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Wearing a jumper and scarf, Schranz stands reading a book in his light and airy apartment, with clutter and a colourful book shelf in the background.

The social housing secret: how Vienna became the world’s most livable city

In the Austrian capital, renters pay a third of what their counterparts do in London, Paris or Dublin. How is it possible?

T he 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 .

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 or 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 inner courtyard of Karl Marx-Hof.

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 isn’t just for 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.

A doorway with arch above.

“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.

Skyline shot showing Vienna’s many large apartment blocks with a church spire one of the highest buildings in the city.

“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.

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

Matteotti-Hof in Margareten, which was built between 1926 and 1927.

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 , 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 because of a shortage of 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 that 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 growing on the site of a former airfield.

Seestadt Aspern, modern 10-storey blocks with small trees and landscaped view looking like a university campus.

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.

This article was amended on 10 January 2024 to correct a caption reference for the date when Matteotti-Hof was built.

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Imagine a Renters’ Utopia.

It might look like vienna..

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Lessons From a Renters’ Utopia

By Francesca Mari

Photographs by Luca Locatelli

When Eva Schachinger married at 22, she applied for public housing. Luckily, she lived in Vienna, which has some of the best public housing in the world. It was 1968. Eva was a teacher, and her husband, Klaus-Peter, was an accountant for the city’s public-transportation system. She grew up in a public-housing complex in the center of the city, where her grandmother, who cared for her from 6 in the morning until 6 at night, lived in one of five buildings arranged around a courtyard. Eva played all day with friends from the complex.

Her mother, who was renting on the private market after a divorce, had recently applied for public housing, too, and she was offered a unit first, in 1971. By then, Eva had a young daughter, and her mother decided Eva needed the spot more and offered it to her. The available unit was in the 21st District, on the northeastern edge of the city. Eva’s father-in-law warned her — not entirely jokingly — that out there, they would be the first to be occupied by the Russians. But she and Klaus-Peter liked the floor plan: Although the apartment was an economical 732 square feet, it had two bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a toilet and washroom and a balcony. The rent was 700 schillings. (That’s about 55 euros, though the currency wasn’t introduced until 2002.) Eva transferred her teaching job to the 21st District, to a school a 15-minute walk from her new apartment.

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When I met Eva late last year, she looked smart in a jean jacket with a neatly tied silk scarf around her neck, small dangly earrings and cropped curly hair. Over the course of the last 44 years, as she continued to teach English to fifth through eighth grades, Eva’s rent increased almost fivefold, to 270 euros from 55, but her wages increased more than 20-fold, to 3,375 euros a month from 150. Viennese law dictates that rents in public housing can increase only with inflation, and only when the year’s inflation exceeds 5 percent. By the time she retired in 2007, Eva’s rent was only 8 percent of her income. Because her husband was earning 4,000 euros a month, their rent amounted to 3.6 percent of their incomes combined.

That’s about what Vienna was aiming for back in 1919, when the city began planning its world-famous municipal housing, known as the Gemeindebauten. Before World War I, Vienna had some of the worst housing conditions in Europe, Eve Blau notes in her book, “The Architecture of Red Vienna.” Many working-class families had to take on subtenants or bed tenants (day and night workers who slept in the same bed at different times) in order to pay their rent. But from 1923 to 1934, in a period known as Red Vienna, the ruling Social Democratic Party built 64,000 new units in 400 housing blocks, increasing the city’s housing supply by about 10 percent. Some 200,000 people, one-tenth of the population, were rehoused in these buildings, with rents set at 3.5 percent of the average semiskilled worker’s income, enough to cover the cost of maintenance and operation.

Experts refer to Vienna’s Gemeindebauten as “social housing,” a phrase that captures how the city’s public housing and other limited-profit housing are a widely shared social benefit: The Gemeindebauten welcome the middle class, not just the poor. In Vienna, a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer. Housing experts believe that this approach leads to greater economic diversity within public housing — and better outcomes for the people living in it.

An aerial view of Alt-Erlaa housing complex. There are pools on many of the roofs and many of the patios of the apartments have visible plant life.

In 2015, before they bought an apartment on the private market, the Schachingers were making about 80,000 euros ($87,000) a year, roughly the income of the average U.S. household in 2021. Eva and Klaus-Peter paid 26 percent and 29 percent in income tax, respectively, but just 4 percent of their pretax income was going toward rent, which is about what the average American household spends on meals eaten out and half a percentage point less than what the average American spends on “entertainment.” Even if the Schachingers got a new contract today on their unit, their monthly payments would be an estimated 542 euros, or only 8 percent of their income. Vienna’s generous supply of social housing helps keep costs down for everyone: In 2021, Viennese living in private housing spent 26 percent of their post-tax income on rent and energy costs, on average, which is only slightly more than the figure for social-housing residents overall (22 percent). Meanwhile, 49 percent of American renters — 21.6 million people — are cost-burdened, paying landlords more than 30 percent of their pretax income, and the percentage can be even higher in expensive cities. In New York City, the median renter household spends a staggering 36 percent of its pretax income on rent.

To American eyes, the whole Viennese setup can appear fancifully socialistic. But set that aside, and what’s mind-boggling is how social housing gives the economic lives of Viennese an entirely different shape. Imagine if your housing expenses were more like the Schachingers’. Imagine having to think about them to the same degree that you think about your restaurant choices or streaming-service subscriptions. Imagine, too, where the rest of your income might go, if you spent much less of it on housing. Vienna invites us to envision a world in which homeownership isn’t the only way to secure a certain future — and what our lives might look like as a result.

Writing about housing in the United States, I’ve become depressed. I’m the scold at the dinner party, revolted by big investors speculating in the housing market, yes, but also by the thousands of small-time investors — including some of my own friends — who are pooling money to buy homes in states they’ve never seen or buying rental properties in gentrifying neighborhoods. But the math is hard to argue with. Buying a home near work is more lucrative than working. The growth of asset values has outstripped returns on labor for four decades, and a McKinsey report found that a majority of those assets — 68 percent — is real estate. Last year, one in four home sales was to someone who had no intention of living in it. These investors are particularly incentivized to buy the sorts of homes most needed by first-time buyers: Inexpensive properties generate the highest rental-income cash flows.

Real estate is a place where money literally grows on tree beams. In the last decade, the typical owner of a single-family home acquired nearly $200,000 in appreciation. “Another word for asset appreciation is inflation,” the academics Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings write in “The Asset Economy,” “an increase in monetary value without any corresponding change in the nature of the good itself or the conditions of its production that would make it scarcer or justify an increased demand for it.” That inflation is creating a treacherous gulch between the housing haves and have-nots. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that, in 2019, the median net worth of U.S. renters was just 2.5 percent of the median net worth of homeowners: $6,270 versus $254,900. Last year, as higher interest rates slowed home sales and caused prices to plateau (and even soften in some overheated cities), the asking price of the median U.S. rental reached $2,000 a month, a record high, according to Redfin. Inflated rent prices line the pockets of landlords while preventing renters from saving for a down payment and ever getting off the treadmill.

The astronomical pace of appreciation is the culmination of decades of policy aimed at encouraging home buying. The fixed-rate, 30-year mortgage is a particularly American invention, possible only because the federal government insures the debt — if a borrower defaults, the government is on the hook. (Only one other country, Denmark, offers the same instrument.) Then there’s our tax code, which allows those affluent enough to buy homes and itemize their deductions to write off the interest they pay on their mortgages: the bigger the mortgage, the bigger the deduction. Homeowners can deduct up to $10,000 of their property taxes from their federal taxes too, and if they sell their primary residence, they may be able to avoid paying capital gains on profits of up to $250,000 per person ($500,000 for couples). As housing activists like to point out, everyone who has a mortgage is living in subsidized housing.

Last year, troubled by the seeming intractability of these problems, I began looking for solutions outside the United States. Could the answer be rent control, as in Berlin? It might have seemed that way a decade or so ago, before investors and new residents began pouring into the city, causing land values to quintuple; now, despite rent-stabilization laws, even the apartments that no one else wanted to buy 15 years ago are huge moneymakers. Many residents with affordable rental contracts are locked into them because it would be too expensive or competitive to move. Frustrated by the housing squeeze, tenant organizers recently put forth an “expropriation” measure, which called for landlords with more than 3,000 units to sell their holdings back to the government at below-market prices. In a 2021 referendum, 59 percent of Berliners voted in favor of it, but it’s not clear whether it will ever be implemented.

Could the answer be loosening zoning restrictions, as Tokyo did in 2002? That has certainly helped. In 2014, there was more home construction in the city than in all of England. Since then, home prices have stabilized. Tokyo is largely celebrated as a model by YIMBYs (members of the “yes, in my backyard” movement) because they like its market-driven approach to housing abundance. They often point out that the city builds five times as much housing per capita as California. But Japan is a very different market because of its earthquake risk: Because regulatory codes and mitigation technologies are ever improving, structures often fully depreciate within 35 years. Older homes are often undermaintained because there’s little expectation that any investment might be recaptured upon resale; they’re thought of like used clothing or cars — you resell at a loss.

Auckland, New Zealand, might seem like a more applicable example. In 2016, the city, which has one of the most expensive housing markets in the world, “upzoned” 75 percent of its residential land, increasing its legal capacity for housing by about 300 percent in an effort to encourage multifamily-housing construction and tamp down prices. In areas that were upzoned, the total number of building permits granted (a way of estimating new construction) more than quadrupled from 2016 to 2021. As intended, the relative value of underdeveloped land increased, because it could suddenly host more housing, and the relative value of units in densely developed areas decreased, tempering sky-high prices. But there are limits to what upzoning can do. Often the benefits of allowing greater density are captured by developers, who price the new units far above cost. It doesn’t offer renters security or directly create the type of housing most needed: affordable housing.

That’s what differentiates Vienna. Perhaps no other developed city has done more to protect residents from the commodification of housing. In Vienna, 43 percent of all housing is insulated from the market, meaning the rental prices reflect costs or rates set by law — not “what the market will bear” or what a person with no other options will pay. The government subsidizes affordable units for a wide range of incomes. The mean gross household income in Vienna is 57,700 euros a year, but any person who makes under 70,000 euros qualifies for a Gemeindebau unit. Once in, you never have to leave. It doesn’t matter if you start earning more. The government never checks your salary again. Two-thirds of the city’s rental housing is covered by rent control, and all tenants have just-cause eviction protections. Such regulations, when coupled with adequate supply, give renters a level of stability comparable to American owners with fixed mortgages. As a result, 80 percent of all households in Vienna choose to rent.

The key difference is that Vienna prioritizes subsidizing construction, while the United States prioritizes subsidizing people, with things like housing vouchers. One model focuses on supply, the other on demand. Vienna’s choice illustrates a fundamental economic reality, which is that a large-enough supply of social housing offers a market alternative that improves housing for all.

One afternoon last fall, I walked through central Vienna, past ornate buildings with lacy balconies, balustrades and porticos — private apartments from the 19th century. They were interspersed with social-housing blocks from the 1920s and 1930s — the Gemeindebauten, which stood out not only for their modernist architecture but also for the triumphant red block lettering on their facades, announcing: Erbaut von der Gemeinde Wien in den Jahren 1925-1926 aus den Mitteln der Wohnbausteuer . (“Built by the municipality of Vienna in the years 1925-1926 from funds from the housing tax.”) A stroke of political genius, I thought, as I waited for the tram: explanation and advertising. Half an hour later, I was in the 21st District, the “Russian territory” where Eva Schachinger used to live. Wohnpartner, the city agency that tries to foster community within the Gemeindebauten and helps resolve tenant conflicts, was having an open house at her old building, a flat, minimalist complex with orange elevator shafts.

Following Wohnpartner signs, I found the glass-walled community center and entered. Most of the attendees were mothers with small children or retired people. There was a painting station, table tennis and a plant exchange. People had brought their secondhand goods to give away, and a millennial Wohnpartner staff member offered tech help, which, surprisingly, no one seemed to need. Among the permanent fixtures was a library filled with free books and a play area with an array of wooden toys.

I took a seat with Eva in the communal kitchen, where someone had made a large pot of butternut-squash soup. (Some of Red Vienna’s planners had hoped to centralize cooking in communal facilities with industrial-strength machines, but the fascists came first, and then, under capitalism, Austrian families quickly became accustomed to shelling out for their own KitchenAids, Vitamixes and Nespresso machines.) Since retiring, Eva has been collaborating with Malyuun Badeed, the building’s caretaker, on a twice-yearly magazine for the complex that includes a recipe and a crossword, along with the latest community news. Badeed, who joined us in the kitchen, wore a black hijab with pearls and waved her hands as she spoke of leaving Somalia as a single mother in the 1990s. When she first arrived in Vienna, she hawked newspapers on the street; now she helped produce one.

Eva told me she often came back to the Gemeindebau to tutor students from the complex with a woman named Edith, an elderly neighbor who lived in a nearby Gemeindebau. Edith’s next-door neighbors help buy and deliver her groceries, which she has difficulty carrying. In exchange, she watches over their three children. When Eva called to wish her a merry Christmas, Edith was busy wrapping 40 presents for the three kids; she hid them around her apartment so they wouldn’t be found before Santa came to visit. “The Gemeindebau is where socialization happens,” Eva was fond of telling me, and this is what socialization looks like across the generations.

I learned that the average waiting time to get a Gemeindebau is about two years (at any given moment there are 12,000 or so people on the waiting list, and each year about 10,000 or more people are housed). Vienna residents — anyone who has had a fixed address for two years, whether they are a citizen or not — may apply, and applications are evaluated based on need. Florian Kogler, a 21-year-old university student, was considered an urgent case because he lived in an overcrowded two-bedroom apartment with his mother, stepfather and two siblings. He shared a room with his brother, while his parents slept in the living room. He also got priority because he was moving into his own apartment for the first time. Kogler was offered an apartment in about a month. “That’s unusually fast,” he told me.

Applicants may decline up to two units; if they decline a third, they have to apply again. Kogler took the first flat offered to him, a 355-square-foot studio drenched in light overlooking a playground in the central 12th District. It cost 350 euros a month; his monthly income from working part time at a museum is about 1,000 euros. Those who need extra assistance to pay their rent receive individual subsidies. Students under 25, like Kogler, can qualify for 200 euros a month.

Every few years, there is a debate about whether the affluent should be forced to give up their Gemeindebau leases — that is, whether the units should be means-tested. The face of this debate, for some, is Peter Pilz, a former member of Austria’s Green Party in Parliament. Pilz lives in Goethehof, one of the largest Gemeindebauten by the Danube River. He moved into a unit as a university student to live with his grandmother, who had been there since the building opened in 1932. Before she died, he took over her contract. (He was, one might say, grandmothered in.) Pilz was elected to Parliament in 1986 and eventually started making more than 8,000 euros a month.

Even in Vienna, Pilz’s tenancy raised eyebrows, making headlines in Austria’s conservative paper, Österreich, which claimed in 2012 that he was paying only 66.18 euros a month in rent. (Pilz says he was paying, including building costs, closer to 250 euros a month.) “Given that Pilz’s income is well over the usual tariff for social housing, it does look like we’re talking about social fraud here,” said the general secretary of the conservative Freedom Party of Austria.

Pilz did nothing illegal. Once in a Gemeindebau, you never have to leave. But is it unethical for the wealthy to stay? City housing officials point out that having wealthier tenants in the Gemeindebauten helps thwart the problems that accompany concentrated poverty, creating a more stable, healthier environment for everyone. Unlike in the United States, where public housing is only for the poorest — the average resident’s annual household income was $15,219 in 2019, well below the federal poverty line of $16,910 for a family of two — the relative integration of the Gemeindebauten means that they are not stigmatized.

That’s not to say they are problem-free. Noomi Anyanwu, the 23-year-old founder of Black Voices Austria, told me that she grew up in a Gemeindebau with an Austrian mother and a Nigerian father. When she wasn’t more than 5, a white boy in the complex who was a bit older called her brother a racial slur while everyone was playing in the courtyard. Overhearing the spat, the fathers descended into the courtyard. But the white father didn’t apologize; he doubled down, repeating what his son said. Just a few years later, Anyanwu said, her father left the country because of employment discrimination and racist treatment by the police.

So I was surprised when Anyanwu told me that, on the whole, her experience with social housing was positive. The Gemeindebau was its own village within the city, she said. She estimated that 50 percent of her Gemeindebau neighbors were immigrants — “it reflected society,” she told me. (Vienna actually has a slightly higher percentage of foreign-born residents than New York City.) A girl her age named Safiya lived in an apartment across the hall from hers and would become her best friend. Safiya’s father was also from Africa — from Somalia — and he, too, left because of racism. But the affordability of the Gemeindebau allowed the girls’ mothers to maintain stability.

Esra Ozmen, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, grew up in Sandleitenhof, one of the largest Geimendebauten, which has villa-like courtyards and stonework. As an adult, she moved into her own Gemeindebau studio. Ozmen says affordable housing gave her the stability to study for a Ph.D. in fine art while also pursuing a rap career. She makes 1,000 to 2,000 euros a month from her shows and from organizing cultural events. “I have a car,” she told me. “A Mercedes A-Class from the ’90s. I eat out. I drink one coffee out every day. I don’t have a lot of money. But I live rich.”

Social housing like Vienna’s might seem inconceivable in America. But American politicians seriously considered it in the 1930s. After the stock-market crash of 1929, the U.S. housing market also collapsed; half of mortgage debt was in default by 1933. Both the right and the left agreed that the government needed to intervene. The question was how. According to the historian Kenneth T. Jackson in his book “Crabgrass Frontier,” at the time, the typical mortgage ranged from five to 10 years, and borrowers paid interest only until the end of the term, when full payment was due or a borrower refinanced. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, Congress created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to buy underwater mortgages and stabilize the housing market. Within two years, the H.O.L.C. restructured more than a million mortgages, covering 10 percent of all owner-occupied homes. Principal and interest were bundled together so that over about 20 years of manageable payments, borrowers became outright homeowners.

But that wasn’t enough to salvage the real estate market or the economy. During the Great Depression, one-quarter of all Americans were unemployed, and the construction industry was hit particularly hard. The United States needed the same things as Vienna at the time: employment and better housing conditions for workers. Housing is “the wheel within the wheel to move the whole economic engine,” said Marriner Eccles, Roosevelt’s Federal Reserve chairman. The Federal Public Works Administration, an emergency jobs program, funded construction of about 50 new public-housing complexes, including the Harlem River Houses in New York City, a project seemingly straight out of Vienna, with Beaux-Arts-inspired buildings along a central courtyard with a nursery school, health clinics and a public library.

Although this housing was admired, it was costly and mired in controversy, writes the historian Gail Radford, who chronicles the New Deal-era debate over social housing in her book, “Modern Housing for America.” Roosevelt sought a housing plan that didn’t require the government to keep footing the bill. At a time when Communism was gaining traction, he preferred to wed Americans to capitalism. The best way to do that? Broaden the base of homeowners — increase the number of Americans with a personal investment in property.

Congress’s National Housing Act of 1934 would rescue the housing market and establish the housing policy that defines America today. It made permanent the fixed-rate, long-term mortgage that the H.O.L.C. had helped introduce. Banks were reluctant to assume risk over decades, so the act created the Federal Housing Administration (F.H.A.) to insure mortgage debt with the full backing of the U.S. Treasury as long as loans conformed to standards it set — for instance, homes had to appraise for the purchase price and had to be in a stable-enough neighborhood, which meant a white-enough neighborhood, to make sure the government wouldn’t lose money if a borrower defaulted. On its maps, the F.H.A. colored the neighborhoods deemed too risky for mortgage insurance in red — a form of “redlining,” a policy that did a great deal to create the grave racial disparities in wealth that persist today. “No agency of the United States government has had a more pervasive and powerful impact on the American people over the past half-century,” Jackson writes.

But the Federal Housing Administration had no plan to address low-income housing needs. So Senator Robert Wagner, a New York Democrat, introduced a second bill, inspired by what the housing scholar Catherine Bauer had seen in Vienna and other European cities. As proposed, the Housing Act of 1937, which Bauer helped write, would have included financing for the construction of both limited-profit housing and public housing. Faced with fierce opposition from the real estate industry, Wagner and Bauer accepted five fatal compromises in order to pass the bill. First, support for nonprofit and limited-profit cooperatives was eliminated. Second, location decisions were left to local governments, many of whose constituents greeted public housing like the bubonic plague, as one commenter put it. Third, a provision was added for an “equivalent elimination” of slum property, meaning that for each new unit built, a slum dwelling had to be cleared. (That way, public housing wouldn’t dampen landlords’ profits by increasing the overall supply of units.) Fourth, public housing would be eligible only to those so poor that they could never secure decent housing in the private market.

Fifth and finally, construction costs were severely limited. The problem with America’s public housing today isn’t just that it’s underfunded and poorly maintained. It’s that it wasn’t built well to begin with. Doors were left off closets; interior walls were thin and cheap. At a public-housing complex in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the elevator only stopped on every other floor. As Radford writes, “Those who hated public housing remained hostile, while the minimal buildings produced by the [United States Housing Authority] attracted no new allies and discouraged some of the old ones.” Indeed, America’s public housing was designed to fail: to be unappealing to anyone who could afford to rent.

As Bauer predicted early on, housing programs targeting only the poor would lack the political support necessary to thrive. Only an integrated program, one that welcomed the majority like the Gemeindebau of Vienna, would be sustainable. But the U.S. government prioritized support for banking rather than construction. The 30-year mortgage was a huge economic boon for the millions of Americans who took one out, benefiting from the federal subsidies and the nation’s long upward trajectory in home prices; the instrument leveraged many a renter and public-housing resident into homeownership and “turned many a former dependent of the public sector into a small-time fiscal conservative,” as Adkins, Cooper and Konings write in “The Asset Economy.”

This constituency of middle-class homeowners is what the Dartmouth emeritus economist William A. Fischel calls “homevoters”: a coalition of Americans who — consciously or not — vote to protect the value of their property. They tend to oppose local development and favor exclusionary zoning — which ensures maximum appreciation and prevents their tax dollars from extending to poorer neighborhoods. This tendency, alongside stagnant wages, has transformed the nation’s housing stock into an ever-scarcer and ever-more-expensive class of speculative asset. It’s almost impossible to “cater to the expectations of an existing constituency of middle-class homeowners without raising the barriers of entry for the rest of society,” Adkins and her colleagues write. “A middle-class politics of asset democratization has ended up undermining the conditions of its own viability.”

I wasn’t the only American looking to Vienna for possible answers to America’s housing crisis. I was there following a delegation from New York that had come to study the city’s housing system — 50 policymakers, researchers and activists invited by Housing Justice for All, an alliance of housing organizers across the state, and the Action Lab, a social-movement hub. One afternoon, I joined them on a tour of Karl-Marx-Hof, one of the largest housing complexes in the world.

Ever since Karl-Marx-Hof opened in 1930, it has been a sort of Rorschach test — a domineering socialist monstrosity or a pioneering communitarian stronghold, depending on your political perspective. Exiting the subway station, the building shot up before me, seven stories tall and three-quarters of a mile long, a perimeter block that looks like a citadel. The core of the building is cream-colored, but its sandstone red elements draw the eye — red balconies and red towers topped by staffs that can fly enormous banners that are visible miles away. Its six huge arched passageways, also red, give the complex the civic stature of an aqueduct.

Julia Anna Schranz, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Vienna and our guide, wore Converse, jeans and a long red wool coat. She pointed out four grim ceramic figures mounted on top of the archways, explaining that they were personifications of enlightenment, freedom, welfare and physical culture. These embellishments — commissions to increase employment during the period between the world wars, were also seen as an investment in the aesthetics of the Gemeindebauten and a tribute to its tenants.

Schranz opened the thick, thorny iron gates spanning one archway, and we passed into a grassy courtyard — nearly two football fields in size. Painted an off-white that glowed in the morning sun, the interior was a striking contrast with the more formidable exterior.

“ These are the projects,” India Walton, a community organizer from Buffalo, said wryly. There was a rose garden. Children — Black, brown, white — were running and shrieking in a playground attached to an on-site kindergarten. Walton, now in her 40s, had twins when she was just 19 and raised them while working as a nurse. Decades later, she became politically active, and in 2021 she won the Democratic nomination for mayor of Buffalo, only to be defeated by a write-in campaign by the Democratic incumbent. Where would she be now if she had the option of living in a place like this? She would have left her marriage sooner, Walton told me. “I might not have been a nurse, but a doctor.” A child in the kindergarten waved at her, and she waved back.

When Karl-Marx-Hof opened, it housed 5,000 people in 1,400 apartments. These apartments were coveted. “It had two central laundries, two communal bathing facilities with tubs and showers, a dental clinic, maternity clinic, a health-insurance office, library, youth hostel, post office, and a pharmacy and 25 other commercial premises, including a restaurant and the offices and showroom of the BEST, the city-run furnishing and interior-design advice center,” Blau writes.

Now fewer than 3,000 tenants live in Karl-Marx-Hof — not because it’s undesirable but because living standards have improved and, in response, Vienna has allotted tenants more space. Vienna’s housing authority believes that a family of four needs around 1,100 square feet, so it combined some of the units to create larger ones.

A bobblehead nodded from a balcony with potted plants and cairns. An older Austrian man waved. State Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher, a Democrat who had recently unseated the incumbent Democrat in the 50th Assembly District, which includes parts of Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Fort Greene, live-tweeted the tour on her phone. State Senator Julia Salazar, a Democrat representing the 18th State Senate District, which covers Bushwick, took notes with a gold pen on a notebook with black paper. Renette Bradley, a tenant organizer, wore a Nickelodeon shirt, overalls, a black New York beanie and lavishly long fake lashes. “Can you be paroled here?” she asked, her voice husky and direct. This affected many of Bradley’s friends and relatives who, upon release from prison, were left homeless because they weren’t allowed to join family living in public housing.

Schranz looked at her blankly.

“Can you come out of prison and live here?” Bradley repeated.

“Of course,” Schranz said. “Why not? If you’re out, you’re out.”

The New Yorkers murmured. Schranz continued to look at us questioningly.

“There’s like four or five problems baked into that question that they just don’t understand,” Joseph Loonam, a housing campaign coordinator with VOCAL-NY, said as we walked toward the laundry facilities. He told me that a member of his organization had been arrested more than 40 times because whenever he visits his family in the Gowanus projects, he violates the terms of his plea deal.

At the museum store, I bought a red potholder crocheted by a local women’s co-op: a Red Vienna-era schema of the “three evils” seizing Europe (Nazism, Communism, monarchism), each represented by white arrows. Several organizers and state legislators bought one, too. When the college student working at the museum shop said he was all out, a lawmaker suggested that he could sell the potholders in the display case. “We aren’t used to this,” the college student said, unlocking the case, by which he seemed to mean American patterns of consumption. The American need to own.

Vienna has succeeded in curbing the craving to own. It has done it by driving down the price of land through rezoning and rent control. In general, the beneficiaries of these land-use policies are less the Gemeindebauten (they stopped building from 2004 to 2015 and now only produce some 500 units a year) and more the limited-profit housing associations, the origins of which preceded Red Vienna and have built 3,000 to 5,000 units a year for the last four decades.

Today limited-profit housing accounts for half the city’s social housing. Limited-profit housing associations are restricted to charging rents that reflect costs. Investors — banks, insurance funds — may buy shares of the limited-profit housing associations, generally to help fund initial construction. They are paid a low rate of annual interest on their shares. Any profits beyond that must be reinvested in the construction of new social housing. “It creates a revolving flow of financing for social housing,” said Justin Kadi, a professor in planning and housing at the University of Cambridge. Vienna’s main outlay toward housing is now providing low-cost financing for construction — and the government gets that money back.

On a gray Friday, Wilhelm Andel, a tall 84-year-old wearing jeans and a leather jacket, greeted me at the Alt-Erlaa tram stop to show me the limited-profit complex where he had lived for 40 years. Alt-Erlaa is one of the largest limited-profit complexes in Vienna, with 3,181 units in 18 futuristic towers, 23 to 27 stories tall, built between 1973 and 1986. As we approached, I saw that the towers had aged surprisingly well, maybe because greenery is timeless, and vegetation seemed to cascade off the tiered balconies. Willie had chosen a unit on the sixth floor. His rent for a nearly-1,200-square-foot apartment was 824 euros — an amount that would be reasonable for Amarillo, Texas, or Shreveport, La., but out of the question in any of the 50 largest American metro areas.

Living in Alt-Erlaa, Willie enjoyed access to seven rooftop swimming pools, seven indoor swimming pools, tennis courts, gyms and acclaimed art. When the rest of the delegation joined us, he led us toward one of his favorite aspects of the buildings: two murals in the lobby of the second building meditating on the role of the news media and labor in society. They were by the Austrian artist Alfred Hrdlicka. “They remind me of Orozco,” said Dorca Reynoso, an employee at Verizon, referring to the political murals of the Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco. Reynoso’s rent in Manhattan doubled in 2014 to $1,250. When her landlord proposed a 50 percent increase again in 2022, she was unable to pay and ratcheted up her organizing campaign against her landlord. “They’re so beautiful,” she said, gazing at the paintings.

For this very reason, Vienna’s limited-profit and nonprofit units were many of the delegates’ favorites. Art and aesthetics matter. We visited a small nonprofit building, a co-op, that was successfully designed and developed by strangers who responded to a newspaper ad. The top floor had an expansive roof deck, a communal kitchen, a playroom and a sauna. “You mean I could be in the sauna when my kids are in the playroom?” said Julie Colon, a Bronx organizer who told me she gave birth alone while in the shelter system. “This is crazy.” Shanti Singh, a tenant-rights activist from the Bay Area with short, asymmetrically cropped hair, lingered in the sunny library with its tall windows and honey wood walls. “I never want to leave,” she said.

The spiral of overvaluation in housing, which makes the housing-haves rich and the have-nots desperately poor, has brought us to a point where only something radical can solve it. The problem with housing in the United States is that it has been locked in as a means of building wealth, and building wealth is irreconcilable with affordability. The housing crisis in the United States is proof. Even in 2017, before the pandemic, around 113 million Americans — some 35 percent of the nation’s population — were living with a serious housing problem, such as physically deficient housing, burdensome costs or no housing at all, notes Alex F. Schwartz, an urban-studies professor at the New School.

Calls for a federal social-housing plan in America might sound far-fetched, but make no mistake: The United States government intervenes heavily in the housing market. It’s just a two-tiered system, as Gail Radford, the historian, argues. There’s generous support for affluent homeowners and deliberately insufficient support for the lowest-income households. In 2017, the United States spent $155 billion on tax breaks to homeowners and investors in rental housing and mortgage-revenue bonds, more than three times the $50 billion spent on affordable housing.

That $50 billion isn’t nothing. In fact, in many U.S. cities, public spending per capita on housing and community-development subsidies is higher than in Vienna. But it seems clear that much of this money is misspent, whether through inefficient private-public partnerships like the low-income-housing tax credit; or through distortionary vouchers; or, most dubiously of all, through subsidizing homeowners, the people who need it least. “If you give everyone demand-side subsidies, like vouchers, and there’s a supply shortage, it’s going to drive up prices,” Chris Herbert, the managing director of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me. It costs the state more, and landlords often wind up pocketing the profits.

Though the Gemeindebauten represented a large initial government outlay, Vienna’s social housing is now self-sustaining. Guess how much of the residents’ salary goes toward the program. One percent. Social housing drives down rents in the private market by as much as 5 percent. Vouchers may appear cheaper in the short term, but directly financing well-regulated public and limited-profit construction is the only way to mitigate speculation and hedge against ever-increasing housing costs. In 2020, New York and California spent $377 and $248 per capita, respectively, in housing development, while Vienna spent just $124 — and approximately half of Vienna’s spending is on low-interest financing that will be repaid and then re-lent.

Social-housing programs have existed in America before, and they exist in America to this day. Local social-housing programs, many of them inspired by Vienna, are underway in Montgomery County, Md. ; Seattle; and California. And they have a long legacy in New York, which built 66,000 affordable apartments and 69,000 limited-profit co-op apartment units from 1955 to 1981 under the Limited-Profit Housing Companies Law, also known as Mitchell-Lama, after the two legislators who introduced it. In combination with public housing, Mitchell-Lama units are a main reason economic diversity remains in the Lower East Side, Williamsburg and Chinatown.

Housing expense has been a staggering burden for so many of us, for so long, that it’s hard to even contemplate what it would mean to have it recede in our minds. When I spoke to Peter Pilz, the politician who took over his grandmother’s unit in Goethehof, I asked him, as I asked every Viennese tenant of social housing, what he did with all the money he saved thanks to his cheap rent. “I haven’t invested a single penny in the stock market,” he told me. “I would consider it an enormous waste of time to sit in front of my computer and study what the stock market is doing. I prefer to use my time writing, editing an online newspaper supporting interesting initiatives and having fun.”

Pilz was staying in Tuscany when we spoke, and he had spent the day bicycling. He stopped in Pienza to admire the small purple cathedral and sample the famous pecorino. Then he cycled on to Montalcino, where he sipped some Brunello, before returning to Bagno Vignoni to go swimming. “That’s my hard life,” he told me. “If people don’t have to struggle all day long to survive — if your life is made safe, at least in social conditions — you can use your energy for much more important things.”

Video at the top from Luca Locatelli

Francesca Mari is a contributing writer for the magazine and an assistant professor of the practice in the literary-arts department at Brown University. She writes about all aspects of housing. Luca Locatelli is a photographer whose work focuses on environmental images and solutions to the climate crisis. He has been working on “The Circular Economy,” an immersive project premiering in September at the Gallerie d’Italia museum of Turin, Italy.

An earlier version of this article misstated the year the euro was introduced in Austria. It was 2002, not 1999.

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Social housing

In the 1920s, the city of Vienna began to build social housing for the countless workers who came to Vienna from elsewhere in the Empire. Today, the architectural image of Vienna is impossible to imagine without these buildings, some of which are truly gigantic.

The Social Democratic government of the First Republic (1918-1934) wanted to improve workers' quality of life. The plan was to erect large housing complexes that were affordable and offered their residents good living conditions. The social housing functioned as a city within a city and was usually built as perimeter block developments: a large gateway led into the often landscaped interior courtyard, from which the individual stairways and apartments were accessed. Amenities such as swimming pools, supermarkets, laundromats, and kindergartens were frequently situated in the common buildings. The first housing estate to be built in Vienna was the Metzleinstalerhof in the 5th district.

Many of the architects were students of Art Nouveau icon Otto Wagner at the Academy of Fine Arts. They included Karl Ehn, who planned the famous Karl-Marx-Hof in the 19th district of Vienna. Together with the Sandleitenhof with 1,531 apartments in the 16th district, he is the poster child of "red housing" in the period between the wars. In the Karl-Marx-Hof, which accommodates 1,272 apartments on a total of 156,000 square meters, there is a museum in the laundromat which explains the communal housing of this era. 61,175 apartments in 348 housing blocks and 5,227 apartments in 42 terraced house developments were built between 1923 and 1934. 400 architecture offices participated in the construction. Interrupted by the Second World War, the city of Vienna took up its social construction projects again in 1947, and has continued these - adapted architecturally to the era in question - until the present.

At the beginning of the 1930s, the so-called Werkbund estates were built. The underlying idea was that of a new estate movement. The aim was to achieve economy in the smallest space and functional solutions. The model houses were supposed to be affordable, able to be built in series, and with flat roofs. The Vienna Werkbund Estate in the 13th district had a total of 70 buildings and was built between 1929 and 1932 under the direction of Josef Frank. Prominent architects included Josef Hoffmann, Clemens Holzmeister and Adolf Loos. However, the Werkbund Estate did not succeed - although today it is one of the most significant examples of modern architecture in Austria. Starting in 1933, Austrian fascism left little space for socio-political experiments, which ended completely with the annexation of Austria to Hitler's Germany in 1938.

The Nazi era hardly left any architectural traces in Vienna, aside from the six flak towers that are visible today - like warnings - on the skyline. Since the 1960s, countless outstanding examples of modern architecture have been built in Vienna.

Links with more information:

  • Tours by the Vienna Architecture Center
  • Museum "Red Vienna in the Laundromat" at Karl-Marx-Hof

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The vibrant Sunflower Houses in the new central neighbourhood of Wildgarten (by Madrid firm Arenas Basabe Palacios with engineering firm Buschina & Partner) are a collection of 11 small buildings, surrounded by green space, that feel more like houses than apartment buildings.

For almost a century, Vienna has been successfully integrating vibrant social housing into the city. Lloyd Alter finds out how.

In 2023, Vienna once again topped the Economist Intelligence Unit’s list of the world’s most livable cities. It scored a perfect 100 for stability, healthcare, education and infrastructure — that last metric encompassing the high quality of its housing and public transport. It wasn’t always thus. At the end of the First World War, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the metropolis transformed from the centre of the world into an impoverished and overcrowded city so rife with tuberculosis that the illness became known as “the Viennese disease.” Then, in 1923, the Social Democrat government approved a plan to build 25,000 housing units; they were paid for by taxes on luxury goods, traffic, land and even brothels. They could do this because of the Austrian capital’s unprecedented independence thanks to “a constitutional law,” according to the City of Vienna, that “separated Vienna from Lower Austria, turning Vienna into a separate Bundesland (state) with financial sovereignty and her own taxing authority.” Only a decade later, at the end of the “Red Vienna” period, more than 60,000 apartments housing 220,000 people had been built.

As part of its plan for the new central district of Wildgarten, Arenas Basabe Palacios designed 11 blocks of varying scales that contain 82 homes and boast a multitude of amenities: community spaces, collective bicycle parking and ground-floor shops. Known as the Sunflower Houses, the buildings are clad in ceramics, including bright yellow tiles, that make for an exuberant addition to Vienna’s ever-growing stock of social housing.

Other major cities were only beginning to embark on social housing — places like New York in the ’30s, London in the ’60s, Toronto in the ’70s. But ideological barriers were already in place. In one egregious example that has echoes in socio-economically discriminative zoning policies around the world, a ban on apartment buildings in residential neighbourhoods was enacted in Toronto in 1912. And in 1934, when Charles Hardy of the Brookings Institution travelled to Vienna to write the first major study of housing in Vienna, he too readily concluded that it did not have application elsewhere. “The housing program was a development out of specific housing conditions, tax policies, building regulations, war-time adjustments and class controversies, most of which were peculiar to Vienna,” Hardy wrote. He saw nothing that “goes far to demonstrate that the provision of shelter is in general one of those services which cannot be performed satisfactorily through private enterprise without governmental subsidy or governmental participation.” A legacy one hundred years and running proves him wrong. To this day, Vienna has maintained all its original social housing stock and continues to build. The result: 60 per cent of the city’s population lives in social housing.

The Sunflower Houses’ different scales guarantee ample sunlight in all the interiors. Their organic connections to the outdoors via shared exterior stairs make them porous to the south-facing gardens and the open spaces between.

A few years ago, after participating in a conference in Vienna, I toured a few projects with the American architect Michael Eliason. Many were in Aspern Seestadt, a community of 25,000 people built on a former airport in the city’s northeast. We rode our bikes around the cyclist-friendly development, which has been in progress since 2007, when the city approved a master plan by the Swedish firm Tovatt Architects & Planners in collaboration with N+ Objektmanagement. Among its first major completed works is a wood housing project by Berger+Parkkinen Architekten with Querkraft. It looks massive from the street, but from within, it breaks up to form slender buildings connected by open walkways and separated by some of the nicest urban green spaces I have seen anywhere.

Child runs through the Sunflower Houses social housing complex in Vienna

Eliason is a housing expert who characterizes the Vienna model as a “100-year experiment in solidarity, building up community, and providing adequate and affordable housing.” He explains how this history has evolved into an embrace of various building typologies. “Vienna is constantly working to improve itself,” he says, “and to prioritize equity, sustainability and the environment. It has built some of the best new urban districts globally, numerous Passivhaus buildings, a broad array of decarbonized buildings, and social housing with amenities and community spaces rarely found elsewhere. The city is all-in on these issues and doing so many things right.”

Vienna's Sunflower Houses social housing complex as seen from above

The success of the model is not explained by any single attribute but by a mix of initiatives and approaches. An embrace of good design has always been paramount: in the Red Vienna years, to build a “Versailles for the working class” at the iconic Karl-Marx-Hof housing estate; and, in more recent times, to create housing that is attractive to people of all economic strata, rather than signalling that this is low-cost housing for low-income residents. And it’s one of the key contributors to Vienna’s social housing success. Essentially, the model can be boiled down into six defining aspects:

There is no zoning for single-family housing. Whereas in many cities, social housing projects are built on the edges or the outskirts, like the banlieues of Paris, Vienna integrates them into the core, where they are built out consistently at six to eight storeys. This precedent long ago precluded NIMBYism, and by upholding the mid-rise character of the city’s neighbourhoods, planners eliminate the spectre of tall buildings overlooking single-family private homes.

In the massive development of Aspern Seestadt, Berger+Parkkinen, in collaboration with Querkraft Architekten, have created the Wood Housing complex: a total of 213 apartments and eight shops united by their warm timber cladding and jutting concrete balconies.

After seeing how well they work in Germany and Austria, Eliason has been promoting the use of single-exit stairs in North America. Permitted in Austrian buildings up to 32 metres tall, they allow for marvellous interior courtyards and much greater flexibility in design. Buildings then tend to be smaller (and much thinner — rarely more than 20 metres deep), since there are limits on the number of units that can be served on each floor by one stair. But this results in layouts with more sunlight and air. In many buildings, the stairwell itself is like an enclosed courtyard — a social space, often with a big skylight that opens for smoke abatement in emergencies. During COVID-19, these operable windows allowed fresh air to circulate through the common spaces.

Sometimes, architects use the freedom afforded by the single stair to break projects up into even smaller buildings; the vibrant Sunflower Houses in the new central neighbourhood of Wildgarten (by Madrid firm Arenas Basabe Palacios with engineering firm Buschina & Partner) are a collection of 11 small buildings, surrounded by green space, that feel more like houses than apartment buildings. This simply could not be done under North American codes requiring two exit stairs and a corridor between them; it takes up too much space. Whereas North American buildings tend to bulk up to amortize the cost of multiple stairs and elevators over more units, the suites in the 11 Sunflower blocks all have multiple aspects for cross-ventilation; many of them have windows and views on three sides, where generous balconies cut a sculptural figure.

In the centre of the complex, residents have access to the “canyon,” a communal spot with stadium stairs and sloped sides that encourage different modes of play and gathering.

Vienna long ago recognized that housing and transit are inseparable. Before development began for Aspern Seestadt or any of its housing units went up, the city constructed the U2 underground subway connection. In this one district, the goal is to have 40 per cent of trips by transit, 40 per cent by bike or on foot, and only 20 per cent by car. If you’re carrying a heavy load, a fleet of rental e-cargo bikes is at your disposal. So residents choosing to live in this new community not only save on rent, but they also avoid the need for car ownership.

Marchfeld Terrassen, by the firm Trans_City, is low-cost social housing located near a rambling park and the Ernst-Theumer-Hof development, which exemplifies 1980’s Viennese social housing. The project consists of two vibrant white buildings with sculpturally undulating facades.

Eighty per cent of Vienna’s population rents, and for good reason: They have security of tenure that is almost equivalent to ownership. Rents are relatively low, 60 per cent of units are subsidized and there are no year-to-year leases. Tenants can stay in their apartments forever, even if they started in subsidized units, and can hand them down to their children. The mix of families on full, partial and zero subsidies in the same buildings rarely leads to conflict because multi-unit residential communities across the entire city reflect an assortment of different incomes. Conservatives in Austria sometimes complain that rich people should not be living in social housing, but according to Francesca Mari in the New York Times , authorities believe that the mix creates a more stable environment for everyone.

Marchfeld Terrassen social housing complex in Vienna

In North America, cities rake in operating revenues by selling land to private developers. Vienna has different ambitions for its assets. Whereas in the Red Vienna days the city was the developer, today the Wohnfonds Wien land bank controls 325 hectares and makes it available for Bauträgerwettbewerbe (housing developer competitions). The winning projects are based as much on design quality as on other criteria. “Teams compete to develop and receive subsidies for individual projects and are judged by a diverse panel on the economics of the project, the architecture, the ecology of the building and the social mix,” explains Eliason. “The city has effectively leveraged its purse to push the price of construction down, making interested parties compete on the merits and economics.”

FUX provides supervised housing for unaccompanied refugee minors in the rapidly evolving 11th District. The handsome building, clad in iridescent stained larchwood, arranges eight individual bedrooms on the second level and administration on the ground floor.

Design has been a critical attribute of housing in Vienna since the days of Karl-Marx-Hof and the Hundertwasser. In her book The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–1934, Eve Blau describes how the city rejected the modern movement and the German Model, instead embracing an indigenous urban building typology exemplified by smaller buildings that are worked into the city fabric — with playgrounds, wading pools and gardens in their central courtyards. But there were also large projects, often designed by students of Otto Wagner, as was Karl-Marx-Hof, which was envisioned by Wagner pupil Karl Ehn, trying to reconcile the old with the new. “As part of the city’s employment program, in this case for artists and artisans, they were in general elaborately and individually detailed with sculpture, moulded and painted decoration, glazed tiles, and ornamental brick and metalwork,” Blau writes. The modernists hated it (Sigfried Giedion ignored it altogether in the seminal modernist tome Space, Time and Architecture). But the occupants loved the buildings, which were (and continue to be) affordable and well-served by public transportation.

FUX social housing in Vienna

A hundred years since the ground was broken for Karl-Marx-Hof, courtyards and playgrounds still abound; connections to public transportation are a given, as are access to daylight and air. The Woody M Buildings Tivoligasse by Freimüller Söllinger Architektur are a good example of how high-quality housing can be inserted into an existing community with less disruption and lower carbon emissions. It replaces a single-storey grocery store with a new shop topped by a landscaped podium and four small mass-timber apartment buildings. The additional units could have been housed in a single building with two stairs and perhaps two elevators; instead, we have four stairs and three elevators — this isn’t just about economy, it’s about quality. Each suite has two aspects and cross-ventilation, and shares the single-loaded corridor with a maximum of four other units. As the architects note, “The spaces between the buildings function as green open spaces with trees, bushes and meadows for the residents, and enable views between the neighbouring buildings.” Vienna’s focus on quality and a strong tradition around community and solidarity has made it a beacon for contemporary planning. “The urban form they want is a city of short distances,” Eliason says. “It isn’t any one thing: Vienna’s successes and high quality of life stem from a massive amount of comprehensive planning and incredible efforts to build a better city. It all dovetails together.”

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Inside the Vienna model of social housing

Vienna’s high-functioning housing system looks to survive long after its centenary, and, like the cyclical lift in the city’s Rathaus, will continue to be one of the last of its kind.

By Jonny Ball

vienna social housing tour

Kurt Puchinger takes us to his office via a Hapsburg-era “paternoster” cyclical lift. Housed in the vast, neo-Gothic Wiener Rathaus, or Vienna City Hall, the city’s housing director is excited to show us this rare contraption made up of around a dozen continuously moving wooden compartments, taking passengers, many of whom are nervous at the prospect of jumping from a moving elevator, on a potentially never-ending rotation around the Rathaus’s ornate floors. “It’s one of the last of its kind,’’ Puchinger says with a smile.

A director of the Viennese housing and planning department, he is tasked with the maintenance of Vienna’s impressive system of subsidised public housing, a hallmark of the city’s social-democratic traditions going back a century. In the Austrian capital, more than 60 per cent of residents live in 440,000 social homes, about half owned directly by the municipal government and the rest by state-subsidised, not-for-profit co-operatives. These council houses are not built just for the low-paid, unemployed or hard up. Nor do they resemble the so-called “sink estates” lamented in the rhetoric of the British political classes. The upper income threshold for a single person to qualify for a social home is €45,510, or £40,000 – a yearly salary that would put you in around the 80th percentile, or the top 20 per cent of earners in the UK.

For a couple, the upper combined income limit is €67,820 – over £60,000. Tenants’ incomes are not continuously assessed, so pay progression throughout a resident’s career does not jeopardise their right to remain in public housing. The average rent on a one bedroom property amounts to 21 per cent of an average resident’s income. In Paris, the average is 46 per cent of income. In London, it’s 49 per cent. Vienna’s housing subsidy is paid for with a 1 per cent levy on the salaries of every Viennese resident, half of which is deducted from wages, and the other half matched by employer contributions.

“Our policy is based on the basic statement that housing is a human right,” Puchinger explains. “For 100 years this has been the philosophy of the Viennese Social Democratic Party.” This year marks the centenary of so-called “Red Vienna”, when Marxists in the Social Democratic Party initiated a radical reformist programme of municipal socialism – mass housebuilding, public education and healthcare – creating a proto-welfare statelet in the former seat of the collapsed Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Social Democrats have been the dominant party in the city legislature ever since.

“We don’t want to have a situation where you can identify the social status of a person by their home address,” says Puchinger. “Wherever you live you’ll find all kinds of social groupings and for us this is one of the most important things we want to do.” Integration and economically mixed communities are the watchwords, along with high-concept modernist architecture that in other European capitals would be the preserve of the well-to-do. Studies have shown that real integration of households of different professions and backgrounds promotes social solidarity, reduces crime, improves health, increases social mobility, avoids ghettoization and alleviates the kind of pervasive moods of detachment, disenfranchisement and alienation that characterise the reputations of some of the UK’s “left behind” areas.

Vienna’s generous housing model stands in stark contrast to the Cameron government’s “Pay to Stay” policy surcharging council tenants earning more than £30,000 a year – an idea that was dropped before implementation due to its impracticality (housing associations had no mechanism for forcing residents to declare their incomes). The late union boss, Bob Crow, and Kate Osamor MP (allocated a council house when she was a homeless single parent), have been criticised for living in social housing despite their relatively high salaries.

[See also: This policy could help Labour solve the housing crisis ]

But short-sighted conservative parsimony isn’t an inevitable part of the British political psyche. In 1949, Nye Bevan, architect of the NHS and doyen of the Labour left, proclaimed his vision of new municipally owned housing estates, in which “the working man, the doctor and the clergyman will live in close proximity”. His Housing Act removed the reference to publicly subsidised housing exclusively for “the working classes”, and aimed for the replacement of slums and ghettos for the poor with the “living tapestry of a mixed community”. Swept to power on a wave of postwar optimism, the reforming Labour government of 1945-1951 would leave a seemingly indelible mark on British society. Large parts of its policy programme were accepted and left untouched by the Conservative Party in government, including the idea that the state should play a large role in housing provision, and the UK variant of the Keynesian consensus – paternalistic welfarism, state intervention and a mixed economy – came to be known as Butskellism, a portmanteau of Labour and Conservative’s postwar Chancellors. By 1979, despite several periods of Conservative government, Bevan’s dream had come a long way to being realised; not only did almost a third of all households live in public housing, but 20 per cent of the richest tenth of the population did too.

This consensus fell apart with the election of Margaret Thatcher and the passing of Right to Buy legislation in 1980. Michael Heseltine, implementing the Housing Act in his role as Secretary of State for the Environment, framed the Bill in emancipatory language. “Certainly no single piece of legislation has enabled the transfer of so much capital wealth from the state to the people,” he said. Long-term council tenants were given the opportunity to buy their houses from local authorities at a huge discount. But while councils were obliged to engage in the piecemeal privatisation of their assets, they were forbidden to use the receipts to build new social homes, leading to a gradual depletion of social housing stock. The number of new council houses being built fell by 85 per cent by the end of the decade. As wealthier inhabitants took advantage of Right to Buy, the less wealthy residents continued to rent, and as council and housing association stock diminished, dwellings remaining under council or housing association control had to be allocated on a needs basis to those on the lowest incomes, the unemployed, the long-term sick and financially vulnerable. Now, after 40 years of Right to Buy, only 17 per cent of the population live in social homes, less than half of the 1979 peak. Half of all social homes have at least one resident with a long-term illness or disability. Average household income is 40 per cent less than in the private rented sector, and less than half the average of home-owning households. The “living tapestry of a mixed community” envisaged by Bevan has faded.

The private sector, meanwhile, has boomed. Average house prices in London were four times the average salary of prospective buyers in 1999, but by 2017 prices were 14.5 times the average salary, following a 300 per cent increase. The dream of a property-owning democracy has faltered for millions of struggling families and younger generations.

Adding insult to injury, over 40 per cent of London’s sold council houses have found themselves in the hands of private landlords rather than owner-occupiers, with many of the new low-income private tenants receiving housing benefit to cover their rents. Thus the public has paid for the policy failure three times: first to build the council house; second to subsidise the discount when it’s sold under Right to Buy; and third when the Right to Buy becomes a Buy to Let, when the former social home is bought by a landlord charging unaffordable rents to less wealthy tenants in receipt of housing benefit. Since the introduction of Right to Buy, the amount of money the government spends on housing benefit has increased by 600 per cent. Before the introduction of the policy, 80 per cent of government’s housing spend went on social homes, with the other 20 per cent going on housing benefits. Now, housing benefits make up 95 per cent of the government’s housing spend, with only 5 per cent spent on new social housing. The Labour Party’s Housing For the Many Green Paper describes this as a transfer of spending from bricks to benefits. In 2017, less than 1,000 new government-backed homes for social rent were started across a country of 65m people with an acute housing crisis. In Vienna, a city of less than 2m inhabitants, “the target is to build between 8,000 and 9,000 social homes every year” – a target that is regularly met, according to Karl Puchinger.

Does Vienna ever intend to follow a similar path to the UK, reducing new building and allowing social renters to buy their properties? “We do not sell any buildings,” Puchinger says. “Buildings that are owned by the city or by a subsidised social building company are not allowed to be sold. We’ve never privatised and we never will.” If Puchinger keeps his word, Vienna’s high-functioning housing system will survive long after its centenary, and, like the cyclical lift in the city’s Rathaus, will continue to be one of the last of its kind.

This article was originally published on 3 September 2019.

[See also: An “essentials guarantee” can end the need for foodbanks ]

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Vienna has created an equitable and affordable housing market. Here's how

A huge 1970s apartment building, with white balconies, many of which feature lush gardens

As Australia's housing crisis shows no signs of abating, one European city is having a very different experience.

In the Austrian capital Vienna, around 60 per cent of its nearly 2 million residents live in some form of social housing, where they have access to low rents, secure tenure and quality accommodation.

Meanwhile, the city consistently places very high on different city rankings, including once again topping the Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Liveability Index in June.

So how has Vienna managed to create a housing strategy that works for so many of its citizens?

It's been more than a century in the making.

Overcoming 'really dire' conditions

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Vienna was one of the premier cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Europe more broadly.

It was an intellectual and artistic melting pot, with radical and wealthy streaks. But it was also a divided city.

"Many people moved into the city, but there was not enough proper housing for them," Julia Anna Schranz, a historian at the University of Vienna, tells ABC RN's Rear Vision .

Private landowners and investors took advantage of this influx, building shoddy apartments with poor design and even worse sanitation, packing workers and families in.

Bed sharing was common around the city. Shift workers would rent the same bed and sleep in it during different parts of the day or night.

"[It was] really dire for the working class," Ms Schranz says.

But then World War I changed everything.

The end of World War I saw the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Austria became a republic and the country's first elections followed.

In 1919, Vienna held its first city council election and the left-wing Social Democratic Party won in a landslide.

The period known as Red Vienna had begun.

"The city government wanted to create a new society; they really wanted to change life for the working class," Ms Schranz says.

It built libraries, swimming pools, public sports facilities and outdoor gyms, and also enacted major housing reforms — funded by increased taxes on the wealthy.

A 1920s sepia photograph of an apartment building construction site

Building public housing with better living conditions than the dominant private market was a key ambition, explains Justin Kadi, an assistant professor in planning and housing at the University of Cambridge.

"[The government] had the slogan saying 'what we want is air and light'," Dr Kadi says — two things that were severely lacking in dingy working-class abodes.

The city government built "Gemeindebauten" or large-scale public housing estates.

The most famous of these is Karl Marx-Hof, named after the Communist Manifesto author.

Completed in 1930, the 1-kilometre-long structure could house thousands of people and remains one of the longest residential structures in the world.

A long, six-storey, brown and yellow apartment building with small turrets and a garden in front

And these buildings weren't just utilitarian — they were grand and decorative structures, designed by some of the country's most respected architects.

Kurt Hofstetter, an urban development planner with the City of Vienna, calls the bigger Gemeindebauten "palaces for workers".

Two types of social housing: Public and co-ops

World War II economically ruined and physically damaged Vienna. But in the fallout, the city's commitment to social housing remained.

"From the 1950s through to the 1970s, we saw very high building activity in the public sector and many, many more apartments were built," Ms Schranz says.

Mr Hofstetter says post-war, a federal tax was implemented where Austrians pay around 1 per cent of their income for social housing.

Rows and rows of apartments and balconies, one with yellow curtains

In Vienna, a system emerged where two types of social housing were offered.

One was the city's public housing, or housing that's owned, operated and provided by the City of Vienna.

The other is housing provided by "limited profit housing associations". These housing associations receive support from the government — like very low interest loans — to build co-op, rent-controlled housing.

In both types of housing, social cohesion within the property and the surrounding neighbourhoods is a big consideration.

Open to the middle class

There are income limits to access public housing in Vienna, but these are much higher than in other cities in the Western world.

According to the City of Vienna, around 75 per cent of the population qualify, meaning "the middle class also gets access to Vienna's subsidised housing stock".

A large statue of a woman fixed to the front of a red apartment building.

Ms Schranz says there are other criteria such as "you have to prove a need for housing, [which] is probably the most important criterion".

This can include "if you move out from home for the first time, if your contract expires and you have to move out [or] if you need an apartment that is more accessible", she says.

In addition, residents need to have lived in Vienna for two years, so Ms Schranz says newcomers often find the city's housing market very expensive.

Dr Kadi says that across different social housing types, "overall, you pay about a third less than on the private rental market".

Crucially, the housing contracts don't expire, even if you start to earn above the income limits.

Affordable housing for 'as many people as possible'

One factor that sets Vienna apart from other cities is that there hasn't been a mass sell-off of social housing stock over recent decades.

"There were several attempts [to sell-off social housing] but overall, the trend was much milder than in most other contexts," Dr Kadi says.

This contrasts with Australia. In NSW for example, around $3.5 billion worth of public housing and land was sold off between 2011 and 2023. These sales were to fund new public housing developments in the state.

Mr Hofstetter adds that Vienna's mindset also makes it unique.

"We kept the attitude of ... providing as much affordable housing to as many people as possible."

And although private rents and sales have gone up in recent years, Ms Schranz says, overall, the housing market still has many affordable options.

"Generally speaking … if you compare rent prices in Vienna to other big cities in Europe and also in the world, our rent is significantly lower."

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Social Housing in Vienna: Is it as good as it seems?

More than half of Vienna's 1.9 million residents live in some form of subsidised housing.

Vienna's reputation as a beacon of social housing excellence is widely considered well-deserved; the city council owns, co-owns and manages some 50 per cent of the city's residential real estate through an array of social schemes, these initiatives have made rents affordable for tens of thousands of households.

This decades-old tradition, which began in the 1920s, has contributed to the city's status as the world's most liveable city . But is the system as perfect and idyllic as it seems?

Recent developments have raised concerns; critics point to rising rent prices, ever-increasing waiting lists, a diminishing share of social housing in the real estate market after a long period of low-interest rates, and subsequent increases in private property ownership.

Euronews reporter Julian Lopez travelled to Austria's capital for Euronews Witness to see what's behind the facade.

A tenant's paradise

Administrative assistant Tesbire Keskin gave Euronews a tour of her 70 m2 apartment where she has lived with her family for almost 20 years. She pays €500 per month and enjoys a quality of life beyond market standards in her centrally-located flat. "The kindergarten is right opposite me, the school is a ten-minute walk. In two minutes, I'm at the underground," she explained.

"When my children were small and I couldn't get home from work, the neighbours picked them up from kindergarten. It's very nice here; it is green, quiet. I'm very happy, satisfied."

Representatives from the city council also showed Euronews around some of Vienna's oldest social buildings. Unlike Berlin and other European cities with high rates of private landownership, the former capital of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire never sold off its public land.

Vienna's annual budget for social housing hovers above €400 million, exceeding those of bigger EU capitals like Rome, Madrid or Lisbon.

"Our housing model is secured and financed by a housing tax that every Austrian pays," said Christian Schantl, the Head of International Relations at Wiener Wohnen-Vienna Living .

"It is a small contribution from their gross income. The employer also makes a small contribution, and this money is specifically intended for housing construction throughout Austria."

Living with mum and dad: Why can't youths in Ireland and Italy afford to move out?

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The winds of change

While Vienna is the pioneer of inclusive housing strategies, the city is also grappling with evolving housing dynamics and an increasing demand for social housing in addition, a prolonged period of low interest rates has worked in the favour of private developers.

Experts at the NGO  Volkshilfe , which helps homeless people access social housing, argue that decades ago, 80 per cent of new developments were social and 20 per cent private. But now, the tables have turned.

"We used to have two thirds of all apartments built by social housing, ten or fifteen years ago. Now it is the other way around. Two thirds of all apartments are being built by private investors. The result is higher housing prices, of course. We should try to turn it around again," Martin Orner, the Head of the NGO's Housing Policy Department, told Euronews.

Due to inflation , the cost of land, materials and maintenance costs have also skyrocketed, putting further pressure on social housing.

"The main solution would be to get more land and more opportunities to build social housing," suggested Orner.

A century-old tradition

As the city continues to navigate the challenges of a changing real estate landscape, the spirit of 'Red Vienna' persists - a period in the 1920s and '30s when Austria's Social Democratic Workers' Party introduced a social housing construction program in response to severe housing shortages.

Today, a permanent exhibition on this era serves as a reminder of the transformative power of social housing in shaping communities and fostering inclusivity. Euronews spoke with the curators, who maintain that this housing model has helped create the city's unique cultural and social character, which continues to influence the present.

"It was a city within a city and people hardly had to leave their residence because everything was available, including doctors' surgeries, shops and so on," explained Lilli Bauer, the exhibition's co-curator.

"At the time, there were even tuberculosis care centres in those municipal buildings. Similarly, during the pandemic, there were COVID-19 testing and vaccination centres. They were all very decentralised and spread across the city, and easy to access," she added.

Despite its limitations, Vienna stands as a testament to the enduring impact of progressive housing policies, the city council maintains it will continue to subsidise between 5,000 and 7,000 new flats every year.

For Julian's full report click on the video in the media player above.

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Vienna’s Social Housing Legacy: Rethinking Value

Charlie clemoes.

For both architecture and exploration Red Vienna underlines the hidden value of devoting a little extra time to quality and beauty.

Almost a year ago I spent a few days trekking across Vienna with the aim of seeing every noteworthy social house built during the Red Vienna period (1919-1934). It was quite a challenge, this was a very productive period of housebuilding, with 60,000 units built and many houses still standing (a lot of which are worthy of note).

As I was to find out, this is a pretty terrible way of exploring Vienna (or most places for that matter), simply trying to see everything rather than stopping to enjoy the particular details. I know this because I was lucky to have a close friend accompanying me who was less inclined to see as much as possible. As such, he wasn’t afraid to put his foot down once in a while and insist on pausing for a bit of café culture. Notwithstanding the fact that stopping for coffee in Vienna is a lovely thing to do, it also created the space for serendipity to strike, most notably in a café on the “Ringstraße des proletariats”, where we met a lady called Jutta Schwarz.

Herwegh-Hof on the “Ringstraße des Proletariats”.

Jutta had grown up in Herwegh-Hof, one of the big complexes that line the Ringstraße. That morning she was celebrating having just finished a month-long series of tours of the area. She was, however, kind enough to give one more private tour in the final few hours of our stay. In a single hour I gained far more of an insight about the philosophy behind the architecture than all the rest of the time we were there. In both architecture and exploration the whole thing was a lesson in the right balance between quality and quantity.

As Jutta explained on our tour, Vienna’s government was notable in this era for adopting a direct-labour programme which sought full employment, a pretty essential policy in a city suffering high unemployment (largely brought about by the collapse of the Austrian Empire). But the government’s approach differed from other socialist governments of the time who tended to advocate a Taylorist method of building governed by a scientific management of labour and an emphasis on pre-fabrication and mass production.

In contrast, the Viennese government was more concerned with the subtle yet vital value of engaging a wide range of tradesmen and materials in the production process and taking care over the design of each building. Consequently, a whole host of artisans and sculptors were involved in the massive programme of house-building.

The houses still bear the mark of this policy as you can find arts and crafts features throughout: magnificent statues, intricate carvings, vivid ceramics, metal work and masonry, with plenty of fountains and gardens and an abundance of well-ordered communal space.

As she pointed out each detail, Jutta was keen to highlight how sparingly things were employed, especially when considering their place in the wider whole. Indeed, while things look good, the decoration is far from overblown, the houses are decorated in muted colours, nothing is conspicuously useless and decorative elements are subtle, it’s like a lovely little treasure hunt, you really have to look carefully to appreciate them.

This relatively ambivalent attitude to decoration is where the huge influence of the Wiener Werkstatte comes to the fore. Influenced by John Ruskin, William Morris and the British Arts and Crafts movement, the Wiener Werkstatte began in the early 20th Century as a loose collection of designers who sought to rescue craftsmanship from oblivion by compromising with modern production processes and using decoration only where appropriate. Following their manifesto, decoration in the Red Vienna housing was used where it was appropriate, but not as a matter of course. Rather, the first priority was to build with good proportions using good materials (again echoing the Werkstatte manifesto).

In these conspicuously solid housing complexes, still standing after almost a century (when the average lifespan of a building these days is in the region of thirty years), you can see how much thought went into how life would be experienced in the place, with an excellent balance of private and public space. And this is where the decorative features come into their own. Because the idea was not just to keep the artisans occupied (a useful end in itself), but to surround Vienna’s working class with beautiful objects, and as a result make these people feel more beautiful themselves.

The sentiment is echoed in the city councillor Franz Steigel’s speech at the opening of Vienna’s beautiful Amalienbad swimming pool in 1926, which he described as “a symbol of the rise of the working classes to a new culture”.

Flickr/H.KoPP

Amalienbad is instructive. Now regarded as a masterpiece it was derided at the time as an expensive folly and used by the embittered landlord class as an example of the wastefulness of the city’s socialist government. With a stockpile of other examples of such seeming waste the tide began to turn against Red Vienna’s approach to the built environment and when the Great Depression hit, austerity quickly became the order of the day.

Reumann-Hof

Things did not end well for the socialist government. With a note of sadness, Jutta described how in February 1934, the army, backed by fascist paramilitary, seized power. After a final stand at the Proletarian Ringroad’s fortress-like Reumann-Hof (named after the city’s first socialist mayor) many socialists were murdered and the rest were forced underground.

Considering the fact that such a policy culminated in a lot of its progenitors beings killed, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a failure. And at face value, attempting to forego the cheapest approach in public works projects could be seen as pretty counter-intuitive to a government whose grip on power was relatively recent and tenuous. Moreover, the rapid rejection of Vienna’s direct-labour programme doesn’t benefit from direct comparison with Moscow’s much more long-lasting approach of mass-produced building using pre-fabricated elements. Indeed, this was and still remains out of step with the cost-conscious culture that has influenced even Communist countries since the advent of capitalist modernity.

But this was a genuine attempt to recast the concept of value, to behave as if there were alternatives to the capitalist emphasis on cost-saving and profit margin. And as we walked with Jutta through the Proletarian Ringroad, slowly observing the details, rather than ploughing through all of Red Vienna’s social houses, I couldn’t help but realise how deeply valuable a little additional craft can be. As we live through our own period of austerity, where a results-driven cost-benefit analysis governs production even more acutely than in the Soviet Union, we have resolutely lost sight of the ineffable value of good craftsmanship, the kind so vehemently advocated by Vienna’s socialist government and the Werkstatte before it.

Karl Marx-Hof

Yet looking at Vienna today it almost goes without saying that there is no longer the same zeal for social housing, let alone beautiful social housing. As we saw, many of the shops and social facilities in the Ringstraße were not functioning or were no longer being used for their original purpose. The houses themselves are still in remarkably good condition, but there has been much less ambition in new housebuilding.

Moreover the regime of rent control is rapidly diminishing. Rent control no longer applies to houses that were built after 1945 (although of 280,000 private rented flats in the city, 220,000 were built before then) and a series of laws since then have made tenancies more flexible and made it much easier to ask for market rates and to charge various premiums, for instance, for prime locations. And in 2008, thirty years after it was first introduced in the UK, right-to-buy began to rear its ugly head.

But this is same old same old, with the trend following that of other European cities (albeit less severely), so Vienna’s government shouldn’t be judged too harshly. Besides, there’s something pretty successful about the continued presence of massive complexes like Raben-hof, Freidrich-Engels-Hof, and Reumann-Hof to name just a few of the huge blocks dotting the city. That they exist is sufficient for now. They stand in wait, a potent reminder that we can do better.

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3 thoughts on " Vienna’s Social Housing Legacy: Rethinking Value "

How zagreb’s socialist experiment finally matured long after socialism, slaven klicek, a memorial to the highs and lows of social housing, tim verlaan, photo essay: the ferrier estate, mark minkjan.

vienna social housing tour

VWW: Gemeindebauten der Innenstadt - 100 years of social housing in Vienna

vienna social housing tour

  • Mo. 22.07.2024
  • 11:00 — 13:00
  • 10, oder €50 für die gesamte Walking Week (16 Tours)
  • 1., Rudolfsplatz 8 (U2 Schottenring)

The first Gemeindebau in Vienna opened in 1924. We celebrate 100 years of fine social housing, with a tour of the six buildings owned by Stadt Wien, in the centre of our city. One of them was built in 1942, during the Nazi period, which is something unusual. It is special to still have room for ordinary people to live in the very heart of Vienna.

Eugene Quinn has been making tours of Vienna social housing since 2019, when he made a walk for Wien Museum's exhibition about 100 years of Red Vienna, looking at one house from each decade since the 1930s, all of them in Floridsdorf. His tours have been reported in Financial Times , Huffington Post , Tumblr , The Local , Wiener Wohnen , Central European University , Uni Wien , Internationale Bauaustellung , Metropole , OEAD , Yahoo Movies , Urban Future Conference, Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements , Act Now conference, South China Morning Post , Australian National Forum , W24 , La Presse (Canada),

The vision, dynamism and focus on social justice of Red Vienna continues to attract worldwide attention, 100 years after the first social housing was completed, in 2024. We will look at the vision, revolutionary spirit and successes of those socialist governments.

The first elections for the Vienna City Council were held on 4 May 1919 in accordance with the universal, equal, direct and secret right to vote for both men and women. The elections resulted in a landslide victory and an absolute majority for the Social Democratic Party. On 22 May, Jakob Reumann was elected mayor. He was the first to take this office in a truly democratic way by will of the people. The problems Vienna was facing at the time were enormous: the Municipality had to cope with an empty treasury, an army of unemployed people, a tense energy supply situation, hunger, severe health problems and not least a dire need for housing.

In order to really understand the achievements of municipal housing in interwar Vienna, one has to go back some time. The housing situation at the end of the 19th century is probably best described in the words of the workers' poet Alfons Petzold: "Thirty windows, stuck together and starving for light, from each the hungry voice of poverty for comfort cried …" Life in the blocks of flats had little to do with "life per se". In 1910 almost 100,000 people were subtenants; another 75,000 were so called "Bettgänger", people who rented a space to sleep on and had basically no roof over their heads at all. In Ottakring, one quarter of the flats consisting of a kitchen and a single room accommodated six to ten people.

This housing situation also led to enormous health problems. In 1900 the average life expectancy of an unqualified worker was a mere 33 years. Of 100 children an average of 24 died during their first year of life. In his book "Wiedergeburt einer Weltstadt" (Rebirth of a Metropolis) Karl Ziak wrote a particularly remarkable sentence about this situation: "If it were possible to take houses to court, the Viennese blocks of flats would have to be put in the dock …"

Today's social housing in Vienna looks back to a long tradition. The first initiatives were taken in 1919 followed by a decision of the City Council in 1923 to build 25,000 flats from tax revenues. This resulted in a public housing model which was to achieve world fame: large multi-storey blocks with green inside courts and playgrounds and affordable flats equipped with running water, toilets and gas mains.

From 1919 to 1934 more than 60,000 flats were built creating housing space for approximately 220,000 people. The financial basis for this large-scale public housing planning was a tax system introduced by the Socialist City Councillor for Finances, Hugo Breitner, who opened up new tax resources for municipal politics. These "Breitner taxes" included a Luxury Tax, taxes on land, rents, commercial units, traffic and the Housing Tax adopted in 1922 as well as a tax on domestic servants and on luxury goods. Additional cornerstones introduced by the Viennese Municipal Administration from 1919 to 1934 were Public Health and Social Services.

We recommend this beautiful website , which explains the history, architecture and political dimensions of Vienna social housing. The right to a decent place to live is a basic human right, which is becoming increasingly unaffordable, around the world. Vienna has found an elegant solution to this problem.

Social housing in Vienna

220,000 municipal flats, 1,800 municipal housing estates, 200,000 subsidised flats, approx. 500,000 tenants in municipal housing facilities, 100 years of municipal housing in vienna, 610 ha of green zones in municipal housing estates, 67,000 trees in municipal housing complexes, 1,300 children's playgrounds in municipal housing estates, more than 7,800 lifts in municipal housing complexes.

  • (c) Pixabay_vienna-1022899
  • City of Vienna, Wiener Wohnen/Gerry Frank
  • City of Vienna - Wiener Wohnen, Gerry Frank
  • City of Vienna - Wiener Wohnen, Peter Korrak
  • City of Vienna - Wiener Wohnen, Dieter Steinbach
  • City of Vienna - Wiener Wohnen, Alexandru Ilisei

Kathrin Gaál

Vice-Mayor and Executive City Councillor for Housing, Housing Construction, Urban Renewal and Women's Issues of the City of Vienna

"The right to housing is a human right (Articles 16 and 31 of the European Social Charter)."

In the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, Vienna was beset by a dramatic housing shortage. Above all the working class was constrained to live in cramped quarters and great poverty. This extreme crowding and lack of hygiene favoured outbreaks of various epidemics. Tuberculosis was referred to as “the Viennese disease” because it was more frequent in the Austrian capital than in other European countries; it was also considered a typical ailment of the working class. Reacting to these conditions, the Social Democratic city government, which was for the first time voted into office after World War I, undertook concerted efforts towards a significant improvement of the housing situation.  In the early 1920s, the City Council’s adoption of the first housing construction programme for Vienna provided for the construction of 25,000 flats over a five-year period. The underlying objective was to create affordable, high-quality homes for broad strata of the population. But much more was achieved: housing estates with “fresh air, light and sunshine” that at the same time offered kindergartens, schools and lending libraries as well as communal facilities. Although framework conditions and needs have changed over the years and decades, the City of Vienna has remained true to its fundamental political intention of ensuring the supply of its citizens with modern and affordable housing. Contrary to other European cities, the treatment of municipal housing estates as an object of profiteering was always out of the question. Vienna’s system of housing promotion is one of most important tools for continuing to provide a sufficient quota of affordable dwellings despite rising demand. Not least because of this asset, Vienna is considered one of the world’s most liveable cities. No other European city can boast a similar constancy of its social housing policy – a policy that was never abandoned, not even when the spirit of the era was dictated by neoliberalism and privatisation. The City of Vienna is committed to subsidised housing construction and, contrary to many other metropolises, has never considered selling off this municipal stock. The great number of subsidised dwellings exerts a price-dampening effect on the entire housing market of the Austrian capital. As a result, rents in Vienna are relatively moderate when compared to other metropolises. A wide range of affordable housing units can still be taken for granted in Vienna. Today, around 50 percent of all Viennese live in subsidised dwellings – either in one of the 220,000 municipal units or in one of the 200,000 co-operative flats built with municipal subsidies. Vienna’s 1,800 municipal housing estates alone are home to close to half a million citizens. The “Vienna Model” of social housing ensures that future generations, too, will have access to a sufficient number of affordable dwellings.

Interview with Kathrin Gaál

The secret of success of the “Vienna Model”

Statement Karin Ramser

Municipal housing in Vienna

Karin Ramser

Director City of Vienna - Wiener Wohnen

Since the launch of Vienna’s first ever social housing programme, people’s expectations and requirements of their living space have changed a lot.

"All over the world, the Vienna model of social housing is regarded as a model of success. It is thus hardly surprising that the interest of international experts in Vienna’s housing sector has greatly increased."

No other European city can boast a similar constancy of its social housing policy – a policy that was never abandoned, not even when the spirit of the era was dictated by neoliberalism and privatisation. Vienna is committed to municipal housing and, contrary to many other metropolises, has never considered selling off this city-owned stock. The great number of subsidised dwellings exerts a price-dampening effect on the entire housing market of the Austrian capital. As a result, rents in Vienna are relatively moderate when compared to other metropolises. A wide range of affordable dwellings can still be taken for granted in Vienna. Economists, too, assert that self-regulating market forces fail where supply is finite and, thus, can only be (re)produced to a limited degree. The housing market is a perfect example of a market where supply is subject to limitations, so that increasing demand does not lead to equally increasing supply but rather to soaring prices. As a consequence, nearly all European metropolises and conurbations are currently beset by a massive housing shortage as well as by the fact that many population groups can no longer afford living in the city and, hence, near their workplace. Vienna’s approx. 220,000 municipal flats, which due to their specific rental conditions are not subject to the forces of the free market, run counter to neoliberal positions and blind faith in the market. This housing stock is an important market regulator that, thanks to Vienna’s city government and its present-day and past decisions, was never exposed to privatisation, contrary to the situation in other metropolises. According to the policy adopted by Vienna’s city government, the fundamental need that is housing and the possibility for all income groups to live in our city are more important than the financial gain achieved by just a few. Today, around 50 percent of all Viennese live in subsidised flats – either in one of the 220,000 municipal flats or in one of the 200,000 co-operative dwellings built with municipal subsidies. Vienna’s 1,800 municipal housing estates alone are home to close to half a million citizens. It was and remains the task of Wiener Wohnen to preserve municipal housing estates for future generations and to further enhance supply through e.g. attic conversions or the “Municipal Housing NEW” programme. Doing justice to this task and the objectives of the near-centenary history of municipal housing constitutes both a permanent challenge and a motivation. More information (in German): www.wienerwohnen.at

Muncipal housing in Vienna

Since 100 years Vienna's municipal housing follows the mission of providing affordable, high-quality dwellings for broad strata of the population.

"Gentle urban renewal" and participation

It is the purpose of "gentle urban renewal" to develop sustainable, socially mixed and robust urban quarters in co-operation with residents.

Neighbourhood work

With their commitment, wohnpartner and the Urban Renewal Offices make a significant contribution to successful community work.

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vienna social housing tour

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Vienna’s Unique Social Housing Program

Photograph of one of the walkways of the Kabelwerk housing community. Children are playing outside, and bushes and brightly colored building walls line the walkway.

The term social housing is used extensively in Europe to refer to government-owned or regulated affordable housing. A comparative study of social housing programs in European nations finds that they vary substantially — in their histories of origin, who they serve, where housing is located, the physical nature of the housing stock, the means of financing new housing, and even how their housing subsidies work. Vienna’s legacy of giving high priority to providing high-quality housing for the working class dates back to the “Red Vienna” period of the early 20th century, when the majority socialist government made providing quality affordable housing for city residents a priority. Vienna remains committed to this cause to this day.

The November discussion in Montgomery County, Maryland was led by Pamela Lindstrom, commissioner of the Housing Opportunities Commission. Lindstrom explained that Vienna’s city government owns and manages 220,000 housing units, which represent about 25 percent of the city’s housing stock. 1 These city-owned housing units, called social housing, are meant primarily for lower-income residents. The city also indirectly controls 200,000 units that are built and owned by limited-profit private developers but developed through a city-regulated process. Vienna adopted the latter approach in the 1980s, when it decided to collaborate with the private sector to build affordable housing rather than developing and owning more public housing. The city buys land deemed suitable for residential development and retains control over the type and nature of development. The city then solicits proposals from various private developers, which will build and retain ownership of the housing units. A jury evaluates these proposals based on four criteria: architectural quality, environmental performance, social sustainability, and economic parameters such as proposed rent levels and costs. 2 After the jury selects a developer, the city sells the land to the developer at an affordable price. In addition, the city gives the developer a loan with favorable terms such as low interest rates and extended repayment periods.

Private developers who collaborate with the city government to build affordable housing must allow the city to rent half of the new apartments to lower-income residents; the developer generally leases the remaining units to moderate-income residents. In some projects, future tenants participate in the planning, design, and construction process and give input on what kind of facilities they would like to have in the building.

Photograph taken at street level showing a façade of one of the buildings of the Wohnpark Neue Donau housing community. The housing units are shown to have balconies and large windows. Trees in the foreground beautifully frame the view of this seven-storied building.

Lindstrom highlighted some examples of social housing projects in Vienna including the Kabelwerk and the Wohnpark Neue Donau housing projects. Built on an old industrial site spanning about 7 hectares, the Kabelwerk social housing project has a total of 1,004 housing units spread across various housing types including subsidized rental housing, subsidized owner-occupied homes, apartments for refugees, and student housing. The development includes amenities such as shops, restaurants, a kindergarten, meeting rooms, and a rooftop pool which enhance the quality of life for the residents. Wohnpark Neue Donau is built along the Danube River over an underground expressway. Consisting of a total of 850 units that vary from subsidized rentals to free-market penthouses, the housing blocks are arranged diagonally, which distributes the building’s load over the expressway deck and provides the apartments with a river view. The buildings are designed in such a way that they step down towards the river, which creates rooftop terrace apartments, and residents enjoy a nearby residential park. The development features one, two, and three bedroom units, and the ground floor units have wall-enclosed private gardens that are especially suited for families with children. Nearby amenities (shops, a school, a church, a kindergarten) mix with office high-rises and other residential neighborhoods — all part of a master plan by architects Adolf Krischanitz and Heinz Neumann.

Vienna’s innovative social housing projects demonstrate the city’s commitment to affordability, high-quality architecture, energy conservation, and resident participation. In addition to other infrastructure systems and facilities, the effectiveness of the housing program has helped in making the city one of the most livable cities in the world, as judged by The Economist and Monocle in 2012, and as the city that offers the world’s highest quality of life, according to Mercer’s Quality of Living survey for the past four years.

The contents of this article are the views of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development or the U.S. Government.

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Vienna differs from other major cities in many respects. This is particularly visible when it comes to the different housing options available to its residents with the exemplary Viennese model of housing subsidies at its core.

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250 metres is the height of Vienna's highest office building ( DC Tower). Source: City of Vienna Statistical Yearbook 2023

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vienna social housing tour

Vienna Social Housing Field Study Overview

International best practices in mixed-income housing.

This course is designed to give local and regional housing policymakers, practitioners, and leaders insight into international best practices in affordable housing. The Vienna Social Housing Field Study takes a deep dive into Vienna’s social housing model to understand the forces that have shaped the city’s unique approach to housing and evaluate how it compares to U.S. affordable housing systems.

Participants will learn about the housing ecosystem in Vienna, from urban planning, design, consultant selection, construction, financing, government land management, and subsidies to newer strategies for environmental sustainability and climate resilience.

vienna social housing tour

Photo credit: © XYZ

vienna social housing tour

This program will also take a close look at how Vienna approaches community engagement, transit-oriented development, the growing need for deeper affordability, and inclusion of housing options for diverse populations, including single parents, seniors, newly arrived refugees, and people experiencing homelessness.

Participants in GPLA’s intensive field study will learn about the housing ecosystem in Vienna, from the role of public agencies in land procurement and funding to the process of designing complete communities with plentiful housing, excellent public transportation, parks and amenities, and affordability levels that serve a broad range of incomes and household sizes.

Why Vienna?

Vienna, Austria is considered one of the most livable and affordable cities in the world, but it was not always this way. One hundred years ago, Vienna had a housing crisis that left more than 30,000 residents unhoused and many more living in squalid conditions.

Today, Vienna has the lowest cost housing of any major European city, with a majority of its residents living in high-quality, environmentally sustainable, permanently affordable housing.

vienna social housing tour

Who Is This Experience For?

  • Elected officials
  • Local, regional, and state housing policy leaders
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  • Community planning professionals
  • Community resiliency and sustainability professionals
  • Affordable housing development and finance professionals
  • Non-profit changemakers

Looking to send a group from your organization?

GPLA encourages the participation of cities, professional organizations, and community groups who want to study the Vienna Social Housing Model as a group. We will work with Community Sponsors to develop a recruitment plan for a diversity of participants and will create specialized learning opportunities for groups of 5 or more people.

For information about Community Sponsorships , please contact Kori Fronda at [email protected] or (619) 236-0632.

vienna social housing tour

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vienna social housing tour

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Visiting Vienna

Karl-Marx-Hof public housing

Front arch of Karl Marx Hof

When you think of buildings in Vienna, one named after the author of The Communist Manifesto probably doesn’t top your list. Yet the Karl-Marx-Hof claims as much historical significance as any city palace or museum.

  • Huge public housing project completed in 1930
  • Notable for its distinctive architecture
  • Powerful representative of post-WWI recovery and urban renewal
  • Key site in the brief Austrian “civil war” of 1934
  • Social housing and Red Vienna

Icon of Urban Planning

Karl-Marx-Hof facade

(Famously russet and beige)

Vienna seems full of paradoxes. A city, for example, that displays its imperial heritage with pride, but where left-wing parties have dominated its politics for decades.

And this home to Baroque palaces, medieval churches, and prestigious opera houses also serves as a role model for modern public housing.

If you dropped into Vienna around 1919, you’d find a city ravaged by the demands of WWI and still finding its feet after the loss of both the war and a centuries-old political system. Many people lived in desperate poverty.

In a moment of enlightenment, the socialist authorities began a public housing programme that experts still regard as a milestone in urban planning. Up went huge buildings that offered decent living conditions for a fair rent within a self-contained complex full of communal facilities and amenities.

One such complex was the Karl-Marx-Hof. Opened in 1930, this would go on to play an important role in Vienna’s history and achieve worldwide fame.

So what makes it so iconic?

Architecture

Open courtyard of the Karl-Marx-Hof

(Built with green spaces in mind)

Designed by architect Karl Ehn (1884-1959), the complex has some resemblance to a medieval fortress, particularly at its centre with the open courtyard.

Huge archways pierce a façade broken up by tower-like structures. Even the small windows on the upper level carry echoes of a castle’s arrowslits.

This was not the explicit intention of the architect. However, it seems likely that the idea of offering a representational counterpoint to the imposing facades of expensive town houses seeped into the design process.

The complex houses over 1,250 apartments, is over a kilometer long, and covers some 156,000 m² (about 22 football pitches); the trees and grass in the inner courtyards account for most of that area. Its construction used over 24 million bricks.

Even today, the Karl-Marx-Hof still counts as one of the world’s longest residential buildings. And it came in well under budget!

Role in History

Public housing inscription

(The wall inscription states it was built by the city authorities and gives the dates of construction)

According to a report of its opening in the Wiener Zeitung newspaper, the complex offered its residents:

…two central laundries, two bath houses, two Kindergartens, a dental clinic, a maternity and infant welfare service, a library, a youth centre, a post office, an outpatient clinic, a pharmacy, and 25 stores.

As such, the Karl-Marx-Hof serves as a poster child for post-WWI recovery, public housing initiatives, and urban development.

One of those two laundries now also houses a permanent exhibition on the history of socialist (“Red”) Vienna in the context of the first Austrian republic (1919 – 1934), with a focus on those public housing projects. All displays were in German when I visited in early 2024, though.

The size, design, and red colour of Karl-Marx-Hof also combined to project the new self-confidence of the working class. Unfortunately, this perception did not sit well with those on the other end of the political spectrum.

That ideological conflict reflected a wider disparity as Austria slipped into fascism from 1933. Resistance to totalitarian developments resulted in a brief and small civil war in February 1934.

During this conflict, a group of armed social democrats took refuge in the Karl-Marx-Hof, leading to three days of fierce fighting and cementing the location’s status as a symbol of (left-wing) democracy.

How to get to Karl-Marx-Hof

The Karl-Marx-Hof

(The complex is also popular with photographers)

Although located in an outer district, Vienna’s public transport system gets you to the area quickly and easily.

Subway: the complex actually looks out over the Heiligenstadt railway station on the U4 subway line. Simply exit east.

Tram: the other side of the complex runs along Heiligenstädter Straße and covers four stops on the D tram line that leaves from the city centre:

  • Gunoldstraße
  • Heiligenstadt, 12.-Februar-Pl.
  • Halteraugasse
  • Grinzinger Straße

Carry on for another two stops on the D and you find yourself at the point where the Donaukanal channel splits off from the Danube river, as you can see on the map below.

Address: Heiligenstädter Straße 82-92, 1190 Vienna

IMAGES

  1. M Grund

    vienna social housing tour

  2. Social Housing at Leyserstrasse Vienna / O&O Baukunst

    vienna social housing tour

  3. Reflections on Vienna’s Social Housing Model From Tenant Advocates

    vienna social housing tour

  4. Gallery of Social Housing at Leyserstrasse Vienna / O&O Baukunst

    vienna social housing tour

  5. Gallery of Social Housing at Leyserstrasse Vienna / O&O Baukunst

    vienna social housing tour

  6. M Grund

    vienna social housing tour

COMMENTS

  1. The social housing secret: how Vienna became the world's most livable

    The most famous examples of Red Vienna social housing, such as the Karl Marx-Hof in the 19th district or the estates dotted along the "Ring Road of the Proletariat" on Margaretengürtel, look ...

  2. Social housing in Vienna

    One of the lasting legacies of history in Vienna comes, unexpectedly, from a programme of social housing construction in the 1920s and early 1930s. Far ahead of their time (even today), the various complexes remain a key part of the urban landscape and the city's post-imperial soul. Remarkable projects that brought high-quality affordable ...

  3. Reflections on Vienna's Social Housing Model From Tenant Advocates

    Vienna, where more than 60 percent of the city's 1.8 million residents live in social housing, is often held up as a model. Just this past November, the Viennese model came up in multiple ...

  4. Lessons From a Renters' Utopia

    But from 1923 to 1934, in a period known as Red Vienna, the ruling Social Democratic Party built 64,000 new units in 400 housing blocks, increasing the city's housing supply by about 10 percent.

  5. Vienna's most important social housing buildings

    The best known social housing building is the Karl Marx Hof, which extends over several tram stations (about 1.2 km). Of course, Vienna has many more mega buildings to marvel at, where tens of thousands of Viennese have found their home. What they all have in common is the partly artistic design of the facilities and the ingenious ...

  6. Social housing

    Social housing. In the 1920s, the city of Vienna began to build social housing for the countless workers who came to Vienna from elsewhere in the Empire. Today, the architectural image of Vienna is impossible to imagine without these buildings, some of which are truly gigantic. The Social Democratic government of the First Republic (1918-1934 ...

  7. Lessons from Vienna: a housing success story 100 years in the making

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  8. Municipal housing in Vienna

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  9. Vienna's Radical Approach to Social Housing

    A legacy one hundred years and running proves him wrong. To this day, Vienna has maintained all its original social housing stock and continues to build. The result: 60 per cent of the city's population lives in social housing. The Sunflower Houses' different scales guarantee ample sunlight in all the interiors.

  10. How Vienna took the stigma out of social housing

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  11. Inside the Vienna model of social housing

    By Jonny Ball. Karl-Marx-Hof, a community owned apartment building, is seen in Vienna, Austria on November 28, 2018. - Vienna is visited for its imperial palaces but also for its social housing: "capital of low rent" for nearly a century, the city has defended a model of affordable housing that makes it an European exception.

  12. In Vienna, most people live in social housing. Here's how it works

    By Annabelle Quince and Nick Baker for Rear Vision. Posted Thu 3 Aug 2023 at 12:00pm. Vienna's Alterlaa social housing complex holds 9,000 people in 3,200 apartments. (Getty Images: Rafael ...

  13. Social Housing in Vienna: Is it as good as it seems?

    More than half of Vienna's 1.9 million residents live in some form of subsidised housing. Vienna's reputation as a beacon of social housing excellence is widely considered well-deserved; the city ...

  14. Vienna's Social Housing Legacy: Rethinking Value

    For both architecture and exploration Red Vienna underlines the hidden value of devoting a little extra time to quality and beauty. Almost a year ago I spent a few days trekking across Vienna with the aim of seeing every noteworthy social house built during the Red Vienna period (1919-1934). It was quite a challenge, this was a very productive ...

  15. Video. Social Housing in Vienna: Is it as good as it seems?

    Video. Vienna, known as the European capital of social housing, has long been hailed as the poster child for affordable housing initiatives. But could this tradition be on its way out?

  16. The Vienna model

    For a more equitable society. The key to achieve this goal lies in the provision of affordable housing that takes account of tenants' needs. The roughly 220,000 municipal flats and around 200,000 subsidised dwellings of Vienna make up the cornerstone of social housing in the city. Roughly 50 percent of Vienna's population live in one of ...

  17. VWW: Gemeindebauten der Innenstadt

    The first Gemeindebau in Vienna opened in 1924. We celebrate 100 years of fine social housing, with a tour of the six buildings owned by Stadt Wien, in the centre of our city. One of them was built in 1942, during the Nazi period, which is something unusual. It is special to still have room for ordinary people to live in the very heart of Vienna.

  18. Home

    A wide range of affordable housing units can still be taken for granted in Vienna. Today, around 50 percent of all Viennese live in subsidised dwellings - either in one of the 220,000 municipal units or in one of the 200,000 co-operative flats built with municipal subsidies. Vienna's 1,800 municipal housing estates alone are home to close ...

  19. Seestadt Aspern Housing brought Red Vienna into the 21st century

    Known as D12, the housing block meets the street with full-height windows and metal mesh for growing plants. Due for completion in 2030, this new district will provide homes for 20,000 people and ...

  20. Vienna's Unique Social Housing Program

    Lindstrom explained that Vienna's city government owns and manages 220,000 housing units, which represent about 25 percent of the city's housing stock. 1 These city-owned housing units, called social housing, are meant primarily for lower-income residents. The city also indirectly controls 200,000 units that are built and owned by limited ...

  21. Housing in Vienna

    Further information. Project RenoBooster and its Goals. Contact for this page: wien.gv.at-English Edition. Contact form. Vienna differs from other major cities in many respects. This is particularly visible when it comes to the different housing options available with the exemplary Viennese model of scoial housing.

  22. Vienna Social Housing Field Study

    The Vienna Social Housing Field Study takes a deep dive into Vienna's social housing model to understand the forces that have shaped the city's unique approach to housing and evaluate how it compares to U.S. affordable housing systems. Participants will learn about the housing ecosystem in Vienna, from urban planning, design, consultant ...

  23. Reinventing Social Housing in Vienna

    From 2016 to 2022, the City of Vienna has been leading an IBA focused on developing more than 10,000 new units of social housing on city-owned and private land throughout the City since 2016, with a culminating exhibition of proposals and neighborhood and project tours in 2022 to showcase the City's latest development innovations.

  24. Walking tours and themed walks

    Social housing: experts consider Vienna a role model for urban development, thanks in large part to the availability of high-quality city-owned housing. This harks back to the remarkably farsighted social housing projects of post-WWI, whose legacy remains in the cityscape. Music and art. As mentioned above, major concert venues have in-house tours.

  25. Karl-Marx-Hof public housing

    The complex houses over 1,250 apartments, is over a kilometer long, and covers some 156,000 m² (about 22 football pitches); the trees and grass in the inner courtyards account for most of that area. Its construction used over 24 million bricks. Even today, the Karl-Marx-Hof still counts as one of the world's longest residential buildings.