It’s time for Boston to demolish the stigma of public housing – The Boston Globe

In Vienna, well-maintained public housing complexes are distributed across the city’s neighborhoods and come with amenities like gyms, schools, and even shopping centers. Far from being places to avoid, these complexes housed more than 60 percent of the city’s 1.8 million residents in 2022.

The Viennese call such housing “social,” to reflect its broad usage — nearly 75 percent of the city’s residents qualify for it. This means that a supermarket cashier and a software developer can be neighbors, with each paying less than 30 percent of their income in rent. In Boston, only households making 80 percent or less of the city’s median income are eligible for Boston’s scant 17 percent of subsidized housing.

When I returned home and breathlessly told my friends and colleagues about Vienna’s successful approach to public housing, I saw apprehension in their faces and got tepid responses. They seemed concerned, the way you might be for someone who’d clearly gone down a rabbit hole of delusion. On a couple of occasions, people expressed their skepticism. “Yeah, that all sounds really nice,” they’d begin. “But dude, that’s never gonna happen in America. Come on.”

Recent history is on their side. Greater Boston rent prices shot even higher into the stratosphere during the second year of the pandemic. The idea of bringing Vienna-style social housing here just seemed increasingly fanciful. But around that time, I noticed something that gave me hope. More journalists than ever were going to Vienna to write about its excellent public housing system, and US policy makers were taking note, too.

These Vienna stories heralded optimism. “Lessons From a Renters’ Utopia,” a headline in The New York Times offered. “How Vienna became the world’s most livable city,” the Guardian gushed. And as an explainer for Shelterforce, a nonprofit publication dedicated to reporting on affordable housing, Hawaii state Senator Stanley Chang and San Francisco assembly member Alex Lee published “How We Can Bring Vienna’s Housing Model to the US.”

Now, after years of affordable housing scarcity and a pessimistic outlook on what solutions are possible, it seems that more lawmakers are willing to think big about housing policy.

In September, Mayor Michelle Wu announced that the city would commit $100 million to a Housing Accelerator Fund, a reserve for kickstarting new housing projects that have run into financing obstacles. The housing accelerator will make it possible for the city to start acting like a real estate investor and directly subsidize public and private housing developments with infusions of cash.

The fund also presents an opportunity for Boston to finance modern, mixed-income public housing like the kind I saw in Vienna. One outspoken supporter of the idea is Boston City Councilor at Large Henry Santana, who spent his childhood in the Boston Housing Authority’s Alice Taylor Apartments in Mission Hill.

“Public housing gave my family a foundation with which to thrive,” Santana said on Oct. 17 at a working group session at Boston City Hall where councilors discussed mixed-income social housing. “I’m passionate about this kind of housing because it can help break down racial and social divides which have shaped our neighborhoods,” Santana added.

But as I took my seat on the sidelines of the meeting room beneath a portrait of James Michael Curley — whose last mayoral term coincided with the start of the “urban renewal” era that saw millions of public housing units razed in Boston — the guests I was most interested in hearing from were officials from Maryland’s Montgomery County. Thanks to them, we no longer have to talk about mixed-income social housing solely as a Viennese import.

In Montgomery County, modern, dignified social housing for a wide spectrum of incomes is becoming part of a new normal.

With its own fund, the Housing Opportunities Commission of Montgomery County (HOC) hired developers to build The Laureate, a 268-unit complex in Rockville with public transit access, a pool, and a gym. A quarter of the apartments are set aside for households making less than 50 percent of the area’s median income — about $76,450 or less for a family of four.

The building is fully owned by the city, setting it apart from most affordable housing projects, in which a fixed number of below-market apartments are baked into a building plan with the help of low-income housing tax credits. In Montgomery County, it’s as if policymakers asked, “What if we got into the business of housing development ourselves?”

The HOC works because it is a revolving fund, meaning the HOC lends developers housing accelerator money to fund the construction of a building, with substantially lower interest rates than they would get from private lenders. Once the building’s units have been leased to tenants, the HOC refinances the project, takes a majority stake in the project to establish municipal ownership, and pays itself back for the initial loan. With the housing funds replenished and the HOC having collected interest from the developers, the HOC is better able to fund more mixed-income public housing. Montgomery County Council member Andrew Friedson says, “The Montgomery County housing fund started with $50 million and now it’s $100 million. This is one of the most cost-effective ways to create housing.”

With that formula for financing mixed-income social housing, more cities and states are warming to the idea. City officials in Atlanta and state officials in Rhode Island have announced plans to form their own public development bodies, and Boston’s housing accelerator fund is a step in the same direction.

On Nov. 19, Mayor Wu announced that the first local project to receive housing accelerator financing will be Bunker Hill Housing, the Boston Housing Authority housing complex in Charlestown. A public-private partnership between the BHA and Bunker Hill Redevelopment Company, the project will result in 15 new residential buildings with a total of 2,699 apartments. More than 1,000 of these apartments — about the same number that made up the original complex at Bunker Hill — will remain deeply affordable, meaning their occupants will spend no more than 30 percent of their income on housing regardless of their income. But apartments in the old complex were exclusively available to low-income renters, while the new buildings will have a mix of rents, including for market-rate units.

Santana thinks this approach will yield dividends for the community. “In the United States, public housing has been traditionally viewed as this last resort for low-income families,” Santana says. “The stigma of public housing is tied to disinvestment and neglect. When you drive across the city and you pass a public housing structure, you know it’s public housing.”

Does Santana see a substantive difference between the terms “public housing” and “social housing”? “I think that ‘social housing’ reflects the philosophy that housing really should be a collective responsibility,” Santana says. “The term helps us reposition housing as a public good, rather than a commodity.”

Although that may be a tough sales pitch, Santana believes people are becoming more open to bolder interventions. “What I’m hearing constituents asking for, in all Boston neighborhoods, are options that provide stability; not just temporary fixes,” Santana says.

Today, when you arrive at 55 Bunker Hill Street — where the old BHA complex still exists, waiting to be knocked down, reimagined, and rebuilt — you’ll see a bunch of two- and three-story brick buildings that have clearly seen better days. They are weathered, their design dated and dour. The demarcation is clear: This is public housing, and that — the freshly painted buildings across the street — is private housing. But now, with the housing accelerator fund catalyzing an overdue renovation and expansion of the BHA property, that line is about to blur.

If Boston’s housing accelerator makes more projects like the Bunker Hill redevelopment possible, we might have a tougher time spotting the difference.

Miles Howard is a freelance writer in Boston and the founder of the Walking City Trail. He publishes the weekly hiking newsletter Mind the Moss.