Public Housing at a Crossroads

“Even with low-cost housing harder than ever to find in most American cities, the stock of public housing is shrinking. The number of families living in public housing shrank 6.5 percent during a recent five-year period, according to the Urban Institute — not a huge decline, but a decline nonetheless,” writes Jared Brey in Governing.

A controversy in San Antonio’s public housing authority reveals broader tensions across the country as affordable housing becomes more inaccessible for the families that need it.

As Brey explains, “Once focused solely on building and maintaining public units for poor people, housing authorities now engage in a wide variety of housing-related activities, sometimes partnering with private developers to build apartments for people who make barely less than the median income.” This often squeezes out the lowest-income tenants, making fewer units available to them and displacing households when former public housing buildings are redeveloped into mixed-income projects.

The former president and CEO of San Antonio’s housing authority, Opportunity Home, was fired recently after putting a stop to a mixed-income redevelopment project and letting $2 million in unpaid rents accumulate during the pandemic, putting the agency at a deficit. The authority now wants to move forward with more mixed-income redevelopment projects, worrying some tenants.

Public housing, for some, is the only viable option. “Housing vouchers don’t provide the same level of stability as traditional public housing. There’s also nowhere nearly enough in terms of either housing vouchers or public housing units to serve everyone who qualifies for one, in San Antonio or anywhere else.”