Decommodifying Housing: The Social Housing Development Authority

Abstract

As the housing crisis has taken hold in communities all around the world, many have pointed to models of “decommodified” housing to remove land and housing from the speculative real estate market. Yet neoliberalism has eroded the social, political, and administrative powers necessary to create such new solutions, especially at the scale that we need. This essay proposes a Social Housing Development Authority (SHDA) to grow the supply of decommodified housing. The SHDA would act as a public bank and a public developer to create decarbonized, non-market housing, including community land trusts, limited equity cooperatives, and government-owned rental housing. The institution would also foreground democratic governance at all levels and solve a variety of political and coordination challenges to the scalable decommodification of housing. In doing so, it would unwind the legacy of racialized inequality that is exacerbated when housing is a speculative commodity.