DC Deserves a Real Debate on Social Housing Policy
DC Deserves a Real Debate on Social Housing Policy- a Response to the Washington Post Editorial on Social Housing.
The Washington Post Editorial Board’s recent piece on the District’s affordable housing crisis combined smugness with a boastful ignorance that epitomizes everything wrong with policy discussion in this town.
The main headline of the editorial was that Washington D.C. cannot and should not invest in social housing due to current economic headwinds.
The Post argues that these recessionary times call for the “adults in the room” to take a more responsible approach to the housing crisis; specifically, they argue that the District must act now to gut tenant rights and engage in some good old-fashioned corporate deregulation.
The editorial further posits that, if these corporate-driven reforms are not enacted, “market realities” will prevent any new housing from being built due to the District’s lack of respect for “property rights”. The implication is that, if tenant safeguards remain in place or civic participation in the development process is tolerated, Wall Street will cease to view the District as a safe place to invest.
The Post ends with a stern warning that the resulting lack of investment will then exacerbate the housing crisis, as increased demand will then drive prices further upward. This reflects classic supply-side economic theory, as applied by city leaders and their patrons in the housing development community in both the best and worst of times. One is left to wonder if the real estate lobby drafted the editorial in full or simply provided the bullet points for the piece.
In any case, there is a central problem for the authors: The facts contained in the editorial contradict its conclusions. In fact, the entire argument collapses like a house of cards upon the slightest reflection.
Let’s break it down.
First, a central talking point contained throughout the editorial is that the existence of current tenant protections and corporate regulations will prevent the necessary future supply of new housing from being built in D.C. This is a bold claim with significant implications – if only it were true. However, history shows that these factors have not been a significant barrier to development, in D.C., or any other city that has implemented such safeguards.
Ironically, the editorial itself drives home this very point! It does so by detailing the extraordinary housing boom that took place in the District during the previous two decades, a time during which the most fundamental tenant protections and regulations were firmly in place.
Without a doubt, neither tenant protections nor D.C.’s regulatory framework have acted as a significant barrier to overall development, nor are they a root cause of the District’s housing crisis. Yet by linking these consumer protections to a lack of building supply, the editorial advances the real estate industry’s long game – to generate and sustain the political will to remove any laws that impede its path to complete control of the District’s development policies and practices.
As such, the Post is acting as an enabler for the industry- a familiar role for legacy media and real estate-funded think-tank “experts”.
This brings us to the main fallacy of the Post’s editorial, the assertion that if unshackled from big government, the private real estate industry will voluntarily take action to bring down housing costs. It will not. This narrative misreads the motivations of today’s housing market, which is fundamentally premised on the idea of permanent housing inflation.
Incredibly, the Post acknowledged this reality by pointing to the unprecedented explosion in housing costs that just so happened to coincide with the massive building boom of the previous decades. I dare say, a casual observer might even conclude that the cause of the housing crisis was in fact the building boom itself! Or to put it more precisely, the cause of the crisis was the result of the type of housing that was built during the boom.
Consider that between 2010 and 2020, Washington D.C. built more housing per square mile than any other city in the United States except New York City, with 84% of units built designated Class A – the industry term for luxury housing. Moreover, to make way for those luxury units, the city made it possible for well-connected builders to demolish existing affordable housing and develop more expensive projects in its place. (See, links.)
No one has publicly disputed my analysis of these plain facts. We have all borne witness to this phenomenon with our own eyes – well, perhaps not the blinkered Editorial Board writers at The Washington Post. But that's beside the point, let’s dig deeper and examine why the motivations that control the private real estate market prevent it from being able to solve the housing crisis.
The extent to which the private real estate sector has become a monopolistic, wealth-creating machine is hard to grasp. Consider that at the start of 2025, the value of global real estate was $393 trillion, making it the world’s most significant store of wealth.
To put that number into perspective, during the same timeframe, the gross domestic product of the entire world combined was $117 trillion. This means in 2025, the value of global real estate was three times more than the GDP of every country in the world combined.
These hundreds of trillions of dollars are not being invested in order to meet the essential needs of working-class people. To the contrary, the financial titans who control such vast sums of money are investing it into cities to bid up the price of real estate in order to maximize profit for their investors. This is the underlying cause of housing inflation, and it is precisely the reason why the vast majority of housing units built in D.C. in the previous decade were luxury units.
In essence, the real estate market is knocking down affordable housing to build expensive housing in order to drive profits – and our elected leaders are helping them do it.
The story of the real estate industry working to blow up housing costs is not unique to D.C. It is happening across the globe, described by experts as housing financialization, “a phenomenon that occurs when housing is treated as a vehicle for wealth and investment rather than a social good.”
Through complex financial instruments and investment models, Wall Street has transformed the housing market. The motivation of this financialized system is not to house people, but rather to create wealth for investors by pooling capital and deploying it across global real estate markets to maximize returns on investment. Washington, D.C. is among the most financialized real estate markets in the world. What do you get when your housing policies are dictated by Wall Street? Massive housing inflation.
Understanding how these markets operate offers a clearer explanation as to why development has slowed in D.C. Despite what the Post would have you believe, dwindling supply is not the result of corporate regulations or tenant protections. The slowdown is instead the consequence of D.C. being massively overbuilt with Class A luxury housing.
That being the case, investors have determined the value they can extract from the District has maxed out. This means, for the time being, they will choose to invest their capital elsewhere, in cities ripe for the speculative investment practices that have defined D.C. for the last 25 years.
Now, the District faces an existential choice. The first option is for local leaders to cling to the false notion that the private market is some omnipotent force, one capable of building our way into vast affordability via land privatization, deregulation, a rollback of tenant protections and tax dollars to subsidize the building of more luxury housing. This is the path the real estate industry has lobbied for, and it is the outcome Mayor Muriel Bowser has delivered with the help of corporate media mouthpieces like the Washington Post Editorial Board.
In the end, this road only leads to higher housing costs and more inequality. However, there is an alternative road, focused on the public good and affordability. That path includes expanded rent control, the protection of public land, zoning protections to preserve existing affordable housing and investment in a vast network of social housing.
Social housing is defined as a publicly owned, mixed-income housing model that treats housing as a human right, not a commodity. A key feature of the model is that it replaces speculative private capital – with its exorbitant interest rates – with public funding at zero interest. This allows the model to build housing much more efficiently than the private market.
I have written extensively about the up-front costs of social housing and exactly how it is financed- which you can read HERE. For now, let’s just focus on the model’s core principles:
· Public Ownership: Social housing is publicly owned, prioritizing community needs over profit;
· Mixed-Income Communities: Social housing integrates people of different income levels to build diverse neighborhoods, integrated schools and stable communities;
· Self-Sustaining and Affordable: Social housing rents are set to cover the operating costs of the building as well as a conventional mortgage payment. Buildings are designed to pay for themselves in 20 to 30 years. Once a building is paid off, the surplus rent that was dedicated to the mortgage payment is recycled back into the social housing network to build more housing and deepen affordability. Every dollar invested into this model is used to maximize affordability while remaining financially sustainable– nothing is wasted on exorbitant private investor profits;
· A Public Option: At the end of the day, social housing offers a non-market alternative meant to encourage competition and lower overall housing costs over time.
Do we want the District to be a place that values equality and the public good, or are we to continue down a path that squanders resources by subsidizing Wall Street to artificially inflate housing costs?
If we choose the former, we can start to invest in innovative solutions like social housing to solve our communities’ most pressing needs. It’s time to have a substantive and informed debate on these issues. Let’s move past the type of lazy and superficial analysis that the Washington Post has engaged in for years, and instead grow stronger from bold ideas.
You can read more about social housing at: