Socialist Portland City Councilor Kate Sykes’ proposal for a task force to study how city might utilize a new “social housing” model to combat the city’s housing crisis was met this week with pushback from her fellow councilors and city officials, and was ultimately postponed until the start of next year.

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District Five Councilor Kate Sykes, former co-chair of the Maine Democratic Socialists of America (Maine DSA), brought her proposal to the Council’s Housing and Economic Development Committee meeting Tuesday evening, after the other Councilors on the Committee expressed interest in her idea for social housing in September.

Sykes’ proposal would create a task force that would be charged with studying how the city could implement city government-developed and -owned affordable housing, as opposed to the city’s current model of using housing trust funds and tax credits to fund projects run by private developers and the Portland Housing Authority.

The task force, as proposed by Sykes, would be on an ambitious timeline of completing a final report with a strategic framework for Portland’s social housing initiative after 12 months.

“As we know, we’re in a housing crisis, we are looking at ways to address that,” Sykes told the Committee on Tuesday when introducing her proposal.

“We obviously have market rate housing, we have subsidized housing, we have public housing already through the Portland Housing Authority — but there seems to around the nation a growing consensus that there is a way to supplement housing production by looking for areas where we can do what’s called social housing,” Sykes said.

Sykes said that there are “many definitions” to social housing, which may include housing bonds or using other financial instruments to create more housing than the city can currently.

“It’s intended to be a complement to market development, not replace it or to box people out,” she added.

Following her presentation, the proposal was met with skepticism from City Councilor Regina Phillips, who questioned the workload and timeline of the task force, and expressed concern voting for Sykes’ proposal without it first getting a fiscal note from city staff.

“I’m not sure how real that is,” Councilor Phillips said of the proposed 12-month task timeline. “I don’t know whose work this going to be doing under [sic].”

Phillips said that the city has already struggled to fill vacancies on the city’s other committees and boards, specifically lamenting the fact that people of color don’t serve on the committees because “they just absolutely do not have the time.”

“We’re missing the voice of people of color to sit on these committees, because they can’t do it,” Phillips said.

“I’m not comfortable bringing this, or voting on this and bringing it to the council, without knowing how much this is going to cost,” she added later in the discussion.

Councilor Roberto Rodriguez commented that he thought the 12-month timeline “seemed ambitious,” but that the task force’s work could be extended, and was more optimistic about finding people to sit on the task force due to the novelty of the proposal.

“I think this is super exciting, and I think it will get a lot of attention,” Rodriguez said.

“I’m ecstatic to see actually see what comes of it,” he added, saying social housing may be “an important piece of the puzzle to solve our housing crisis.”

Later in the discussion Councilor Phillips made a motion to postpone Sykes’ proposal to the Committees next meeting, which would in effect make it one of the first items taken up by the Committee in January after the newly elected City Councilors are sworn in, and give the city time to assess the financial impact of the task force.

Sykes voted against the motion to postpone her proposal, while her three colleagues voted in favor of the motion.