Redistributive Majoritarianism: Urban Inequalities and the Struggle for Social Housing

What are the political considerations of who is included or excluded through eligibility thresholds? A long-standing policy debate is whether social policy should be “targeted” only for the neediest or instead be “universalist” by serving a broad-based constituency. As the persistent housing affordability problem deepens, such debates have come up in the emerging discussion of “social housing.” Social housing describes various housing types that reduce the influence of markets and often are of mixed income. Yet the exact mix of incomes eligible for social housing has generated substantial debate among policy advocates, echoing the targeting versus universalism arguments. This article empirically examines income distributions across race and housing tenure and the potential for building a political majority for social housing policies. We synthesize the political advantages of both targeting and universalism through a proposed framework we call “redistributive majoritarianism,” which includes broad eligibility with explicit priorities for the neediest.