On February 6, 2024, New York State (NYS) Senator Cordell Cleare, a Democrat in the 30th Senate DIstrict (including Harlem), introduced Senate Bill 2023-S8494 to establish “the New York State social housing development authority as a public benefit corporation to increase the supply of permanently affordable housing in the state through the acquisition of land and renovation or rehabilitation of existing real property, and through the construction of new, permanently affordable housing.”

The bill, which was immediately referred to the Senate Finance Committee and remains there as of today, has the potential to democratize housing across the state and to make a significant and long-lasting impact in the areas of housing and economic justice.

Social housing and “public authorities” in New York

New York State Sen. Cordell Cleare, who introduced the S8494 bill. (Photo: NY State Senate)

According to the bill, “social housing” means housing that is “permanently affordable and democratically controlled.” In response to the “greed of private ownership” in the housing market, the bill would empower New York State to produce housing comparable to, if not better in quality than, the private market. At the same time, it would standardize housing costs so that all New Yorkers can afford a place to live.

Co-sponsors of the bill include a broad coalition of NYS Senate Democrats representing communities from Brooklyn to Rochester.

The bill would create the Social Housing Development Authority (SHDA), a public-private entity empowered to “[create] a durable and scalable program for the ongoing construction, rehabilitation and maintenance of permanently affordable housing statewide.” The intention of this program would be to “[preserve] high-quality, affordable housing for New York’s residents.”

In other words, the SHDA would create high quality housing, owned by the state (that is, by ‘we, the people’) and marketed at fixed prices so that multiple social strata can afford the housing. This democratization of housing would counterbalance the runaway costs of housing in the private market, which can ascribe prohibitively high prices to housing stock that is substandard if not deteriorating in localities like Buffalo.

The NYS legislature has used this political mechanism - the so-called “public authority” - in many industries. They are usually organized for the purposes of managing “the construction, operation, financing, and improvement of various forms of state infrastructure and public services.”

NYS public authorities operate in a wide range of fields like transportation, parking, water and sewage, telecommunications, and more. As historian Gail Radford showed in her canonical study The Rise of the Public Authority (2013), public authorities allow for autonomous decision-making and innovative financing minus the legal and political obstacles presented by state constitutions and bureaucracies.

Permanent affordability and collective ownership

The broad powers proposed for the SHDA could have extraordinary ramifications for housing markets across the state. The Authority, for example, would receive state funding to build and buy housing stock and become a big and powerful landlord: “The policy of the state…shall…direct subsidies towards both construction and acquisition, in which the authority through its stewardship may hold such subsidy permanently in trust.”

“The authority would use state funds to build and buy properties across New York and would employ NYS residents and the tenants of SDHA properties to determine which properties are purchased, where properties are developed, how properties are managed, and what economic thresholds will make properties affordable to the broadest cross section of population where the properties are maintained. Furthermore, tenants would be organized, trained, and encouraged to become collective owners of property acquired by the state in the private housing market. ”

The SDHA would also empower tenants in state-owned housing to make decisions about the maintenance of the housing developments - that is, how they’re managed - in order to provide a high quality experience for the people who live in the properties: “The policy of the state shall…create such authority with a vision for governance that empowers its residents to participate in decision-making, creates a sense of shared responsibility…, and generates a positive feedback cycle for the authority in the implementation and modification of policies.”

To summarize, if the SDHA were instituted, it would create a publicly owned housing market, where tenants have decision-making powers in the developments where they live. If that’s not evolutionary enough, then consider this: The SDHA would assist tenants in their collective efforts to democratize the private housing market themselves. “The policy of the state,” reads the bill, “shall further be to promote…the conversion of private housing to social housing models, under the stewardship of the authority, through acquisitions made by the authority in partnership with tenants, wherever tenants of a building shall seek to purchase their building at a fair market value from its owner.”

In other words, the SHDA would support, if not subsidize, coalitions of tenants who seek to buy the property in which they live from a private landlord. This means that a team of tenants can achieve collective ownership of their housing development with the state’s support.

Demystifying social housing

Permanent affordability and collective ownership make social housing radically different from “public housing” and “affordable housing.” (See our earlier piece gathering independent, grassroots, and global perspectives on the issue of social housing.)

Ramsgate, UK. (Photo: Katie Gerrard/Unsplash)

On the one hand, public housing is similar to social housing in that it is governed by public housing authorities (PHAs). In her contribution to The Encyclopedia of Housing (2012), social scientist Rachel G. Bratt notes that PHAs were “responsible for a complex set of tasks, requiring various kinds of expertise: developing and acquiring developments, maintaining and modernizing them, selecting and evicting tenants, and providing social services to residents.”

Public housing authorities are sanctioned by the national government, not the state government, and they target low-income tenants and the working poor almost exclusively. Notably, the PHAs have not been designed to incentivize collective ownership of the housing developments.

Affordable housing, on the other hand, is better understood as a formula for a desired outcome rather than as a concrete strategy. According to social scientist Kathe Newman, what constitutes ‘affordability’ in this context is determined by the cost of housing and how it impacts the income of the tenant. “Housing affordability,” writes Newman, “is measured as a percentage of income: Housing that consumes less than 30 to 40 percent of total household income is considered affordable.”

In this sense, affordability is relative to the population targeted for housing. Put another way, housing developments are more or less ‘affordable’ depending on the class status of the people they seek to house. “People at any income level can find affordable housing a problem,” observes Newman, “but it mostly afflicts poor and middle-class households since the private market rarely produces a sufficient amount of housing to meet their needs.”

A horizon of transformation

The SHDA currently under consideration by the NYS Senate might be best understood as an evolutionary strategy to make housing in New York permanently affordable. The authority would use state funds to build and buy properties across New York and would employ NYS residents and the tenants of SDHA properties to determine which properties are purchased, where properties are developed, how properties are managed, and what economic thresholds will make properties affordable to the broadest cross section of population where the properties are maintained.

Furthermore, tenants would be organized, trained, and encouraged to become collective owners of property acquired by the state in the private housing market. “We, the People” can become state-sanctioned landlords.

With these elements at the core of the SHDA proposal, radical transformation of the New York State housing market may be on the horizon.