Our current profit-driven housing ecosystem has produced scarce options for people seeking affordable and sustainable places to live in communities that meet their needs. What options do we have for creating permanent solutions? PowerSwitch Action, Local Progress and PolicyLink are excited to co-author this report that unpacks local governments’ efforts to build out social housing solutions that benefit the public. 

This report offers principles for how we achieve a different world, and a snapshot of how emerging local policies are working toward those principles. It presents a history of how the real estate industry has worked for a century to distort our housing choices in favor of their profit interests, and dissects how real proposals to build and manage housing in the public interest can guide us out of a housing crisis.

The report includes an overview of ten cities and states’ proposals and programs to create social housing – from Seattle and Atlanta to Chicago and Washington, D.C. — and compares them using principles that organizers and advocates have prioritized to measure the strength of social housing policy design.