<
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city>
"The first place that Max Schranz moved into after leaving his family home is
the kind that many young professionals dream of inhabiting at the peak of their
career. At only 26, he lives in a bright fifth-floor apartment with high
ceilings overlooking a European capital city, 10 minutes from the central
station and within walking distance of cinemas, theatres and bars.
No lottery win or parental trust fund was needed to make that dream a reality:
Schranz, who is a master’s student, pays €596 (£512) a month for his 54 sq
metre two-bedroom apartment – a fraction of typical rents for similarly sized
and similarly located apartments in other major European cities. What’s more,
he didn’t have to put down a deposit and his rental contract is unlimited – in
theory, he’s allowed to pass it on to his children or a sibling when he
eventually decides to move on. “I’m aware it’s a pretty stress-free existence,”
Schranz says. “My friends in other European cities are a bit jealous.”
Welcome to Vienna, the city that may have cracked the code of how to keep
inner-city housing affordable. As other cities battle spiralling rental prices,
partly fuelled by inner-city apartments being used as short-term holiday
rentals or being kept strategically vacant by property speculators, the
Austrian capital bucks the trend. In the place that last year retained its
crown as the world’s most livable city in the Economist’s annual index,
Vienna’s renters on average pay roughly a third of their counterparts in
London, Paris or Dublin, according to a recent study by the accounting firm
Deloitte.
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."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-we-are-reading-vienna-affordable-housing-conscious-travel/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
