Social Housing

What Is Social Housing?

Social housing is housing kept permanently outside the speculative real estate market. Owners are public agencies, nonprofits, limited-profit companies or cooperatives, and rents are set by costs or rules rather than the market. In some European cities, most famously Vienna, it houses a large share of the population, not only the poor.

In the United States, advocates and some local governments now use the term for publicly owned or permanently nonprofit housing open to a broad income range. They contrast it with public housing, which came to serve mainly very low-income households, and with privately owned subsidized housing, whose affordability rules often expire.

Common features include public, nonprofit or resident ownership; permanent affordability; mixed incomes; rents tied to costs or income; and, in many models, a resident role in governance.

How Social Housing Works

Public money or low-cost public loans usually pay to build or buy the homes. Rents then cover operating costs and debt. In mixed-income models, higher rents from some units help cover lower rents in others.

Vienna

Vienna, Austria, reports about 220,000 municipal and 200,000 subsidized apartments, housing more than 60% of its residents. The city says its allocation rules deliberately include middle-class households.

U.S. Experiments

• Montgomery County, Maryland. The county set up a revolving $50 million Housing Production Fund for its public housing agency, the Housing Opportunities Commission (HOC). The money comes from bonds that HOC issues and the county repays from yearly appropriations. The fund made its first loan in December 2021, and the County Council approved a second $50 million in 2022. It provides construction-period financing for HOC’s mixed-income developments. As loans are repaid, the money is lent again.
• Seattle. Voters created the Seattle Social Housing Developer in February 2023 to serve households earning 0% to 120% of area median income, with rents capped at 30% of income. In February 2025, voters approved a 5% employer-paid tax on pay above $1 million per employee to fund it. In February 2026, the City Council approved an agreement to transfer about $115 million to the developer that year.

Social Housing vs. Public Housing

Criticisms and Limitations

Critics point to the large up-front public capital required and the limited U.S. track record of public developers. They also argue that serving middle-income households can divert scarce subsidy from people with the greatest need. U.S. programs remain small and new, while Vienna’s system has been built up over roughly a century.