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Interesting that the article talks about similar housing crises in other major European cities. But never hints at Vienna having solved the problem a century a

Interesting that the article talks about similar housing crises in other major European cities. But never hints at Vienna having solved the problem a century ago - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-08/the-design-history-of-vienna-s-world-famous-social-housing https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-08/the-desig...

aimanbenbaha 2y ago
IMO if there is any model to follow to solve the housing crisis it should be Japan/Singapore. Vienna is too unique of a case and its housing market still suffers from negative externalities. Singapore is also hard to achieve but the HDB mandate made it that the government own monopoly on land so they're incentivized to provide maximum land utility to its population. Japan has the best land use zoning in a way it makes it so easy to build and develop. They also have a very practical view on housing and do not see it as an appreciating asset critical to accumulating wealth.
- franciscop 2y ago
  > Japan has the best land use zoning in a way it's makes it so easy to build and develop. They also have a very practical view on housing and do not see it as an appreciating asset critical to accumulating wealth. I want to note that this is in big part due to earthquakes and nature in general. In Spain 100-year old houses (like in the article) are renovated and relatively easy to maintain. However in Japan, between the earthquakes, typhoons, and the weather in general, not only you need to be actively maintaining it (typhoons), but they become worse over time (earthquake damage accumulates). Source: Spaniard who lives in Tokyo.
  - aimanbenbaha 2y ago
    Yeah that would be a factor but there's more to that. For example the Japanese are so crafty with land use they even allow an odd type of development called Zakkyo. Which are multi-storey buildings wherein each floor is owned and managed independently. The foot traffic isn't restricted to the ground floor to enjoy these "third places". IMO geographical constraints should not be the all-in justification for a certain land-use/housing policy. I hear a lot chalk up the fact Barcelona stopped building since the 1980s because they're surrounded by mountains and the sea. Or recently with the LA fires people look at these wrong answers. There's no reason for things being like that other than NIMBYism and lack of long-term political will from local councils.
    - hibikir 2y ago
      Spain's multi-story buildings are often independently owned anyway: the "law of horizontal property", dealing with condominiums, is there to mostly deal with shared disputes among owners. Buildings where the ground floor is stores, the next three have small professional offices, all owning the space, and the rest is a collection of apartments occupied by their owners is very common where there's sufficient demand for said offices. Barcelona's problems come from a very complicated regulatory regime that hasn't just lowered construction, but ultimately led to fewer people living in the same space. Regulations that favor the renter enough to make putting housing up for rent pretty risky in many ways. Minimal property taxes that let having an apartment unused be pretty attractive. Big tax advantages for owning an expensive apartment vs living in a smaller one and putting your savings into stocks. Prices that don't come down. A location so interesting, and yet at prices that are globally affordable, so it is more profitable to have an apartment dedicated to low-occupancy rate foreign tourism than to have it occupied all year long by a long term tenant. Cheap enough for an American in tech to buy an apartment downtown, and use it 3 weeks a year. The market-centric changes that wouldn't just allow more building, but make the existing buildings be used more efficiently are just not in any local regulator's radar, because lowering prices might be nice for renters, but it'd be awful for owners, and there's a lot of those, and they vote.
    - franciscop 2y ago
      Definitely, but I wanted to note a big thing that I often do not see mentioned in these kind of discussions. e.g. I'm looking at apartments in Tokyo, and for Japanese people one of the biggest decision factor is the age due to earthquake fears. Heck, I'd say it's the main factor not to buy, a big % of the people just won't buy older than X years. This is the most "unthinkable" thing in my Spaniard brain, since older houses are not inherently worse (they have both bad things and good things). There's many other differences (and surprisingly, similarities) between Spain and Japan regarding buildings, e.g. the mixed areas are both very similar in both countries. But another surprising thing in (specifically) Tokyo is how strongly public transportation shapes Tokyo, go out in any train station and you have tall buildings, but walk 10-15 mins away and you have houses. In Spain, you have a very homogeneous height all across the city (fun fact: this was traditionally shaped by the cathedrals/churches).
appreciatorBus 2y ago
What does "solved" mean in a non-market context? Does it mean that anyone, at any income level, and any family situation, in Austria can elect to move to Vienna and get a reasonable sized apartment within a short period of time, perhaps 1 month? There's nothing wrong with believing that non-market housing is the way to go, but we can't judge success on rents alone.
Mistletoe 2y ago
That looks awful though, like a prison. If all of Vienna looked like Karl Marx Hof no one would want to go there.
owenversteeg 2y ago
Vienna is highly unusual because about 100 years ago, they built massive social housing projects and then the population peaked, declined precipitously, and has still not reached its former peak. Recent construction hasn't caught up with population growth so it's not a given that they will be a great example in a few decades. To be fair, the Viennese government is much more serious about building than other governments; for example, they have large amounts of buildable land "banked" for future construction [0] [1] so we shall see. But even looking at Vienna, it's obvious that the answer to affordable housing is to build more housing. It doesn't matter who builds or who owns it. It could be a corporation building Levittown. It could be the SPÖ building the 1.1km long Karl-Marx Hof. It could be Khrushchev building Khrushchevkas. And it doesn't even have to be ugly (on the subject of Vienna, see the George-Washington-Hof.) But you do have to build, more or less continuously, and if you don't you better have a large building boom to make up for it. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc... [1] https://www.wohnfonds.wien.at/english_information https://www.wohnfonds.wien.at/english_information
awongh 2y ago
Singapore has also solved it to a certain degree.
wesselbindt 2y ago
But think of all the poor landlords who'd be out of work if we adopted Vienna's solution on a larger scale. And what about the profit margins of Blackstone and the like? Have you no heart?
ido 2y ago
Did it solve it? I used to live in Vienna for 8 years (2005-2013). Looking at https://www.immobilienscout24.at/regional/wien/wien/wohnung-mieten https://www.immobilienscout24.at/regional/wien/wien/wohnung-... the prices per square meter are a lot higher than I paid at the time: the cheapest rentals I saw was just above €10/m^2 (rare) and more commonly were around €15-20/m^2. When we left in 2013 we were paying €480 per month for a 65m^2 apartment (that was already cheap at the time but is even more out of the ordinary today). Anecdotally everyone I know in Vienna started complaining about housing unaffordability around the time we left (it was never a topic when I got there) & that seems to still be the case.
- barrenko 2y ago
  Guess what happened in 2013?
  - firtoz 2y ago
    The 2013 Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert?
- hiatus 2y ago
  €480 in 2005 is €738 today from inflation alone. The prices are almost on par with 2005 accounting for inflation.
  - ido 2y ago
    €480 was in December 2012 when we left (I remember the date because we flew out Christmas eve ‘12). It was cheaper in 2005.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- orwin 2y ago
  As oh 2025, prices in Vienna are much more affordable than other European capitals. The reason is obvious, only ~10% of the available to rent housing supply is free-market, almost half is municipal housing, and the rest is a mix of other non-market housing and rent-controlled housing.
truculent 2y ago
> They weren’t cheap, either: About 25% of a tenant’s wages went toward monthly rent This obviously a lot to pay for such miserable housing, but it’s also significantly less than private renters currently pay in the UK[1]: > Excluding housing support, the average proportion of income spent on rent was 37% for social renters and 45% for private renters. I’m not trying to suggest the current situation is as bad as early C20 Vienna. Thankfully, such poor conditions are not, to my knowledge, widespread. I imagine other needs like food and clothing are more affordable than they were then. However, it does point to how expensive things have become. If we removed some regulation, would housing be pushed further towards cheaper but substandard dwellings? I don’t think housing at 25% of low-income exists in the UK. If we extrapolated from the current, more expensive housing options, how different would 25% housing be from those in Vienna? [1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/chapters-for-english-housing-survey-2023-to-2024-headline-findings-on-demographics-and-household-resilience/chapter-2-housing-costs-and-affordability https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/chapters-for-englis...
motorest 2y ago
> But never hints at Vienna having solved the problem a century ago - You seem to be confused, and a tad ignorant too. Public housing investments are nothing new, and Barcelona has already benefitred from a massive urban development program at the turn of the century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample Barcelona has already one if the highest population densities in the world. The examples you listed in Austria are already eclipsed by the massive appartment blocks in Barcelona and neighboring municipalities. Your average city block in Barcelona is already 6 stories high or greater. It's a dense urban area covered by massive residential blocks. Even if you start demolishing blocks to replace them with hongkong-style skyscrapers, you would need a few decades to increase supply in a meaningful way, and even then the impact would be negligible. Barcelona's problem is not supply.
- codingbot3000 2y ago
  Barcelona resident here. I think it is a combination of not enough new supply and a stupid legal situation. As mentioned in the article, it is most attractive to rent out your apartment temporary from 1 to 11 months. Longer renting contracts are quite risky from a landlord's perspective. E.g. in Spain if your tenant goes bankrupt and does not pay the rent anymore, you cannot kick them out until they have found something else. Good luck on that. The law sounds nice because no one wants people to end up on the street, but it effectively makes small landlords exit the rental market. Protection from squatters is also nonexistent. Local newspapers are full of stories of places being occupied by squatters while empty for renovations. Also there are these stupid local regulations around having to create social housing in every building / renovation project. That also significantly reduces new supply.
miguelxt 2y ago
The fundamental issue cannot be ignored: supply and demand. Spain population has increased by 2 million in just 2 years, far outpacing residential construction. Right now, the system excludes those who cannot afford the ever-increasing rents. Rent control, although well-intentioned and a very popular policy, has numerous negative effects supported by a variety of studies both in Spain and abroad. Rent control or any other alternate system to allocate the scarce units will leave many without access to housing. The solution, IMHO, building more, could be theoretically be championed by the State, but with ever-increasing construction costs, regulation, taxes on everything, scarcity of land in big cities, and pensions entitlements, where will the money come from? It's not cheap to build with the quality standards that we all desire everyone to have. Building co-ops like those that exist in Vienna do exist in Spain, but they are not a panacea, the same problems that a State-run initiative has will apply.
- dmix 2y ago
  > Right now, the system excludes those who cannot afford the ever-increasing rents It also creates a system where the only new buildings are luxury condos because on paper it’s usually the only thing that would turn a profit after investing a decade of hoop jumping and political wrangling. No affordable development would ever pass that sort of system. So the gov is tasked with building affordable housing. Creating a bad situation themselves, pointing the finger at developers and only offering very expensive bandaids as the solution that happens to give them more power, money, and control over the city. Kingmakers in an high end market while feigning solutions for the low end, and pushing the middle to the suburbs and small towns.
- dumbledoren 2y ago
  > Rent control, although well-intentioned and a very popular policy, has numerous negative effects supported by a variety of studies both in Spain and abroad. No, it doesn't. Everywhere in Spain it works well. It was always there. Those 'studies' come out of mainly the bloated neoliberal Anglloamerican investment circles like the Brookings institute - which was cited just in this discussion. > The solution, IMHO, building more, could be theoretically be championed by the State, but with ever-increasing construction costs, regulation, taxes on everything, scarcity of land in big cities, and pensions entitlements, where will the money come from? China is able to build housing like that for ~1.5 billion people and they don't run out of money. Maybe the problem is the bloated, destructive real estate investment sector in the West?
eitau_1 2y ago
Vienna is less populous now than it was 100 years ago.

aimanbenbaha 2y ago

IMO if there is any model to follow to solve the housing crisis it should be Japan/Singapore. Vienna is too unique of a case and its housing market still suffers from negative externalities. Singapore is also hard to achieve but the HDB mandate made it that the government own monopoly on land so they're incentivized to provide maximum land utility to its population. Japan has the best land use zoning in a way it makes it so easy to build and develop. They also have a very practical view on housing and do not see it as an appreciating asset critical to accumulating wealth.

franciscop 2y ago
> Japan has the best land use zoning in a way it's makes it so easy to build and develop. They also have a very practical view on housing and do not see it as an appreciating asset critical to accumulating wealth. I want to note that this is in big part due to earthquakes and nature in general. In Spain 100-year old houses (like in the article) are renovated and relatively easy to maintain. However in Japan, between the earthquakes, typhoons, and the weather in general, not only you need to be actively maintaining it (typhoons), but they become worse over time (earthquake damage accumulates). Source: Spaniard who lives in Tokyo.
- aimanbenbaha 2y ago
  Yeah that would be a factor but there's more to that. For example the Japanese are so crafty with land use they even allow an odd type of development called Zakkyo. Which are multi-storey buildings wherein each floor is owned and managed independently. The foot traffic isn't restricted to the ground floor to enjoy these "third places". IMO geographical constraints should not be the all-in justification for a certain land-use/housing policy. I hear a lot chalk up the fact Barcelona stopped building since the 1980s because they're surrounded by mountains and the sea. Or recently with the LA fires people look at these wrong answers. There's no reason for things being like that other than NIMBYism and lack of long-term political will from local councils.
  - hibikir 2y ago
    Spain's multi-story buildings are often independently owned anyway: the "law of horizontal property", dealing with condominiums, is there to mostly deal with shared disputes among owners. Buildings where the ground floor is stores, the next three have small professional offices, all owning the space, and the rest is a collection of apartments occupied by their owners is very common where there's sufficient demand for said offices. Barcelona's problems come from a very complicated regulatory regime that hasn't just lowered construction, but ultimately led to fewer people living in the same space. Regulations that favor the renter enough to make putting housing up for rent pretty risky in many ways. Minimal property taxes that let having an apartment unused be pretty attractive. Big tax advantages for owning an expensive apartment vs living in a smaller one and putting your savings into stocks. Prices that don't come down. A location so interesting, and yet at prices that are globally affordable, so it is more profitable to have an apartment dedicated to low-occupancy rate foreign tourism than to have it occupied all year long by a long term tenant. Cheap enough for an American in tech to buy an apartment downtown, and use it 3 weeks a year. The market-centric changes that wouldn't just allow more building, but make the existing buildings be used more efficiently are just not in any local regulator's radar, because lowering prices might be nice for renters, but it'd be awful for owners, and there's a lot of those, and they vote.
  - franciscop 2y ago
    Definitely, but I wanted to note a big thing that I often do not see mentioned in these kind of discussions. e.g. I'm looking at apartments in Tokyo, and for Japanese people one of the biggest decision factor is the age due to earthquake fears. Heck, I'd say it's the main factor not to buy, a big % of the people just won't buy older than X years. This is the most "unthinkable" thing in my Spaniard brain, since older houses are not inherently worse (they have both bad things and good things). There's many other differences (and surprisingly, similarities) between Spain and Japan regarding buildings, e.g. the mixed areas are both very similar in both countries. But another surprising thing in (specifically) Tokyo is how strongly public transportation shapes Tokyo, go out in any train station and you have tall buildings, but walk 10-15 mins away and you have houses. In Spain, you have a very homogeneous height all across the city (fun fact: this was traditionally shaped by the cathedrals/churches).

appreciatorBus 2y ago

What does "solved" mean in a non-market context? Does it mean that anyone, at any income level, and any family situation, in Austria can elect to move to Vienna and get a reasonable sized apartment within a short period of time, perhaps 1 month? There's nothing wrong with believing that non-market housing is the way to go, but we can't judge success on rents alone.

Mistletoe 2y ago

That looks awful though, like a prison. If all of Vienna looked like Karl Marx Hof no one would want to go there.

owenversteeg 2y ago

Vienna is highly unusual because about 100 years ago, they built massive social housing projects and then the population peaked, declined precipitously, and has still not reached its former peak. Recent construction hasn't caught up with population growth so it's not a given that they will be a great example in a few decades. To be fair, the Viennese government is much more serious about building than other governments; for example, they have large amounts of buildable land "banked" for future construction [0] [1] so we shall see. But even looking at Vienna, it's obvious that the answer to affordable housing is to build more housing. It doesn't matter who builds or who owns it. It could be a corporation building Levittown. It could be the SPÖ building the 1.1km long Karl-Marx Hof. It could be Khrushchev building Khrushchevkas. And it doesn't even have to be ugly (on the subject of Vienna, see the George-Washington-Hof.) But you do have to build, more or less continuously, and if you don't you better have a large building boom to make up for it. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc... [1] https://www.wohnfonds.wien.at/english_information https://www.wohnfonds.wien.at/english_information

awongh 2y ago

Singapore has also solved it to a certain degree.

wesselbindt 2y ago

But think of all the poor landlords who'd be out of work if we adopted Vienna's solution on a larger scale. And what about the profit margins of Blackstone and the like? Have you no heart?

ido 2y ago

Did it solve it? I used to live in Vienna for 8 years (2005-2013). Looking at https://www.immobilienscout24.at/regional/wien/wien/wohnung-mieten https://www.immobilienscout24.at/regional/wien/wien/wohnung-... the prices per square meter are a lot higher than I paid at the time: the cheapest rentals I saw was just above €10/m^2 (rare) and more commonly were around €15-20/m^2. When we left in 2013 we were paying €480 per month for a 65m^2 apartment (that was already cheap at the time but is even more out of the ordinary today). Anecdotally everyone I know in Vienna started complaining about housing unaffordability around the time we left (it was never a topic when I got there) & that seems to still be the case.

barrenko 2y ago
Guess what happened in 2013?
- firtoz 2y ago
  The 2013 Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert?
hiatus 2y ago
€480 in 2005 is €738 today from inflation alone. The prices are almost on par with 2005 accounting for inflation.
- ido 2y ago
  €480 was in December 2012 when we left (I remember the date because we flew out Christmas eve ‘12). It was cheaper in 2005.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
orwin 2y ago
As oh 2025, prices in Vienna are much more affordable than other European capitals. The reason is obvious, only ~10% of the available to rent housing supply is free-market, almost half is municipal housing, and the rest is a mix of other non-market housing and rent-controlled housing.

truculent 2y ago

> They weren’t cheap, either: About 25% of a tenant’s wages went toward monthly rent This obviously a lot to pay for such miserable housing, but it’s also significantly less than private renters currently pay in the UK[1]: > Excluding housing support, the average proportion of income spent on rent was 37% for social renters and 45% for private renters. I’m not trying to suggest the current situation is as bad as early C20 Vienna. Thankfully, such poor conditions are not, to my knowledge, widespread. I imagine other needs like food and clothing are more affordable than they were then. However, it does point to how expensive things have become. If we removed some regulation, would housing be pushed further towards cheaper but substandard dwellings? I don’t think housing at 25% of low-income exists in the UK. If we extrapolated from the current, more expensive housing options, how different would 25% housing be from those in Vienna? [1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/chapters-for-english-housing-survey-2023-to-2024-headline-findings-on-demographics-and-household-resilience/chapter-2-housing-costs-and-affordability https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/chapters-for-englis...

motorest 2y ago

> But never hints at Vienna having solved the problem a century ago - You seem to be confused, and a tad ignorant too. Public housing investments are nothing new, and Barcelona has already benefitred from a massive urban development program at the turn of the century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample Barcelona has already one if the highest population densities in the world. The examples you listed in Austria are already eclipsed by the massive appartment blocks in Barcelona and neighboring municipalities. Your average city block in Barcelona is already 6 stories high or greater. It's a dense urban area covered by massive residential blocks. Even if you start demolishing blocks to replace them with hongkong-style skyscrapers, you would need a few decades to increase supply in a meaningful way, and even then the impact would be negligible. Barcelona's problem is not supply.

codingbot3000 2y ago
Barcelona resident here. I think it is a combination of not enough new supply and a stupid legal situation. As mentioned in the article, it is most attractive to rent out your apartment temporary from 1 to 11 months. Longer renting contracts are quite risky from a landlord's perspective. E.g. in Spain if your tenant goes bankrupt and does not pay the rent anymore, you cannot kick them out until they have found something else. Good luck on that. The law sounds nice because no one wants people to end up on the street, but it effectively makes small landlords exit the rental market. Protection from squatters is also nonexistent. Local newspapers are full of stories of places being occupied by squatters while empty for renovations. Also there are these stupid local regulations around having to create social housing in every building / renovation project. That also significantly reduces new supply.

miguelxt 2y ago

The fundamental issue cannot be ignored: supply and demand. Spain population has increased by 2 million in just 2 years, far outpacing residential construction. Right now, the system excludes those who cannot afford the ever-increasing rents. Rent control, although well-intentioned and a very popular policy, has numerous negative effects supported by a variety of studies both in Spain and abroad. Rent control or any other alternate system to allocate the scarce units will leave many without access to housing. The solution, IMHO, building more, could be theoretically be championed by the State, but with ever-increasing construction costs, regulation, taxes on everything, scarcity of land in big cities, and pensions entitlements, where will the money come from? It's not cheap to build with the quality standards that we all desire everyone to have. Building co-ops like those that exist in Vienna do exist in Spain, but they are not a panacea, the same problems that a State-run initiative has will apply.

dmix 2y ago
> Right now, the system excludes those who cannot afford the ever-increasing rents It also creates a system where the only new buildings are luxury condos because on paper it’s usually the only thing that would turn a profit after investing a decade of hoop jumping and political wrangling. No affordable development would ever pass that sort of system. So the gov is tasked with building affordable housing. Creating a bad situation themselves, pointing the finger at developers and only offering very expensive bandaids as the solution that happens to give them more power, money, and control over the city. Kingmakers in an high end market while feigning solutions for the low end, and pushing the middle to the suburbs and small towns.
dumbledoren 2y ago
> Rent control, although well-intentioned and a very popular policy, has numerous negative effects supported by a variety of studies both in Spain and abroad. No, it doesn't. Everywhere in Spain it works well. It was always there. Those 'studies' come out of mainly the bloated neoliberal Anglloamerican investment circles like the Brookings institute - which was cited just in this discussion. > The solution, IMHO, building more, could be theoretically be championed by the State, but with ever-increasing construction costs, regulation, taxes on everything, scarcity of land in big cities, and pensions entitlements, where will the money come from? China is able to build housing like that for ~1.5 billion people and they don't run out of money. Maybe the problem is the bloated, destructive real estate investment sector in the West?

eitau_1 2y ago

Vienna is less populous now than it was 100 years ago.