zones, offering little space to safely play outdoors in the blistering heat.

FIELD REPORT

*The lawsuit was filed by Community Power Collective, East LA Community Corporation, and Inclusive Action for the City along with vendor plaintiffs Merlín Alvarado and Ruth Monroy. Photo by* *Public Counsel*

Street vendors rallied in Hollywood on July 19 after news of a sweeping settlement in the landmark case Community Power Collective v. City of Los Angeles, which argued that the city’s arbitrary vending restrictions violated state law. In addition to repealing no-vending zones around the city, the settlement ensures that vendors who were criminalized under the unjust system will have any citations canceled and reimbursed. LA’s city council also voted last month to reduce annual street vendor fees from $541 to a much more reasonable $27.51. The Hollywood celebration also effectively culminated a decade-long fight to formally legalize vending in LA. The timing is exceptional as the city just started a major streetscape plan for Hollywood Boulevard named Access to Hollywood that will create more outdoor dining spaces, and can now include vendors instead of excluding them.

Coming up next…

On Sunday, August 18, the first Climate Justice Park Meetup will take place in Palms Park. From 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., grab a coffee, (feel free to bring kids you’ve got ‘em) and join LAFI near the playground to talk about climate issues. RSVP here

Then, on Tuesday, August 20, join LAFI for a Measure A teach-in to learn about a housing affordability and homelessness prevention measure on the LA County ballot this November (and offers a possible funding source for social housing)! That’s on Zoom from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., register here.

And on Monday, August 26, it’s Affordable Housing Development 101 with LAFI's Housing Justice Action Team, Alan Greenlee, Executive Director of SCANPH, Tara Barauskas from Santa Monica Community Corporation, and Cynthia Mejia from National Core. 6 p.m to 7 p.m. on Zoom, register here.

REPORT IN

Hi, Alissa Walker here — I’ll be compiling Report Forward every month. Please send reports, studies, white papers, and big policy wins to me at reports@laf.institute — and forward this to someone working to make LA a better place.

Want to make sure to get these issues every month? Sign up for our email list below!