As the city wrestles with a housing market that has swung from breakneck growth to uneasy cooling, the Austin City Council is weighing a new approach it hopes could lock in affordability for decades.
Council members on Thursday will debate whether the city should pursue “green social housing,” a model that blends public ownership, long-term rent stability and environmentally focused design.
Public housing, owned and operated by the government, accounts for a small share of Austin’s housing stock reserved for residents with lower incomes. While the city has in recent years reduced barriers for new development and pushed for density, some city leaders argue the private market has failed to provide enough affordable, stable and desirable housing for working families. That gap has fueled interest in “social housing,” a European model of publicly owned rental properties, which supporters say offers stronger protections for tenants. The model has shown some success in Maryland and is gaining traction in other parts of the country; Austin council members will now decide whether it could be another tool to address the city’s long-running affordability crisis.
“A key aspect of this is that it would be a long-term strategy to build permanently affordable housing for Austin workers,” said Council Member Mike Siegel, who sponsored the resolution.
The five-county Austin-metro area has ranked among the nation’s fastest-growing regions for the last two decades. Even as cranes became a common fixture in Austin’s skyline, development failed to keep pace with population growth during the pandemic. In 2021, rents surged, with the average cost rising 25%.
Thanks to new buildings and the flood of new residents becoming more of a trickle, rents have cooled. This trend may not last for long; Siegel said it’s not a matter of if prices rise again, but when.
“We’re seeing a downturn in the rental housing market right now. The private market built maybe more housing than was needed at this exact moment. But we know rents are going to go back up,” Siegel said. “By having a larger stock of publicly-controlled housing that would protect the tenants in those units, we can make sure that the rents don’t escalate too quickly and that people can stay in the city.”
Another major component of the resolution is ensuring the developments would be “green.” The policy could eventually require features such as solar panels, resource-efficient building designs and access to transit options that do not rely on cars.
“The city is acting as a public developer, and so you want to build housing that people want,” said Siegel. Adding social housing on transit corridors and focusing on areas of the city where there isn’t affordable housing “would be very much desirable,” he said.
How it’s worked in Montgomery County
After city leaders in Montgomery County, Md., expressed interest in social housing, representatives from Vienna, where a large share of its population lives in public housing, were invited to give a presentation.
Years later, the county’s public housing agency has become one of its largest landlords, with close to 10,000 units.
“There’s a real pent-up angst and desire of communities that lack the housing, and the existing tools are nowhere near enough,” said Zachary Marks, who was a real estate executive with the county’s Housing Opportunity Commission until recently. “What this fund structure and idea do is allow them to control their own destiny and do it.”
The county created in 2021 a fund to increase housing construction. It has since completed hundreds more social housing units.
Under the Montgomery County model, public dollars finance construction and are later replaced with private financing once units are leased, allowing the original funds to be reused for future projects. Marks said that the approach has helped move stalled developments forward.
“It just helps these projects to get unstuck, because they’re all hung up on financing, whether you’re a market-rate private developer or a nonprofit affordable developer,” he said.
Marks said cities from around the country have sought guidance on launching similar programs.
“Nine other cities and states that now have these. In 2026, you’ll see that number probably double,” he said. “I certainly think a city like Austin makes complete sense to have this as a tool in the toolbox.”
Jake Wegmann, a planning professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said the Maryland experience shows how much housing the model can help produce. In Austin, he said social housing could be most effective during periods when the housing market has cooled, like now, and private development has slowed.
“If designed well, it can act in a countercyclical way,” Wegmann said. “When things cool down, and private developers start pulling back from projects, that’s a really good time for a public entity to step in and pick up the slack.”
Wegmann said potential downsides include higher construction costs than private development and uncertainty about political support.
“There is this dynamic where Austin does certain things that are innovative and progressive, and then that can attract the ire of the state legislature,” Wegman added. “We’ll see if this proposal goes far enough for that to happen here.”
