If there’s one thing Santa Monicans can agree on, it’s that the rent is simply too damn high.
Soaring housing costs are displacing longtime residents and essential workers, diminishing our diversity, hurting our businesses’ ability to hire and retain talent, exacerbating traffic, and forcing more and more people onto the streets.
For these reasons and more, we were thrilled when Santa Monica was granted an opportunity to participate in a weeklong intensive housing policy field study in Vienna, Austria, a city that leads the world in providing high quality, affordable, and sustainable housing to its residents.
Sadly, we must now express equal dismay that our colleagues have pressured city staff to forfeit this unique learning opportunity.
To fully understand the benefits of the Vienna field study program — and the loss suffered by Santa Monicans as a result of forgoing it — it is worth exploring the question of why people around the world are studying Vienna, as well as why some might oppose learning from it.
Vienna is popularly known for its ample supply of "social housing," government-owned multifamily housing that is available to people of all income levels, where rent increases are limited to inflation and revenues are plowed back into loan servicing and upkeep.
By providing a public option to compete with the private housing market, social housing has succeeded in containing housing costs in Vienna not just for people who live in it, but also for everyone else.
As The New York Times detailed last year, "Viennese living in private housing spent 26% of their post-tax income on rent and energy costs, on average, which is only slightly more than the figure for social-housing residents overall (22%)."
Compare that to residents in Los Angeles County, where one in three renters are considered "severely rent burdened," paying more than 50% of their pre-tax income on rent and utilities.
A recent study from USC showed that families engage in many different coping mechanisms to deal with this rent burden, including cutting back on food, deferring bill payments, taking on debt, and going without medicine or seeing a doctor.
Remarkably, Vienna also bests the competition when it comes to spending public dollars efficiently, keeping the overall cost of its housing programs remarkably low.
While New York and California spend $377 and $248 per capita each year, respectively, providing affordable housing, Vienna’s model is largely self-sustaining: It spends just $124 per capita, and half of it is in the form of low-interest loans that will later be repaid.
So what’s not to love?
Mayor Brock, in registering his opposition, notes that Vienna has a bigger population than Santa Monica, and some of its buildings are too tall and boxy. But neither the height and style of the buildings nor the size of the city itself has any bearing on social housing or its success.
Brock refers to the Viennese model as "public housing," doubtless seeking to conjure images of Cabrini-Green and other ill-fated American low-income housing "projects" of the past.
The economic diversity of families living together in Vienna’s social housing, however, renders it entirely different in kind, creating better life outcomes for all its residents, as well as the political will to provide ongoing maintenance to the buildings.
One group that could certainly stand to lose from social housing are landlords, speculators, and real estate developers, whose profits are predicated on the essential scarcity of the goods they peddle.
Indeed, at the core of social housing is the idea that there’s enough to go around — and that everyone, regardless of their income level, should be entitled to safe and stable housing.
This may not sit well with people who prefer an economically gated city, where only those able to pay top dollar are allowed to reside here. And that’s okay. As policymakers, we often disagree.
But we object wholeheartedly to the notion that knowledge and learning should be kept off limits and the professional development of city staff rudely denied.
Local officials and policymakers across the country are studying the Vienna model. Montgomery County, Maryland and the cities of Atlanta and Seattle are standing up housing programs inspired by it. And just last September, Los Angeles City and County officials traveled as part of a delegation to Vienna, following which Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 555, which directs the state to study social housing.
A critical piece of the Vienna field study program has been the exchange of ideas between elected officials, policymakers, and staff who are tasked with policy implementation. Because our city leadership have been bullied into canceling their trips, thereby foreclosing this collaborative approach, Councilmember Torosis has canceled her trip as well.
If Santa Monica hopes to avoid becoming a city only available to a wealthy few, we’ll have to leverage new housing finance models. Instead of stymying innovation, let’s gather all the good ideas we can and let the best ones win.
After all, housing affordability is a true crisis, and we can’t let petty grievances distract us from doing what’s best for our city.
Submitted by Councilmembers Caroline Torosis, Gleam Davis and Jesse Zwick
