Municipal Social Housing: What can California learn from Seattle’s win?

By now, San Francisco is famous not just for unaffordable rent, but also for its acrimonious debates about how to solve the problem. One well-funded contingent asserts it’s all about making it easier and cheaper to build privately owned homes, but as even the corporate media is now noting, we’ve done a lot of that, and housing isn’t forthcoming. In an unusually frank comment, an advocate for this market-oriented approach admitted at a public hearing, “One of the challenges we face in San Francisco is we need the rent to go back up to get housing to work” Clearly, private development is, at best, limited in what good it can do. We need something more.

Social housing can be that something more. Referring to housing that’s permanently affordable, permanently off the speculative market, tenant governed, and home to people at a range of income levels but always including those who need it the most, social housing has been inspiring socialist organizers in cities across North America, including New York, Minneapolis, and Chicago. But efforts in San Francisco have been stymied by opposition from our previous and current mayors, and the new Big Tech-backed majority on our board of supervisors only makes the headwind greater.

That’s why we we in DSA SF’s Ecosocialism Working Group were so interested to learn from Seattle, a west coast city of similar size to San Francisco, which also had a business-backed mayor and city council opposed to social housing but managed to sidestep them and create and fund a social housing developer through a ballot measure. How did they do it, and what can we learn? To answer that, we hosted a conversation with Eric Lee from Seattle DSA and House Our Neighbors, and to speak to the work already happening towards social housing in San Francisco and in California, we also included Shanti Singh from DSA SF and Tenants Together. What follows is an edited transcript from that conversation, on October 3rd, 2025.

Can you both introduce yourselves?

Shanti Singh: Hi, comrades. I’m Shanti Singh, I have been a DSA SF member for over eight years and used to be co-chair way back in the before times. And my day job is working at Tenants Together, a statewide coalition of tenant unions and other organizations like legal aid and housing justice coalitions. I’m the legislative director, but most of what we do beyond advocacy is organizing and base building and trying to make sure every California city has a tenant union. And that’s drawn us into social housing in a big way.

Eric Lee: Hello, everyone. My name is Eric. I am on the steering committee for House Our Neighbors. I’m also a member of Seattle DSA and was co-chair of our housing justice working group for two years during our fight for social housing. House Our Neighbors built a coalition that went toe-to-toe with some of our city’s most powerful actors, like the landlord lobby, tech companies, financial firms, etcetera. And we won. We won the creation of a Seattle social housing developer, which is a public development authority designed to provide publicly owned, permanently affordable, tenant-run housing. And we also won a tax on some of the city’s wealthiest and some of the world’s wealthiest corporations to fund that development. I’m interested to learn also about your all’s struggle for a more just housing system and share the details of what we’ve done up here.

How do you define social housing?

Shanti: There’s not a settled definition: it’s contested in good ways and bad. But there are some basic principles I think are useful. It’s permanently decommodified, so it’s not a speculative tool. A lot of our “affordable housing” in the United States can revert to purely private housing after 15 to 55 years, depending on where you live.

So that takes me to social ownership, defined broadly to include public housing and public ownership, community land trusts, and limited equity cooperatives that are run by the tenants themselves.

Universality. Who is social housing for? It should be for the people who need it most. But we also want to have targeted universalism, where it’s available to everybody who needs it, regardless of their status or their ability or their employment.

And then of course, there’s community control. Tenant-led development and tenant autonomy, so that social housing is actually run by the people that live in it. That doesn’t just mean tenants are picking the paint color on their walls, but maybe even being able to determine their rents. The tenants really have control over the housing that they live in.

Eric: Those are our key pillars that we’ve organized around, as you’ve said: publicly owned, permanently affordable. Tenants don’t pay more than 30% of their income in rent, ideally much less than that. It’s tenant-run, so 50% of the development authority’s board has to be elected by the tenants the developer serves. Also the buildings have councils and committees that manage operations of the buildings themselves.

Union built, green housing as well. New housing in Seattle will be built to the Passive House standard. The built environment has a relation to climate justice.

How did Seattle’s campaign get started?

Eric: House Our Neighbors emerged out of a response to a business-backed initiative to enshrine sweeps in our city charter, and make incredibly vague, unfunded commitments to shelter. It fortunately never made it to the ballot. House Our Neighbors filed a lawsuit, and it was thrown out by a judge.

Coming out of that victory, House Our Neighbors wanted to take on a more positive vision instead of fighting against something. That became I-135 [in 2023], which was a ballot initiative that established a social housing developer. Unfortunately, due to Washington state’s wonky laws, a ballot initiative can only focus on a single thing, so we couldn’t fund the developer within that initiative.

The initiative provided minimal startup funds so the developer could hire staff and lease office space, and we were hoping our local or state governments would provide funds for property acquisitions or actual development. However, they didn’t.

So we were forced to run another initiative [Prop. 1A in February 2025] that implemented a payroll tax on businesses that pay an individual employee over a million dollars. This tax is estimated to raise $50 million annually for the developer. We faced steep opposition from tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce and the real estate lobby. And we won, and the developer should be receiving those funds early next year.

How did you structure this program to ensure it was implemented in spite of opposition from your mayor and all but one of your city council members? Based on our experience in San Francisco, I’m thinking to myself, “The mayor is going to say, ‘I’m just not going to do that.’” Or he won’t allocate the funds.

Eric: The initiatives are binding. I-135 actually created the public development authority (PDA) and required the city to allocate a certain amount of money for their startup funds. The mayor did drag his feet on providing those initial startup funds and the city actually never provided the full amount, and required a partnership with the state to provide those funds. But the text of the initiative is actually binding and they have to follow it.

Similarly with the tax itself. Those funds are allocated for the social housing developer and must be directed to the social housing developer. Again, they’re dragging their feet on providing those funds. The initiative passed in February of this past year and the funds were supposed to be retroactive to January, and they still haven’t received the initial funds. They’re expected to receive them in the first quarter of 2026. But because of the legal power of the initiative, they have to comply with it. I’d be interested to learn more about how your elected officials cannot follow the voters’ mandate.

Shanti: Our former socialist in office, Supervisor Dean Preston, with DSA and other organizations, spearheaded in 2020 a real estate transfer tax, Prop I. There were carve-outs for affordable housing, but if you sell an office building or a residential building over $10 million, the seller pays this transfer tax. That passed with 58% despite being outspent 20 to 1.

That funding was meant to go to rent relief and social housing. Unfortunately due to a legal technicality, that funding was not able to be automatically dedicated, so it went into the general fund. We’ve been fighting over that money ever since. [Prop 13 requires a two-thirds supermajority for taxes devoted to a specific purpose, unless the measure is placed on the ballot by gathering signatures, which wasn’t safe in 2020 due to Covid.]

In 2022, we won a $64 million budget allocation. A lot of it got spent on taking 200 to 250 units of housing off the private market and delivering them to community land trusts. We won an allocation to start researching what we would need to do to have a development authority like Seattle has.
And that funding is under attack. A couple years after Prop I, the city of LA passed Measure ULA, a similar transfer tax where 25% goes to social housing models. Now there is an attempt by real estate interests, both in the legislature and possibly at the 2026 ballot, to roll back ULA and potentially transfer taxes across the state. So it’s two steps forward and one step back.

How did Seattle build the coalition it needed to overcome elected officials’ opposition and win?

Eric: One key group was traditional affordable housing providers, who are severely underfunded. We didn’t want them to see the social housing developer as a competing entity for scarce funding. So we baked into I-135 a clause that the social housing developer would not be eligible for existing funds, but would require a new source of revenue. So the Housing Development Consortium came out as neutral and we saw individual affordable housing providers like the Low Income Housing Institute actually endorse our initiative.

Another endorsement we were proud to receive was the Seattle Building and Construction Trade Council. This is a group of unions who typically endorse more conservative candidates, but we baked into our initiative that the housing should built by union firms.

Regarding how we structured the campaign, a lot of campaigns use working people for photo ops or grunt work, but don’t really bring them into the decision-making. We empowered everyday volunteers, working people, to take action. We had a series of working groups—field, communications, endorsements—where anyone who expressed interest could join and help in the development of our tactics and strategies.

Part of our field strategy was to contact people who were materially affected by the social housing developer, namely renters. We looked at voter records and property ownership records, put them together, and identified if someone likely owned the unit of housing they lived in. Then we tried to get into apartment buildings to specifically talk to renters. That was just some volunteer who came up with that idea and put those two data sets together.

Seattle’s vote was held at a weirdly timed special election in February, and there was a competing measure that was a watered-down version of social housing your mayor was supporting. How did that end up happening?

Eric: Basically every step along the way, we faced some sort of opposition and that was one of the instances.

There’s a couple of phases of a ballot initiative [in Washington state]. First you file it, then you collect signatures. Then it goes to the city council and they can take one of three actions. They can pass it outright and make it a law. They can put it onto the next election. Or they can put it on the next ballot with an alternative they concoct.

We used public data requests to uncover the conversations that were going behind the scenes. The Chamber of Commerce contacted our council president with a sample alternative, and they took that sample alternative and passed it on to the ballot. 

They also delayed the vote. We turned in signatures to qualify for the November election, which had huge, 70 to 80% turnout here in Seattle. And we really wanted to be on that ballot because we felt like a higher turnout election would benefit us. Instead, they delayed the vote past the deadline to put us on the November ballot. Instead they cloistered us to a February ballot where it has like 30% turnout, and the turnout is typically mostly homeowners.

I have the flyer here that they sent out. This is our mayor, Bruce Harrell. They sort of phrased it as, “the people for responsible social housing.” It was a watered-down initiative to kneecap the social housing developer. It essentially provided two options to vote No on our initiative. But luckily people saw through this.

How do zoning changes in Seattle and San Francisco tie into the fight for social housing?

Eric: Seattle right now is going through what they call their comprehensive planning. It happens every couple of decades and outlines how Seattle will handle housing growth and zoning changes over the next two decades. The mayor and city council are largely responsible for drafting that. Most of Seattle is single family zoning, or it’s been changed to something called neighborhood residential zoning, which allows up to four townhomes on every lot.

House Our Neighbors particularly is interested in density bonuses for social housing. Traditional affordable housing providers receive density bonuses, which allows them to build larger buildings than they would be allowed to if it was market rate housing. However, the social housing developer under current Seattle and Washington state laws doesn’t qualify for those bonuses. We hope to change those laws to afford the Seattle social housing developer those bonuses and incentives.

Shanti: In San Francisco, we have to submit something called a housing element. It has to be compliant with state requirements, where there have been changes to state law lately to facilitate mostly market-rate housing construction with a little sprinkling of affordable on the side.

But that’s coming from interests that are primarily hostile to public investment. Hostile to social housing, hostile to taxing and reigning in speculation. And I think it’s especially acute in SF. In LA, because there is that funding source [ULA], there is more energy from the left to tackle single family zoning in our own way and be like, “We want to build social housing in these communities.”

But here, the problem is that everybody who’s behind this rezoning has no interest or commitment to even meeting our state goal of 46,000 low and middle income units. When you ask the folks in charge of the zoning plan, our previous mayor or current mayor, “What’s your plan to get those 46,000 units?”, it’s a question our DSA SF electeds like Dean Preston before and Jackie Fielder now are asking—they don’t have one. It’s just like, “The market will fix everything.” And that poisons the well a bit. As much as we do have exclusionary communities, the [rezoning] is very much in lockstep with real estate, who are also the ones who tried to kill our transfer tax, who don’t want social housing to happen. It makes people question what it can be used for.

Some version of this is going to pass in my opinion. It’s up to us to figure out, what is our vision and how do we weaponize the situation as DSA and as the left in SF? How do we use this to fight hard for social housing and turn lemons into lemonade?

As Shanti alluded to, we have another “pro-housing” faction in San Francisco, the YIMBY movement, and historically there’s been bad blood between YIMBYs and socialists. Does this dynamic also exist in Seattle?

Eric: I wouldn’t say we have that particular tension. A lot of urbanists in Seattle support social housing.

At House Our Neighbors, we understand that there is a supply issue. The amount of housing being built [compared to] projected housing needs for the future is insufficient. However, where most urbanists would end there, we think that’s only a key aspect of the problem. The other component is who owns and controls that housing. But I haven’t really seen that sort of tension here in Seattle. I was kind of surprised to hear that.

Shanti: I think it boils down to the progressives versus moderates divide that long predates DSA. Since Mayor Dianne Feinstein in the seventies, it’s been the tenant movement in San Francisco versus the downtown real estate interests. A lot of this was before we were born. But also, as DSA, we’re not the Democrats, right? We’re not progressives. We’re not moderates. We’re socialists. I think we should be conscious of history, do our own thing and stick to our principles, but not be bound by whatever the beef between progressives and moderates is.

What efforts are happening at the state level towards social housing in California?

Shanti: In LA, a quarter of measure ULA’s funding is dedicated to social housing. And that includes a lot of the community land trusts in Los Angeles, but could be towards building the kind of housing that’s being hopefully going to be built very soon in Seattle. So that is dedicated, though the rest of the money is going towards a lot of other programs, like legal aid for tenants, homelessness services.

I want to take this back to the movement. I consider tenant organizing in California to be at a nascent growing stage. There’s new tenant unions popping up all over, which is awesome to see. But we’ve got a long way to go.

I see social housing as an organic demand of organized tenants. You had the Moms for Housing in Oakland, homeless black mothers occupying vacant housing owned by a big nationwide speculative investor. You had a similar occupation in El Sereno in East Los Angeles, which is actually on publicly owned Caltrans-owned homes. You see the Veritas [a real estate investment firm] tenants in San Francisco, who are demanding Veritas housing be bought by the city. And you have the Hillside Villa tenants who are part of the Los Angeles Tenants Union in Chinatown, LA, demanding the city eminent domain their property and take it away from a slumlord. Fresno mobile home tenants who are winning co-ops, buying back their mobile home parks.

All of these are different social housing fights. Even with the tenant movement being in this nascent stage, organized tenants are thinking, “Why does my landlord own this housing anyway? They don’t have to. I can own it. The state can own it. A land trust can own it.” We feel that we have the power collectively to take this housing away, and off the market for good. That demand has exceeded the resources available, even as we have 60+ community land trusts growing. So the state needs to step up and do something.

We passed a study bill called SB 555 in 2023. It inspired the framework in AOC’s Homes Act. We basically said, here’s what social housing is. It’s permanently affordable. It’s permanently decommodified. It’s for people who are cost burdened by the private market. That’s a broad range from no income to middle income people. It can be owned by a community land trust. It can be owned publicly, can be owned as a limited equity cooperative.

We put some of those big-tent guidelines forward. And we demanded that the California Department of Housing and Community Development, HCD, put out recommendations. How do we get 1.2 million units of social housing, either through acquisition or construction, in California? That study is due at the end of 2026.

The purpose of this is to make sure our definition of social housing is in state law, because there are attempts to co-opt social housing. But also to get recommendations we can start turning into campaigns, locally and at the state level.

I got to go to Vienna three years ago, which was really cool. The main lesson is that there’s a social movement and a political party, the Social Democratic Party of Austria, that’s managed to maintain [their social housing system]. When we think about it as DSA, the social movements and political infrastructure are really more important even than thinking about the technicalities of public versus cooperative housing or how they have a ton of public control of land. They have tight rent controls on the private market, they keep a stranglehold on the private market to make social housing sustainable and keep growing it in Vienna, but all of that comes down to the strength of the movement.