Austin is in a housing crisis. Landlords are price-fixing rents through algorithms like RealPage, which is used by nearly 50% of apartments in Austin, as homeownership gets more and more out of reach for our city’s working class. This crisis requires bold action, and our current strategy of reducing zoning restrictions to let the free market go to work will not serve everyone. Landlords will always find a way to extract rent from tenants and take advantage of our working class. We need to build public social housing that ensures all people can have a place to call home in our Austin.

To build new social housing, we’re going to need to make major investments in our local housing authorities: the Housing Authority of Travis County (HATC) and the Austin Housing Finance Corporation (AHFC). In order to do this sustainably, we need to pass a new property tax. In 2020, Austin voters passed Project Connect’s funding plan, Proposition A, which added a 4% property tax to expand public transportation access. Social housing requires a similar level of investment. Our local housing authorities need a consistent revenue stream that allows them to build units at scale and know they can count on revenue to support them into the future. We must give a mandate to Austin City Council and the Travis County Commissioner’s Court that we demand social housing be built imminently and that we expect nothing less. This requires mass movement building and electing social housing first people to the dais, similar to what we did to pass the Austin Police Oversight Act (“Yes on A, No on B”). We cannot accept underfunded and weak housing authorities that contract out the buildings to private developers any longer.

We must also prevent the gentrification of our neighborhoods and the displacement of our communities. We can do this through utilizing Community Land Trusts (CLTs), which are organizations that own the underlying land of a given house or complex and only sell rights to the unit, not the land. This allows the CLT to permanently ensure the housing stays accessible to the working class through deed restrictions that require the home be affordable when sold. For rapidly gentrifying areas like East Austin, we must step in and force land sales to Community Land Trusts instead of private developers to keep communities at home. This has been used to similar effect in Burlington to avoid displacement of residents at the largest affordable housing complex in Vermont, Northgate. The City stepped in under Mayor Bernie Sanders’ direction to purchase the property and put it into joint public and tenant ownership to prevent it from being turned into market rate condos, saving Northgate’s affordability and residents.

Similarly, the Champlain Land Trust, also created in Burlington under Sanders’ leadership, owns a myriad of properties which have helped keep housing prices in Burlington low and homeownership within reach of Burlington’s working class.

Landlords need to face consequences for neglecting their tenants. Not only are slumlords driving communities out of Austin, they also present an immediate danger to Austinites living in their buildings. We can take over the buildings, clean up the hazards and build social housing at no cost through urban renewal laws while scaring slumlords into caring for their residents. Urban renewal laws were created in order to allow local governments to clean up “slum and blighted areas” through dispossessing and acquiring property. We must start to enforce these laws against landlords by creating a real penalty for slumlords that continue to harm and abuse residents.

These are solutions that require political will of politicians and staff to challenge the status quo. We must give them that will and force their hand through strong community action. We cannot settle any longer for ineffectual land use code changes. Rather, we must actively build housing for the working class.