Shanti Singh on social housing, movement infrastructure, and effective coalitions

"We're doing labor organizing for your house."

Shanti Singh is the Legislative & Communications Director at Tenants Together, a statewide base-building & advocacy coalition of 60+ tenant unions, land trusts, legal aid, eviction defense, and other community organizations across California. She has been organizing for eight years with renters in private, public and nonprofit housing in San Francisco. She formerly co-chaired the San Francisco Democratic Socialists of America and is a city commissioner for clean municipal energy and public banking, chair of the SF Housing Stability Oversight Board to explore social housing strategies, and board vice president of the San Francisco Community Land Trust.

This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity.

It seems like housing is in crisis basically everywhere in the country—we have rising unaffordability, homelessness, displacement, etc. Some people say we just need to allow developers to build more and/or change zoning laws, but there's a clear tension between housing as a commodity and being a need that the market can’t always provide. So what should we be doing?

We should be building public and social housing, and acquiring it. This thing where it's progressive to rely predominantly on the market for housing production, that all kicked off in San Francisco and I was around for that. That discourse has taken many forms. Some of it’s moved well to the left of where it was, some of it’s moved to the right; it's all over the place. But I definitely remember being around when YIMBYism and stuff was just getting started. It was more explicitly libertarian back then, I'll put it that way.

What do I think about that? I don't think it makes sense on its face: why would we depend on a cyclical market that's only going to build predominantly at the higher end to solve a housing shortage? I do believe there's a housing shortage; I just don't believe the market will ever solve the housing shortage. Just on the economics of it, you're expecting developers to continue building even when rents are falling, you're expecting their investors to be stupid enough to finance that. There's a lot of reasons why that doesn't work.

We have a 1.2 million unit shortage for low-to-middle income people alone in California. That's a unit shortage that the market is not going to build. Someone put it really well on Twitter the other day: it's true that there's a housing shortage and it's true that some land-use regulations can be a barrier to housing production, and people learned that thing then didn't learn a second or third thing [laughs]. That is really how I think about it, too. Even if you’re not a socialist, it doesn't really make sense to pin all your hopes on the credit cycle or the business cycle or the private market. Folks will say, “Yeah, we support more money and investment in affordable housing, etc.” but saying you support it nominally is completely different than winning it politically at the scale that is required. And when we have 50 years of wage stagnation and racialized income inequality, that makes the affordability challenge so much bigger.

I have seen a lot of different definitions of social housing out there. How do you explain that to people who aren't familiar with what social housing is?

I stick to the core tenets: that it's permanently affordable, that it's permanently de-commodified, that there's community and tenant autonomy—that they actually have power over what happens to the housing that they live in. And, of course, that it's safe and secure and decent. That's the umbrella of what social housing is. I think it's helpful to think about social housing as a spectrum, but to hold those tenets. And not excluding things like existing public housing that has been defunded from the definition of social housing.

I think it's an ongoing debate, and it's coming to the forefront. A lot of people are having those debates—sometimes productively, sometimes unproductively—about what social housing means. It is an umbrella term, but I think that that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I do think that it's important to be specific wherever possible, but it's a useful umbrella term to talk about things like community land trusts or limited equity housing cooperatives in addition to municipally owned housing and existing public housing. I think it's very useful in that sense, but it definitely is vague enough that it can be easily misunderstood or co-opted, and I think that's a big challenge.

So you went to Vienna to check out their legendary social housing. How has that been sustained, and what do you think we can learn from that here? 

People love to nerd out on the different land and funding models. And don't get me wrong, I love to nerd out on that stuff, too. But I think it's really about the political coalition that built Red Vienna, and the political coalition that's maintaining it. Honestly, the coolest part of it for me was two things. One, being able to actually experience Vienna with tenants, not just in private housing, but in NYCHA—New York public housing—and getting to see it through their eyes and hear what they thought about it. And to also meet and get to know some folks who are affiliated with the Austrian Social Democratic Party and their Chamber of Labour, who are basically the political line of defense; politics in Austria writ large is not necessarily going in a positive direction. So to actually see the people who are fighting to defend it, and also experience it through the eyes of tenants who are organizing in the United States and to see how they felt about it.  

When we were touring Karl Marx-Hof—one of the big, famous municipal developments—with the tenants, they were like, “If we won funding for NYCHA, our housing could look like this; this is NYCHA if we cared about it." That was something that I heard a lot of tenants say. They were able to directly make that connection and immediately say, “This is a political challenge—we're organizing for investment, we're organizing for resources.”

And the Social Democratic Party folks are definitely under the gun. Not just from fascism, but also from neoliberalism. Because the EU has really curtailed how much you can spend on municipal housing systems if you're a member country, and that's affected them pretty seriously for the last few decades. Though they are trying to go back to a more direct municipal housing model, the kind that they used to use for all their older housing. There are a lot of lessons, but I was really thinking about: how did they win this as a coalition 100 years ago? How are they defending it now? My mind was really focused. They're still facing a ton of challenges, which I think people forget sometimes; they just think about it as this perfect place with no issues. That's not true. 

We have this idea here of perpetually increasing home values. It's basically sold as a retirement plan, and renters are often treated as an afterthought to politicians. How do you think we can navigate that tension between homeowners and tenants to move towards making housing a human right?

I don't really see homeowners as a political bloc the way that some folks who think about housing do. They're not coordinated in that way. From the tenant side, when we think about coordinated political blocs, we think they're pretty obvious—they have names. They're called the Apartment Association and the realtors and the chambers of commerce, etc. We think about it as our enemy is real estate capital writ large.

It is going to be really hard to disentangle. The US/UK/anglophone model of perpetually appreciating property ownership has also been exported. I was rereading Raquel Rolnik’s amazing book, Urban Warfare, recently and she talks a lot about how that model—through the World Bank and other institutions—has been exported as a solution for the Global South, which is rapidly urbanizing. That’s really frightening. How do we disentangle it is the million dollar question. Even folks on the center left have been saying more and more we have to make renting more secure and more stable for people. I think that's definitely true. But the dream of homeownership—I never thought about this when I was watching HGTV as a kid—we have a whole channel dedicated to this ideology. We have many channels dedicated to this ideology.

But I don't think of homeowners themselves as a political bloc such that they can't be moved in one direction or the other. These models are very small and they need to be scaled up and tested more, but things like limited equity housing coops and community land trusts and those kinds of alternative ownership models, I think about them as strategies to wean people off of the white picket fence. That being said, a lot of the tenants that we organize with, many of whom are victims of the 2008 foreclosure crisis, those folks know. They don't have any illusions about being a temporarily embarrassed homeowner; they know how far out of reach that is. A lot of people do. Not just the people who it's been taken away from, but even the people who might aspire to that.

It's really about security. It's about financial security, it's about wealth building, it's about physical stability. I'm optimistic that we can come up with solutions and policies that offer them that outside of this traditional homeownership model. It has not been working for so long, especially since 2008. There are more people who are disillusioned with it than I think we like to assume. 

What's one weird trick for doing it? [laughs] I don’t know. It is a huge question, and there's a lot of different ways to approach it. There's a lot of discourse about things like rent control—I'm in a rent-controlled apartment right now—being bad because it offers people stability. God forbid somebody gets to live in the same place. It's going to be really uphill, because while there's definitely changing consciousness on the ground, when I go into the Capitol, all those talking points, all that ideology, is still there. There's so much talk about wealth-building. 

I'll just add one more thing that I also think about, that someone observed when we were in Vienna, which is that renting is considered a form of wealth-building there. Because they're not spending that much money on renting their housing, they get to stay, which means they get to build wealth for their families. If you're the kind of person who's susceptible to wealth-building discourse, like a politician, no one ever thinks about stable renting as a form of wealth-building, even though it absolutely can be. But they do over there, and that's also something that I hadn't really thought of pushing before. That's still probably a pretty out-of-left-field thing to be saying in the Capitol, but I have been testing it out.

Do you think that fighting for legislative reforms can be complementary to tenant unions and tenant organizing? Do you think it makes sense to fight directly for better housing policy intertwined with organizing tenants?

I'm biased because I’m the legislative director for an outfit that does primarily build tenant unions and do tenant organizing [laughs]. I'm the policy jockey for a base-building outfit; I do this so that my coworkers can do the important work of organizing. I think about this all the time because it's what I do. Besides the fact that we have to really conserve our capacity, when it comes to reforms, I think it's incumbent on policy people to always be thinking: how are you moving the organizing forward? Does this make the organizing easier? Even if we lose a particular bill, did we build something out of it? And to actually plan that ahead. Before you even try to initiate something, to actually plan out: if I lose, has this built power, has this built infrastructure? What can we get out of this that's going to set us up for more success next time? I think about it as building infrastructure, policies like right to counsel or right to organize. Right to organize is a big one for us at Tenants Together.

It's really about it being a vehicle to movement-building. People can't organize their communities if they get pushed out of them in the first place. So a lot of the work that we do is passing local rent control, because that's a movement infrastructure policy. And I think our enemies in the landlord lobby know that [laughs].

What is right to organize policy?

That's another million dollar question, because I think it will look very different in different places. In 2019, we did a bill called SB 529. It didn't make it, but it would have strengthened certain provisions that allow you to withhold rent over habitability, etc. They're in the penal code or the civil code. We wanted to strengthen those provisions, but there was also anti-retaliation: you're not evicted for belonging to a tenant association or a tenant union. That was what was viable at the state level.

Labor's obviously decades and decades ahead of us, and there's no Wagner Act for tenant organizing, there's no NLRB for tenant organizing. But it's really fascinating to see discussions within labor about different forms of striking and different forms of organizing, and how much does it help or hurt to codify or legalize one form potentially at the expense of another form of organizing. We're at the very beginning of having that debate, I think. Not just in California, but also nationwide.

And last year, San Francisco passed—I believe we are the first city—a right to organize ordinance where there actually is an adjudicating body. It's our rent board, which also oversees our rent control. There is basically legal recognition of a tenant association. You don't have to register, but you do have to meet certain criteria. The law compels your landlord to recognize and negotiate with you, and that's pretty sweet. That one’s flown under the radar; there hasn't been a lot of coverage. My supervisor in my district, whose election I worked on in 2015, passed it in coordination with one of Tenants Together’s member organizations that does a ton of tenant organizing citywide in SF called the Housing Rights Committee. 

I suspect it will look different in different places. You could have as much of a diversity of opinion about legal recognition to organize within the housing justice movement as you have in labor. I wish I could talk more publicly about what people are cooking up, but a lot of our allies in labor—who are very attuned to housing issues because their workers are predominantly tenants who are under the gun—are also very interested in passing right to organize ordinances. Obviously, I love hanging out with labor. They have things they want to learn from us, but we have a lot we want to learn from them, too, because they've been in this organizing debate forever. 

Where does organized labor fit into this? Or where have you seen success and bringing together housing and labor?

I think organized labor is essential; those are our most natural allies. The SF right to organize ordinance was called “A Union at Home.” We've been working with a lot of the University of California unions who have been getting hit really hard by housing costs issues. Not just for their students and their academic workers, but also they care about the gentrification and displacement in the broader communities where UC campuses are. And there was a big letter—other unions and orgs from outside of California signed on, we signed on—demanding that UC divest from Blackstone, enact protections on its housing, and advocate for tenant protections on private housing on its campuses. So rent control, just cause for eviction, things like that, but also that they divest from Blackstone and use that to actually build social housing on their land, of which they have quite a lot. That was like a tenant-labor Voltron [laughs]. I think there were some environmental justice folks, too. So it was a really cool thing to see, and there's been a lot of action around that. It's going to be a divestment campaign, and it's just getting off the ground. 

We have a couple bills that are tenant and housing justice and labor organizations working together, cross-endorsing each other's proposals. There's a bill now, SB 584, that's a tax on short-term rentals across the state to fund social housing, and its sponsors are the state building trades and the California Labor Federation, the AFL-CIO. Their names are on it, and we're supporting it. We have a planning bill to come up with a state grant social housing plan, and they're on our bill now. There's all sorts of different coalitions and work that's being done. Labor has always been our allies on local rent control fights. SEIU is a huge player in housing politics and policy; they’re always with us on state and often local initiatives. UNITE HERE is another one that all over the state is very engaged in housing issues.

To take a step back, definitely the more active labor partners on local and state work are, unsurprisingly, the ones whose workers are predominantly on the lower-income end because they're getting hit the hardest. So it's obvious to them, it's obvious to all of us that we should be working together. There's that segment of labor, but I think that other parts of labor are either getting involved or have been involved or that we're trying to work together more on housing issues. There's a lot of exciting stuff going on. In terms of what we do as tenant organizers, we just think we're doing labor organizing for your house [laughs]. 

You've listed some examples in California you’re very familiar with. Are you seeing other promising housing organizing around the US right now? Are there any recent victories you think are good lessons to draw from?

There's tenant organizing happening everywhere, and it's so exciting to see. It’s not just this coastal blue city thing. Ask Kansas City Tenants [laughs], who are doing incredible. We're all in awe of Kansas City Tenants, we all have a huge crush on them. You see a resurgence of tenant organizing in SF, LA, Seattle, New York, Chicago, etc.—in those big blue cities. But you're also seeing more tenant organizing—and land organizing, too—in more and more areas. If you look at the map of Right to the City member organizations and where it's growing, you can be in rural New Mexico, you can be in the exurbs of the deep south; it's popping off everywhere, and that's really cool to see. There wasn't a renters union in Pittsburgh when I was growing up there, but there is one there. There’s tenant organizing in Rochester and Buffalo and Cleveland and Detroit. It’s been growing in all sorts of different places. You're starting to see this kind of organizing happening in rural areas and exurbs, too. It’s not necessarily places where there's multifamily buildings that you’re organizing, it’s talking about community stewardship and ownership of land. There's so many inspiring examples.

Have you seen good examples—in your own experience or elsewhere—of bringing together electoral and labor and housing, and how these things can be complimentary?

The one I have the most direct experience with, because that's our bread and butter where I work, is local rent control. It is, unfortunately, limited by state preemption that we've been trying to get rid of since 1995 when it passed. It's the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act. It's awful, we’re trying to get rid of it. But besides that, you pass rent control city-by-city in California; that’s how it works. And you can do it two ways: you can go to the ballot, or you can go to your city council. So electing a good city council is pretty important. You see a lot of more electoral-minded folks getting involved in local rent control campaigns for that reason. You need a coalition to go to the ballot, you need money, you need resources. So it's really interesting to see different constellations of different people working in different subject areas.

There's a city called Bell Gardens, part of greater LA, that passed rent control. And the big organization that was organizing tenants in Bell Gardens, mostly working class Latina women, was California Latinas for Reproductive Justice. They make the connection between rent control and women's reproductive autonomy. When we were trying to pass rent control in Sacramento a few years ago, our allies were three different SEIU unions. So it's different in different places. Some of our allies in the East Bay are not housing organizations. We've worked with an early childhood development organization. Environmental justice folks are involved as well.

There was a crop of early cities that passed rent control in the late 70s/early 80s, which was SF, LA, Berkeley, Oakland, Santa Monica, and San Jose. Then nobody passed rent control for about 30 years. And then Richmond, California was the first city to pass it and kicked off this wave that's been continuing now for eight years. Why? Because Richmond was owned by Chevron. And so Richmond's predominant issue and all the organizing that brought their Progressive Alliance to their city council was around environmental justice. They, of course, recognized that the exploitation around housing and habitability and all of those different issues was clearly connected with all of the public health and environmental implications and the electoral implications of Chevron owning their entire city council.

That was the perfect example of rent control as an environmental justice priority coming out of an environmental justice effort and political coalition that also turned into an electoral coalition that still remains here to this day. And they ended up kicking off a wave that has not stopped and has only grown. Seven years later, you have California Latinas for Reproductive Justice passing rent control in Bell Gardens. When it comes to these local rent control efforts, people de-silo themselves in very interesting ways, and it looks different from place to place. It's always really fascinating to me to all see the myriad little coalitions that are built, depending on what the local conditions are and what the challenges are.