[ In the Austrian capital, renters pay a third of what their
counterparts do in London, Paris or Dublin. How is it possible? ]
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THE SOCIAL HOUSING SECRET: HOW VIENNA BECAME THE WORLD’S MOST
LIVABLE CITY  
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Philip Oltermann
January 10, 2024
Guardian
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_ In the Austrian capital, renters pay a third of what their
counterparts do in London, Paris or Dublin. How is it possible? _

Allt-Erlaa public housing project, Vienna,

 

The first place that Max Schranz moved into after leaving his family
home is the kind that many young professionals dream of inhabiting at
the peak of their career. At only 26, he lives in a bright fifth-floor
apartment with high ceilings overlooking a European capital city, 10
minutes from the central station and within walking distance of
cinemas, theatres and bars.

No lottery win or parental trust fund was needed to make that dream a
reality: Schranz, who is a master’s student, pays €596 (£512) a
month for his 54 sq metre two-bedroom apartment – a fraction of
typical rents for similarly sized and similarly located apartments in
other major European cities. What’s more, he didn’t have to put
down a deposit and his rental contract is unlimited – in theory,
he’s allowed to pass it on to his children or a sibling when he
eventually decides to move on. “I’m aware it’s a pretty
stress-free existence,” Schranz says. “My friends in other
European cities are a bit jealous.”

Welcome to Vienna, the city that may have cracked the code of how to
keep inner-city housing affordable. As other cities battle spiralling
rental prices, partly fuelled by inner-city apartments being used as
short-term holiday rentals or being kept strategically vacant by
property speculators, the Austrian capital bucks the trend. In the
place that last year retained its crown as the world’s most livable
city in the Economist’s annual index, Vienna’s renters on average
pay roughly a third of their counterparts in London, Paris or Dublin,
according to a recent study by the accounting firm Deloitte
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Part of the reason Schranz’s apartment is so affordable is simple:
it’s owned by the city. In Vienna, that is (almost) the norm. The
landlord of approximately 220,000 socially rented apartments, it is
the largest home-owning city in Europe (in London, which has more than
800,000 socially rented apartments, they are owned by the local
councils). A quarter of the people who live in Vienna are social
tenants – if you also include the approximately 200,000 co-operative
dwellings built with municipal subsidies, it’s more than half the
population.

Many of these apartments came into being a century ago, as part of an
enormously ambitious building programme after the end of the first
world war, when Vienna was awash with people uprooted by the collapse
of the Habsburg empire. Funded primarily through a hypothecated tax
on luxuries such as champagne or horse-riding, the inaugural phase of
socialist-governed “Red Vienna” saw 65,000 socially rented
apartments shoot up within the city by the time of the Nazi coup
attempt in 1934.

These “superblocks” from the 20s and 30s don’t look like
ordinary social housing. With the modernist ideals of the
contemporaneous Bauhaus school yet to capture the imagination of
Austrian architects, for one, they haven’t got flat roofs. The most
famous examples of Red Vienna social housing, such as the Karl
Marx-Hof in the 19th district
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the estates dotted along the “Ring Road of the Proletariat” on
Margaretengürtel, look more like castles or monasteries, with art
deco flourishes on their facades. As the historian Eve Blau has put
it: “If you’re planning something radical, it’s not a bad idea
to come across as conservative as possible.”

The majority of Vienna’s council estates were built after the second
world and look more familiar, but even they don’t tend to have the
stigma of poverty and crime associated with similar developments in
the US or Europe. Schranz’s apartment is inside the Theodor
Körner-Hof, a 50s-built group of 14 housing blocks in the Margareten
district that are far from fancy, yet still well-maintained enough
that Schranz likes to hang out in the green inner courtyards on summer
evenings to read his books.

The Viennese term for estates like these is _Gemeindebauten_,
“communal buildings”, which hints at their underlying philosophy.
“One of the key concepts to understanding Vienna’s approach to
housing is social sustainability,” says Maik Novotny, an
architecture critic for the Austrian newspaper Der Standard. “In
order to avoid the creation of ghettoes and the costly social
conflicts that come with them, the city actively strives for a mixing
of people from different backgrounds and on different incomes in the
same estates. Social housing
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the poor.”

As a student without a disability or any dependants, Schranz would
have no hope of applying for social housing in countries such as the
UK, but in Vienna the city courted him via a programme for first-time
tenants under 30.

“Keeping a mix of people from different paths of life in social
housing is key, and yes, it isn’t always easy,” says Kathrin Gaal,
Vienna’s deputy mayor and executive councillor for housing. One
tactic is an income maximum for applicants of €57,600 a year for
single people and €85,830 for two-person households. But “once
you’ve moved into a _Gemeindebau_ as a young student, if you start
earning more once your career progresses, we don’t check in on you,
because your situation could also worsen again,” says Gaal.

Vienna’s social housing programme is more than a policy – in the
city it is a foundational ideal that is a source of immense pride. And
as with similar progressive achievements that command a political
consensus – the UK’s National Health Service, say, or Norway’s
oil fund – that can create blindspots in the national debate. Talk
to _Gemeindebau _residents such as 76-year-old Heinz Barnerth, a
retired mechanical engineer who has lived for the past seven decades
in the Reumannhof estate in Margareten, and he will be unswerving in
his praise of the idea that brought his block into existence in the
1920s. “Vienna’s model is more timely than ever, because rental
prices are hard to contain,” he says.

But the reality doesn’t always live up to the ideal, and Barnerth is
even more animated when complaining about the time it takes the city
to carry out repairs in his estate. The light by the stairs leading to
the basement hasn’t been working for three weeks, and when a door
lock breaks, the residents usually don’t bother waiting for central
management to fix it. “If you don’t sort a handyman to repair the
lock overnight, the junkies try to break in,” he says. One of the
downsides of having a single large company, Wiener Wohnen, in charge
of managing and maintaining so much housing stock in the city is that
logging and commissioning caretakers’ tasks can lead to bottlenecks.

The other downside of the Vienna model is that while 60% of the
city’s residents have hit the jackpot by getting into
a _Gemeindebau_ or subsidised co-op, that still excludes a large
chunk of the population of a city in which 80% are renters. Only those
who have resided permanently in Vienna for two years can apply for
social housing, and those who stay in private rentals face problems
more familiar from other European cities.

“Twenty years ago, private rentals in Vienna were mostly low quality
and low price,” says Justin Kadi, an assistant professor in planning
and housing at University of Cambridge. “But in recent years,
private rentals have transformed into a segment of Vienna’s housing
market that is in many cases not just high quality, but also quite
expensive.”

This, he explains, was largely due to deregulation in the mid-90s,
which allowed landlords to charge tenants not just for size and
equipment standards, but also for location, often leading
to arbitrary mark-ups. As part of the same reforms, it became easier
for landlords to limit contracts, putting private renters in Vienna in
a less secure position.

“The only thing that other European cities can learn from Vienna is
their marketing,” says Harald Simons, a Berlin-based economist and
researcher who published a scathing analysis of the Viennese housing
market in 2020. Vienna, Europe’s second-largest German-speaking
city, has “an income structure that is more like Berlin’s but
average new rental prices similar to those of a high-income city like
Hamburg”, Simon says. He criticises Wiener Wohnen for its opaque
accounting, suggesting its finances are in direr straits than the
Vienna’s senate admits, and that the city’s underspending on
maintenance is driving the middle-income earners so desired for the
social mix into private rentals.

And yet, there are good reasons why Vienna’s social housing model
has attracted renewed attention and regular visits from international
policymakers recently.

The crucial difference is in the trend. While the number of homes in
London’s socially rented sector has stayed broadly stable, at about
800,000, for example, its share of the city’s housing
stock continues to fall
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partly due to them being converted into privately owned homes via the
right-to-buy scheme, and in part because of the lack of new homes
being built while the UK capital continues to grow. Figures released
just before Christmas show that 105,000 households in the UK are
trapped in temporary accommodation
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social housing. Many cities in continental Europe battle with similar
problems: Berlin, for example, having missed its target for 20,000 new
homes in 2022, only managed to build about 16,000 last year.

Vienna, by contrast, has the advantage of being in a monopoly position
that it has never relinquished. “We never succumbed to the
temptation of selling off our municipal or subsidised apartments in
the way many other European cities did to plug holes in their
budgets,” Gaal says. “It means our stock of housing is still
vast.”

About 40 years ago, Vienna started a “land procurement and urban
renewal fund” that reserves land in the city exclusively for social
housing: it currently has 3m sq metres of space, including farm or
fallow land, disused rail tracks and empty hospitals, that it can
exclusively put out to tender to social developers. “That kind of
systemic stockpiling might be something that other countries could get
started on too,” Gaal says.

In 2019, Vienna introduced a new zoning rule
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means that in developments with more than 5,000 sq metres of living
space, two-thirds must be subsidised housing. “For cities, the
question is always whether they have a good bargaining position with
land owners,” even Vienna-sceptic Simons concedes. “And Vienna has
a good bargaining position.” The city’s land procurement fund
coordinates closely with the department that hands out planning
permissions, and can strike deals accordingly.

Whether Vienna will reach its target of building 5,500
new _Gemeindebau _apartments by 2025 remains to be seen, and whether
that will be enough if the city is expected to return to its 1910
population levels by 2038 is another question entirely. But it is
taking tangible steps. After an 11-year freeze on new social housing
developments, the city resumed building new _Gemeindebau _blocks in
2015, and has earmarked €557m for new developments in 2024. One of
the most recent to be completed, by the local architecture firm WUP,
lies about 7km east of the city centre in Seestadt Aspern, a new
urban centre
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on the site of a former airfield.

Margarete Stoklassa, 73, and her husband moved into one of the 74
apartments from an estate in the city centre last April because they
needed barrier-free access, and seem more than pleased. At 50 sq
metres their new home is not huge, but a circular floorplan and
several sliding walls mean that “I sometimes end up playing
hide-and-seek with my husband,” says Stoklassa. “I am very happy;
everything I need is here.” The couple pay €520 in rent a month.

The facades of the new-era _Gemeindebau _are painted in chalky reds,
blues and greens that reference the mighty fortresses of the Red
Vienna period, although with prices of building materials peaking
during the construction phase, there is plenty of bare concrete and
galvanised steel. “The rise in the cost of raw materials forced us
to concentrate on what social housing is really about,” says the
architect Bernhard Weinberger. Having prevailed for more than a
century, Vienna’s ideals of communal living have shown they can
stand the test of time. “This building should still be standing in
200 years,” he says.

_Philip Oltermann is the Guardian's European culture editor.
Click here
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Philip's public key. @philipoltermann
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* Vienna
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* public housing
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* Housing
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* rental housing
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