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“Social housing doesn’t mean poorly constructed, drab, or uncomfortable. When people have a say in it — when it’s built for us, by us — our housing can be beautiful, comfortable, long-lasting, and sustainable.”
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3 Housing Lessons from Vienna and Berlin
[[link removed]] by Christina Rosales
Housing and Land Justice Director
Last month we brought together 30 housing organizers and elected leaders from across the country on a learning trip to Vienna and Berlin. We met with city officials and campaign organizers, visited notable social housing projects and neighborhoods, and had deep, insightful conversations about how to create and sustain community-controlled housing. We learned a lot about financing models, climate strategies, organizing tactics, and more; all of which are seeding big and bold ideas for our own cities.
Below are three big lessons that we’ve brought back with us – you can read about the places we visited and the inspiring people we met in the full piece here [[link removed]] .
Put land in public hands
When we arrived in Vienna, we saw with our own eyes the social housing system that we had heard so much about: high quality, beautiful homes; affordable, stable rents; strong tenant protections; and people who felt cared for, content, and proud of where they live. This model is the result of political shifts and investments made over a century ago, when the city began buying up land and using it to build municipal housing developments that included social goods such as libraries, child care centers, and post offices.
Contrast this with Berlin, where we encountered a system very similar to what we see in the US: when a city sells off its housing to private real estate. Amid a budget crisis in the early 2000s, the city decided to sell more than 200,000 units of public housing for very cheap to private corporations. Unsurprisingly, corporate landlords have been jacking up the cost of rent, sparking a tenant movement that is growing and building power in the city. Now, a campaign called Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen (DWE) is organizing to seize corporate-owned housing and put it back in the hands of the government to use for community-controlled housing.
Have people govern it
What’s happening in Berlin is the result of people building power together, and tapping into a shared sense of agency and hope to create something different for themselves and their communities. One of the goals of the DWE campaign is to have publicly-owned, community-governed buildings run by tenant councils, and they’re building the muscle for that kind of governance structure in the ways that they make decisions internally and organize out in neighborhoods.
For folks in Vienna, the community governance aspect of housing is built into systems and structures that people interact with on a daily basis. For example, the Vienna Chamber of Labor represents every worker by law, collects dues from each member, and is accountable to the needs and interests of working people through elections, services, and legislation. The Chamber played an important role in passing a citywide vacancy tax and is currently pushing for policy demands around public land use, subsidized constructions, rent control, and more.
Make it high quality and beautiful
In Vienna, we can see what’s possible when a housing system is people- and solution-oriented, not profit motivated. The long-term commitment of the local government to secure and adapt its housing and land system has made it so that people’s basic need for shelter and safety are taken care of. And that, in turn, makes it easy for people to care for their homes and one another.
Read the full piece here [[link removed]]
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